Plato Quotes
-
From a short-sided view, the whole moving contents of the heavens seemed to them a parcel of stones, earth and other soul-less bodies, though they furnish the sources of the world order.
-
If anyone comes to the gates of poetry and expects to become an adequate poet by acquiring expert knowledge of the subject without the Muses' madness, he will fail, and his self-controlled verses will be eclipsed by the poetry of men who have been driven out of their minds.
-
Writing is the geometry of the soul.
-
Any man may easily do harm, but not every man can do good to another.
-
He who is only an athlete is too crude, too vulgar, too much a savage. He who is a scholar only is too soft, to effeminate. The ideal citizen is the scholar athlete, the man of thought and the man of action.
-
The Dance, of all the arts, is the one that most influences the soul. Dancing is divine in its nature and is the gift of God.
-
The people always have some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness. ... This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.
-
When man is not properly trained, he is the most savage animal on the face of the globe.
-
Numbers are the highest degree of knowledge. It is knowledge itself.
-
The bees can abide no drones amongst them; but as soon as they begin to be idle, they kill them.
-
Man is the plumeless genus of bipeds, birds are the plumed.
-
Boys should abstain from all use of wine until their eighteenth year, for it is wrong to add fire to fire.
-
Virtue is voluntary, vice involuntary.
-
A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.
-
I don't know anything that gives me greater pleasure, or profit either, than talking or listening to philosophy. But when it comes to ordinary conversation, such as the stuff you talk about financiers and the money market, well, I find it pretty tiresome personally, and I feel sorry that my friends should think they're being very busy when they're really doing absolutely nothing. Of course, I know your idea of me: you think I'm just a poor unfortunate, and I shouldn't wonder if your right. But then I dont THINK that you're unfortunate - I know you are.
-
At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.
-
Love is the joy of the good, the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the gods; desired by those who have no part in him, and precious to those who have the better part in him.
-
Attention to health is life's greatest hindrance.
-
Music is to the mind as air is to the body.
-
O youth or young man, who fancy that you are neglected by the gods, know that if you become worse, you shall go to worse souls, or if better to the better... In every succession of life and death, you will do and suffer what like may fitly suffer at the hands of like. This is the justice of heaven.
-
For the man who makes everything that leads to happiness, or near to it, to depend upon himself, and not upon other men, on whose good or evil actions his own doings are compelled to hinge,--such a one, I say, has adopted the very best plan for living happily. This is the man of moderation; this is the man of manly character and of wisdom.
-
Whenever a person strives, by the help of dialectic, to start in pursuit of every reality by a simple process of reason, independent of all sensuous information - never flinching, until by an act of the pure intelligence he has grasped the real nature of good - he arrives at the very end of the intellectual world.
-
Those whose hearts are fixed on Reality itself deserve the title of Philosophers.
-
Would that I were the heaven, that I might be all full of love-lit eyes to gaze on thee.