Plato Quotes
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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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Our love for our children springs from the soul's greatest yearning for immortality.
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Lord of Lords, grant us the good whether we pray for it or not, but evil keep from us, even though we pray for it.
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The physician, to the extent he is a physician, considers only the good of the patient in what he prescribes, and his own not at all.
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To be conquered by yourself is of all things most shameful and vile.
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Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
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Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable, inasmuch as he has the fountain of reason in him not yet regulated.
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Let us describe the education of our men. What then is the education to be? Perhaps we could hardly find a better than that which the experience of the past has already discovered, which consists, I believe, in gymnastic, for the body, and music for the mind.
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. . . Then anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise anyone who receives it, in the belief that such writing will be clear and certain, must be exceedingly simple-minded. . . .
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Take charge of your thoughts. You can do what you will with them.
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Is there anything worse for a state than to be split and disunited? or anything better than cohesion and unity?
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Music gives a soul to the universe.
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Now nothing can be more important than that the work of a soldier should be well done.
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My good friend, you are a citizen of Athens, a city which is very great and very famous for its wisdom and power - are you not ashamed of caring so much for the making of money and for fame and prestige, when you neither think nor care about wisdom and truth and the improvement of your soul?
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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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I would have you imagine, then, that there exists in the mind of man a block of wax... and that we remember and know what is imprinted as long as the image lasts; but when the image is effaced, or cannot be taken, then we forget or do not know.
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Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
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εὖ ἂν ἔχοι ... εἰ τοιοῦτον εἴη ἡ σοφία ὥστ᾽ ἐκ τοῦ πληρεστέρου εἰς τὸ κενώτερον ῥεῖν ἡμῶν...
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No one is a friend to his friend who does not love in return.
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We must, if we are to be consistent, and if we re to have a real pedigree herd, mate the best of our men with the best of our women as often as possible, and the inferior men with the inferior women as seldom as possible, and keep only the offspring of the best.
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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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The soul takes nothing with her to the other world but her education and culture; and these, it is said, are of the greatest service or of the greatest injury to the dead man, at the very beginning of his journey hither.