Plato Quotes
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And among the other honours and rewards our young men can win for distinguished service in war and in other activities, will be more frequent opportunities to sleep with a woman; this will give us a pretext for ensuring that most of our children are born of that parent.
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And once we have given our community a good start,' I pointed out, ' the process will be cumulative. By maintaining a sound system of education you produce citizens of good character, and citizens of sound character, with the advantage of a good education, produce in turn children better than themselves and better able to produce still better children in their turn, as can be seen with animals.
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The highest reach of injustice is to be deemed just when you are not.
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The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.
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Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity - I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only a euphemism for folly.
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I fast for greater physical and mental efficiency.
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Democracy passes into despotism.
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You may be sure, dear Crito, that inaccurate language is not only in itself a mistake: it implants evil in men's souls.
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To conquer oneself is the best and noblest victory; to be vanquished by one's own nature is the worst and most ignoble defeat.
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Necessity is literally the mother of invention.
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Everything desires not like but unlike: for example, the dry desires the moist, the cold the hot, the bitter the sweet, the sharp the blunt, the void the full, the full the void, and so of all other things; for the opposite is the food of the opposite, whereas like receives like receives nothing from like.
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To be curious about that which is not one's concern while still in ignorance of oneself is ridiculous.
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All well bred men should have mastered the art of singing and dancing.
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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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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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The gods' service is tolerable, man's intolerable.
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Wonder is the beginning of the desire to know the beautiful and the good.
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The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.
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The honour of parents is a fair and noble treasure to their posterity, but to have the use of a treasure of wealth and honour, and to leave none to your successors, because you have neither money nor reputation of your own, is alike base and dishonourable.
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The good man is the only excellent musician, because he gives forth a perfect harmony not with a lyre or other instrument but with the whole of his life.
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In order to seek one's own direction, one must simplify the mechanics of ordinary, everyday life.
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No one punishes the evil-doer under the notion, or for the reason, that he has done wrong -- only the unreasonable fury of a beast acts in that way. But he who desires to inflict rational punishment does not retaliate for a past wrong, for that which is done cannot be undone, but he has regard to the future, and is desirous that the man who is punished, and he who sees him punished, may be deterred from doing wrong again.
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The ultimate design of the Mysteries ... was to lead us back to the principles from which we descended, ... a perfect enjoyment of intellectual [spiritual] good.
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There are few people so stubborn in their atheism who, when danger is pressing in, will not acknowledge the divine power.