Plato Quotes
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Love consists in feeling the Sacred One beating inside the loved one.
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And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.
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We must infer that all things are produced more plentifully and easily and of a better quality when one man does one thing which is natural to him and does it at the right time, and leaves other things.
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If the study of all these sciences which we have enumerated, should ever bring us to their mutual association and relationship, and teach us the nature of the ties which bind them together, I believe that the diligent treatment of them will forward the objects which we have in view, and that the labor, which otherwise would be fruitless, will be well bestowed.
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Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
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The form of law which I propose would be as follows: In a state which is desirous of being saved from the greatest of all plagues-not faction, but rather distraction-there should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty nor, again, excessive wealth, for both are productive of great evil . . . Now the legislator should determine what is to be the limit of poverty or of wealth.
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Then the case is the same in all the other arts for the orator and his rhetoric; there is no need to know the truth of the actual matters, but one merely needs to have discovered some device of persuasion which will make one appear to those who do not know to know better than those who know.
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Arguments, like men, are often pretenders.
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But if with your mind's eye you regard the absolute great and these many great things in the same way, will not another great appear beyond, by which all these must appear to be great?
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The god is the beautiful.
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Avoid compulsion and let early education be a matter of amusement. Young children learn by games; compulsory education cannot remain in the soul.
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Knowledge is true opinion.
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When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest...and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war.
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If one has made a mistake, and fails to correct it, one has made a greater mistake.
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No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew it was the greatest of evils.
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Those having torches will pass them on to others.
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To love rightly is to love what is orderly and beautiful in an educated and disciplined way.
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He who is of calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden.
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Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil.
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It is as expedient that a wicked man be punished as that a sick man be cured by a physician; for all chastisement is a kind of medicine.
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Adultery is the injury of nature.
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There is no one who ever acts honestly in the administration of states, nor any helper who will save any one who maintains the cause of the just.
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τοῖς μὲν οὖν τότε, ἅτε οὐκ οὖσι σοφοῖς ὥσπερ ὑμεῖς οἱ νέοι, ἀπέχρη δρυὸς καὶ πέτρας ἀκούειν ὑπ᾽ εὐηθείας, εἰ μόνον ἀληθῆ λέγοιεν: σοὶ δ᾽ ἴσως διαφέρει τίς ὁ λέγων καὶ ποδαπός.
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Enjoy life. There's plenty of time to be dead. Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.