Plato Quotes
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The highest reach of injustice is to be deemed just when you are not.
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And tell him it's quite true that the best of the philosophers are of no use to their fellows; but that he should blame, not the philosophers, but those who fail to make use of them.
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Art has no end but its own perfection.
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Rhythm and melody enter into the soul of the well-instructed youth and produce there a certain mental harmony hardly obtainable in any other way. . . . thus music, too, is concerned with the principles of love in their application to harmony and rhythm.
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I do believe that there are gods, and in a far higher sense than that in which any of my accusers believe in them.
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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 am not given to finding fault, for there are innumerable fools.
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[Not enough is known about solid geometry] and for two reasons: in the first place, no government places value on it; this leads to a lack of energy in the pursuit of it, and it is difficult. In the second place, students cannot learn it unless they have a teacher. But then a teacher can hardly be found.
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Hardly any human being is capable of pursuing two professions or two arts rightly.
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All well bred men should have mastered the art of singing and dancing.
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A State would be happy where philosophers were kings, or kings philosophers.
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Our love for our children springs from the soul's greatest yearning for immortality.
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You need some knowledge to recognize knowledge, so where does the first knowledge come from?
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The gods' service is tolerable, man's intolerable.
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...there are some who are naturally fitted for philosophy and political leadership, while the rest should follow their lead and let philosophy alone.
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Vision, in my view, is the cause of the greatest benefit to us, inasmuch as none of the accounts now given concerning the Universe would ever have been given if men had not seen the stars or the sun or the heavens. But as it is, the vision of day and night and of months and circling years has created the art of number and has given us not only the notion of Time but also means of research into the nature of the Universe. From these we have procured Philosophy in all its range, than which no greater boon ever has come or will come, by divine bestowal, unto the race of mortals.
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Music is a more potent instrument than any other for education.
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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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Wonder is the beginning of the desire to know the beautiful and the good.
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A wise ignorance is an essential part of knowledge.
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Freedom in a democracy is the glory of the state, and, therefore, in a democracy only will the freeman of nature deign to dwell.
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You cannot conceive the many without the one.
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So the well educated man can learn to sing and dance well.
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A man's duty is to find out where the truth is, or if he cannot, at least to take the best possible human doctrine and the hardest to disprove, and to ride on this like a raft over the waters of life.