Plato Quotes
-
Take a look around, then, and see that none of the uninitiated are listening. Now by the uninitiated I mean the people who believe in nothing but what they can grasp in their hands, and who will not allow that action or generation or anything invisible can have real existence.
-
In the world of knowledge, the essential Form of Good is the limit of our inquiries, and can barely be perceived; but, when perceived, we cannot help concluding that it is in every case the source of all that is bright and beautiful -in the visible world giving birth to light and its master, and in the intellectual world dispensing, immediately and with full authority, truth and reason -and that whosoever would act wisely, either in private or in public, must set this Form of Good before his eyes.
-
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.
-
We will be better men, braver and less idle, if we believe that one must search for the things one does not know, rather than if we believe that it is not possible to find out what we do not know and that we must not look for it.
-
Art has no end but its own perfection.
-
I fast for greater physical and mental efficiency.
-
A State would be happy where philosophers were kings, or kings philosophers.
-
...there are some who are naturally fitted for philosophy and political leadership, while the rest should follow their lead and let philosophy alone.
-
What then is the right way to live? Life should be lived as play.
-
A house that has a library in it has a soul.
-
The greatest wealth is to live content with little.
-
The true runner comes to the finish and receives the prize and is crowned.
-
One cannot make a slave of a free person, for a free person is free even in a prison.
-
It seems to me that whatever else is beautiful apart from asbsolute beauty is beautiful because it partakes of that absolute beauty, and for no other reason. Do you accept this kind of causality?
-
In order to be a good soldier it is necessary to know how to dance.
-
The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life.
-
I fear this is not the right exchange to attain virtue, to exchange pleasures for pleasures, pains for pains and fears for fears, the greater for the less like coins, but that the only valid currency for which all these things should be exchanged is wisdom.
-
Hardly any human being is capable of pursuing two professions or two arts rightly.
-
Trees and fields tell me nothing: men are my teachers.
-
Love is simply the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole.
-
Let him know how to choose the mean and avoid the extremes on either side, as far as possible. . . . For this is the way of happiness.
-
And yet the artist will go on with his work without knowing in some way if any of his representations are sound or unsound. The artist knows nothing worth mentioning about the subjects he represents, and that art is a form of play, not to be taken seriously.
-
One should turn towards the main ocean of the-beautiful-in-the-world so that one may by, contemplation of this Form, bring forth in all their splendor many fair fruits of discourse and meditation in a plenteous crop of philosophy.
-
The natural function of the wing is to soar upwards and carry that which is heavy up to the place where dwells the race of gods. More than any other thing that pertains to the body it partakes of the nature of the divine.