Plato Quotes
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Those who have a natural talent for calculation are generally quick-witted at every other kind of knowledge; and even the dull, if they have had an arithmetical training, although they may derive no other advantage from it, always become much quicker than they would have been.
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You should not honor men more than truth.
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The Earth is like one of those balls made of twelve pieces of skin.
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For the poets tell us, don't they, that the melodies they bring us are gathered from rills that run with honey, out of glens and gardens of the Muses, and they bring them as bees do honey, flying like the bees? And what they say is true, for a poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him. So long as he has this in his possession, no man is able to make poetry or to chant in prophecy.
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Men of sound sense have Law for their god, but men without sense Pleasure.
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Whence comes war and fighting, and factions? Whence but from the body and the lust of the body? Wars are occasioned by the love of money, and money has to be acquired for the same and service of the body.
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What is honored in a country will be cultivated there.
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The philosopher is in love with truth, that is, not with the changing world of sensation, which is the object of opinion, but with the unchanging reality which is the object of knowledge.
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Desires are only the lack of something: and those who have the greatest desires are in a worse condition than those who have none, or very slight ones.
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No man's nature is able to know what is best for the social state of man; or, knowing, always able to do what is best.
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The wisest have the most authority.
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A certain portion of mankind do not believe at all in the existence of the gods.
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Is it not the excess and greed of this and the neglect of all other things that revolutionizes this constitution too and prepares the way for the necessity of a dictatorship?
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He who is of a calm and happy nature, will hardly feel the pressure of age.
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Even in reaching for the beautiful there is beauty, and also in suffering whatever it is that one suffers en route.
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Science is nothing but perception.
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Of all the Gods, Love is the best friend of humankind, the helper and healer of all ills that stand in the way of human happiness.
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The only real ill-doing is the deprivation of knowledge.
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For it is obvious to everybody, I think, that this study [of astronomy] compels the soul to look upward and leads it away from things here to higher things.
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Know one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.
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As a breath of wind or some echo rebounds from smooth, hard surfaces and returns to the source from which it issued, so the stream of beauty passes back into its possessor through his eyes, which is its natural route to the soul; arriving there and setting him all aflutter, it waters the passages of the feathers and causes the wings to grow, and fills the soul of the loved one in his turn with love.
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From all wild beasts, a child is the most difficult to handle.
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That man is wisest who, like Socrates, realizes that his wisdom is worthless.
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There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.