Plato Quotes
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Because, unlike courage and wisdom, which made our state brave and wise by being present in a particular part of it, discipline operates by being diffused throughout the whole of it. It produces a concord between its strongest and weakest and middle elements, whether you define them by the standard of good sense, or of strength, or of numbers or money or the like. And so we are quite justified in regarding discipline as this sort of natural harmony and agreement between higher and lower about which of them is to rule in state and individual.
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The Paphian Queen to Cnidos made repair Across the tide to see her image there: Then looking up and round the prospect wide, When did Praxiteles see me thus? she cried.
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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.
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Those whose hearts are fixed on Reality itself deserve the title of Philosophers.
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People are like dirt. They can either nourish you and help you grow as a person or they can stunt your growth and make you wilt and die.
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Those wretches who never have experienced the sweets of wisdom and virtue, but spend all their time in revels and debauches, sink downward day after day, and make their whole life one continued series of errors.
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Knowledge becomes evil if the aim be not virtuous.
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And so, when a person meets the half that is his very own, whatever his orientation, whether it's to young men or not, then something wonderful happens: the two are struck from their senses by love, by a sense of belonging to one another, and by desire, and they don't want to be separated from one another, not even for a moment.
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The cause of all the blunders committed by man arises from this excessive self-love. For the lover is blinded by the object loved; so that he passes a wrong judgment on what is just, good and beautiful, thinking that he ought always to honor what belongs to himself in preference to truth. For he who intends to be a great man ought to love neither himself nor his own things, but only what is just, whether it happens to be done by himself, or by another.
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They (the poets) are to us in a manner the fathers and authors of the wisdom.
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Everything that deceives does so by casting a spell.
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Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.
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The greater part of instruction is being reminded of things you already know.
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Excess generally causes reaction, and produces a change in the opposite direction, whether it be in the seasons, or in individuals, or in governments.
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Wise men speak because they have something to say.
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I must yield to you, for you are irresistible.
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Where love reigns, there's no need for laws.
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Wealth is well known to be a great comforter.
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For just as poets love their own works, and fathers their own children, in the same way those who have created a fortune value their money, not merely for its uses, like other persons, but because it is their own production. This makes them moreover disagreeable companions, because they will praise nothing but riches.
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As the government is, such will be the man.
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No one can escape his destiny.
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Wherefore also these Kinds [elements] occupied different places even before the universe was organised and generated out of them. Before that time, in truth, all these were in a state devoid of reason or measure, but when the work of setting in order this Universe was being undertaken, fire and water and earth and air, although possessing some traces of their known nature, were yet disposed as everything is likely to be in the absence of God; and inasmuch as this was then their natural condition, God began by first marking them out into shapes by means of forms and numbers.
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Serious things cannot be understood without laughable things, nor opposites at all without opposites.
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If you ask: What is the good of education? The answer is easy: Education makes good men and good men act nobly.