Plato Quotes
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The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods.
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What a poor appearance the tales of poets make when stripped of the colours which music puts upon them, and recited in simple prose.
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Friends should have all things in common.
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No one is a friend to his friend who does not love in return.
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The qualities which a man seeks in his beloved are those characteristics of his own soul, whether he knows it or not.
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The souls of people, on their way to Earth-life, pass through a room full of lights; each takes a taper - often only a spark - to guide it in the dim country of this world. But some souls, by rare fortune, are detained longer - have time to grasp a handful of tapers, which they weave into a torch. These are the torch-bearers of humanity - its poets, seers and saints, who lead and lift the race out of darkness, toward the light. They are the law-givers and saviors, the light-bringers, way-showers and truth-tellers, and without them, humanity would lose its way in the dark.
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Let every man remind their descendants that they also are soldiers who must not desert the ranks of their ancestors, or from cowardice fall behind.
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The wisest of you men is he who has realized, like Socrates, that in respect of wisdom he is really worthless.
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Education is teaching our children to desire the right things.
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Are these things good for any other reason except that they end in pleasure, and get rid of and avert pain? Are you looking to any other standard but pleasure and pain when you call them good?
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I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.
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Is what is moral commanded by God because it is moral, or is it moral because it is commanded by God?
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The poets are nothing but interpreters of the gods, each one possessed by the divinity to whom he is in bondage.
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Haughtiness lives under the same roof with solitude.
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Socrates: The disgrace begins when a man writes not well, but badly.Phaedrus: Clearly.Socrates: And what is well and what is badly-need we ask Lysias, or any other poet or orator, who ever wrote or will write either a political or any other work, in metre or out of metre, poet or prose writer, to teach us this?
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Democracy leads to anarchy, which is mob rule.
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It is better to be wise, and not to seem so, than to seem wise, and not be so; yet men, for the most part, desire the contrary.
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Better a good enemy than a bad friend.
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... the good are not willing to rule either for the sake of money or of honor.
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We are like people looking for something they have in their hands all the time; we're looking in all directions except at the thing we want, which is probably why we haven't found it.
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Love is an intermediate state between possession and deprivation.
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If a man can be properly said to love something, it must be clear that he feels affection for it as a whole, and does not love part of it to the exclusion of the rest.
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Being well satisfied that, for a man who thinks himself to be somebody, there is nothing more disgraceful than to hold himself up as honored, not on his own account, but for the sake of his forefathers. Yet hereditary honors are a noble and splendid treasure to descendants.
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Health is a consumation of a love affair of all the organs of the body.