Plato Quotes
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Justice in the individual is now defined analogously to justice in the state. The individual is wise and brave in virtue of his reason and spirit respectively: he is disciplined when spirit and appetite are in proper subordination to reason. He is just in virtue of the harmony which exists when all three elements of the mind perform their proper function and so achieve their proper fulfillment; he is unjust when no such harmony exists.
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When the mind's eye rests on objects illuminated by truth and reality, it understands and comprehends them, and functions intelligently; but when it turns to the twilight world of change and decay, it can only form opinions, its vision is confused and its beliefs shifting, and it seems to lack intelligence.
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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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Love: a grave mental disease.
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Health is a consumation of a love affair of all the organs of the body.
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The prisoner grows to love his chains.
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There are two things a person should never be angry at, what they can help, and what they cannot.
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The purpose of education is to give to the body and to the soul all the beauty and all the perfection of which they are capable.
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The doctors will treat those of your citizens whose physical and psychological constitution is good: as for the others, they will leave the unhealthy to die and those whose psychological constitution is incurably warped they will be put to death.
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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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Truthfulness. He will never willingly tolerate an untruth, but will hate it as much as he loves truth... And is there anything more closely connected with wisdom than truth?
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Thus rhetoric, it seems, is a producer of persuasion for belief, not for instruction in the matter of right and wrong ... And so the rhetorician's business is not to instruct a law court or a public meeting in matters of right and wrong, but only to make them believe.
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It gives me great pleasure to converse with the aged. They have been over the road that all of us must travel, and know where it is rough and difficult and where it is level and easy.
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You cannot conceive the many without the one...The study of the unit is among those that lead the mind on and turn it to the vision of reality.
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No one is a friend to his friend who does not love in return.
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Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable.
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An hour of play is worth a lifetime of conversation.
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It is beautiful to wish to add another's light to your own.
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There is far greater peril in buying knowledge than in buying meat and drink.
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...that not life, but a good life, is to be chiefly valued.
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He who has followed the path of love's initiation in the proper order will on arriving at the end suddenly perceive a marvelous beauty, the source of all our efforts.
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Trees and fields tell me nothing: men are my teachers.
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Other people are likely not to be aware that those who pursue philosophy aright study nothing but dying and being dead. Now if this is true, it would be absurd to be eager for nothing but this all their lives, and then to be troubled when that came for which they had all along been eagerly practicing.
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Many men are loved by their enemies, and hated by their friends, and are the friends of their enemies, and the enemies of their friends.