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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For though a man should be a complete unbeliever in the being of gods; if he also has a native uprightness of temper, such persons will detest evil in men; their repugnance to wrong disinclines them to commit wrongful acts; they shun the unrighteous and are drawn to the upright.
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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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The race of the guardians must be kept pure.
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The wrong use of a thing is far worse than the non-use.
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The truth is that we isolate a particular kind of love and appropriate it for the name of love, which really belongs to a wider whole.
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In a democracy only will the freeman of nature design to dwell.
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The highest form of pure thought is in mathematics.
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In particular I may mention Sophocles the poet, who was once asked in my presence, How do you feel about love, Sophocles? are you still capable of it? to which he replied, Hush! if you please: to my great delight I have escaped from it, and feel as if I had escaped from a frantic and savage master. I thought then, as I do now, that he spoke wisely. For unquestionably old age brings us profound repose and freedom from this and other passions.
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Great parts produce great vices as well as virtues.
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Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.
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I know nothing more worthy of a man's ambition than that his son be the best of men.
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Equals, the proverb goes, delight in equals.
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Atheism is a disease of the soul before it becomes an error of understanding.
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Athenian men, I respect and love you, but I shall obey the god rather than you.
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Kindness which is bestowed on the good is never lost.
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Don't ask a poet to explain himself. He cannot.
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They ought to be gentle to their friends and dangerous to their enemies.
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Those who are not schooled and practised in truth [who are not honest and upright men] can never manage aright the government, nor yet can those who spend their lives as closet philosophers; because the former have no high purpose to guide their actions, while the latter keep aloof from public life.
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The ludicrous state of solid geometry made me pass over this branch.
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When two friends are in the mood to chat, we have to go about it in a gentler and more dialectical way. By 'more dialectical,' I mean not only that we give real responses, but that we base our responses solely on what the interlocutor admits that he himself knows.
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Courage is a kind of salvation.
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If there is a good and wise God, then there also exists a progress of humanity toward perfection.
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Great is the issue at stake, greater than appears, whether a man is to be good or bad. And what will any one be profited if, under the influence of money or power, he neglect justice and virtue?