Plato Quotes
-
Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Hence it is from the representation of things spoken by means of posture and gesture that the whole of the art of dance has been elaborated.
-
The learning and knowledge that we have, is, at the most, but little compared with that of which we are ignorant.
-
The blame is his who chooses: God is blameless.
-
Lust is inseparably accompanied with the troubling of all order, with impudence, unseemliness, sloth, and dissoluteness.
-
Both poverty and wealth, therefore, have a bad effect on the quality of the work and the workman himself. Wealth and poverty, I answered. One produces luxury and idleness and a passion for novelty, the other meanness and bad workmanship and revolution into the bargain.
-
For a poet is an airy thing, winged and holy, and he is not able to make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his mind and his intellect is no longer in him.
-
I know too well that these arguments from probabilities are imposters, and unless great caution is observed in the use of them, they are apt to be deceptive.
-
And may we not say, Adeimantus, that the most gifted minds, when they are ill- educated, become the worst?
-
Philosophy begins in wonder.
-
Then may we not fairly plead in reply that our true lover of knowledge naturally strives for truth, and is not content with common opinion, but soars with undimmed and unwearied passion till he grasps the essential nature of things with the mental faculty fitted to do so, that is, with the faculty which is akin to reality, and which approaches and unites with it, and begets intelligence and truth as children, and is only released from travail when it has thus reached knowledge and true life and satisfaction?
-
A man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong - acting the part of a good man or of a bad.
-
No one knows whether death is really the greatest blessing a man can have, but they fear it is the greatest curse, as if they knew well.
-
But that we shall be better and braver and less helpless if we think that we ought to enquire, than we should have been if we indulged in the idle fancy that there was no knowing and no use in seeking to know what we do not know; - that is a theme upon which I am ready to fight, in word and deed, to the utmost of my power.
-
I was stupid enough to think that we ought to speak the truth about each person eulogised, and to make this the foundation, and from these truths to choose the most beautiful things and arrange them in the most elegant way; and I was quite proud to think how well I should speak, because I believed that I knew the truth.
-
...in every man there is an eye of the soul, which...is more precious far than ten thousand bodily eyes, for by it alone is truth seen.
-
As it is, the lover of inquiry must follow his beloved wherever it may lead him.
-
It is our duty to select the best and most dependable theory that human intelligence can supply, and use it as a raft to ride the seas of life.
-
When there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income.
-
But at three, four, five, and even six years the childish nature will require sports; now is the time to get rid of self-will in him, punishing him, but not so as to disgrace him.
-
God is a geometrician.
-
The life which is not examined is not worth living.