Plato Quotes
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Music is to the mind as air is to the body.
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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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Experience proves that anyone who has studied geometry is infinitely quicker to grasp difficult subjects than one who has not.
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Nothing can be more absurd than the practice that prevails in our country of men and women not following the same pursuits with all their strengths and with one mind, for thus, the state instead of being whole is reduced to half.
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From all wild beasts, a child is the most difficult to handle.
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The greatest penalty of evil-doing is to grow into the likeness of bad men, and, growing like them, to fly from the conversation of the good, and be cut off from them, and cleave to and follow after the company of the bad.
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The tyranny imposed on the soul by anger, or fear, or lust, or pain, or envy, or desire, I generally call 'injustice.'
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Writing is the geometry of the soul.
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The music masters familiarize children's minds with rhythms and melodies, thus making them more civilized, more balanced, better adjusted in themselves, and more capable in whatever they say or do, for rhythm and harmony are essential to the whole of life.
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For not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine. Had he learned by rules of art, he would have known how to speak not of one theme only, but of all; and therefore God takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God himself is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us.
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As to the artists, do we not know that he only of them whom love inspires has the light of fame?-he whom love touches not walks in darkness.
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Nothing is more unworthy of a wise man, or ought to trouble him more, than to have allowed more time for trifling, and useless things, than they deserve.
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The function of the wing is to take what is heavy and raise it up in the region above.
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Apply yourself both now and in the next life. Without effort, you cannot be prosperous. Though the land be good, You cannot have an abundant crop without cultivation.
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To be sure I must; and therefore I may assume that your silence gives consent.
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Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.
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... the community suffers nothing very terrible if its cobblers are bad and become degenerate and pretentious; but if the Guardians of its laws and constitution, who alone have the opportunity to bring it good government and prosperity, become a mere sham, then clearly it is completely ruined.
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Madness comes from God, whereas sober sense is merely human.
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The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
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Education is the constraining and directing of youth towards that right reason, which the law affirms, and which the experience of the best of our elders has agreed to be truly right.
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Wonder is the feeling of the philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.
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The cure of the part should not be attempted without the cure of the whole.
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I take it that our state, having been founded and built up on the right lines, is good in the complete sense of the word.
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Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.