Plato Quotes
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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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A true artist is someone who gives birth to a new reality.
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Arguments, like men, are often pretenders.
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A state arises, as I conceive, out of the needs of mankind; no one is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants.
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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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It is a common saying, and in everybody's mouth, that life is but a sojourn.
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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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And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.
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Love consists in feeling the Sacred One beating inside the loved one.
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As you hope to prove your own great value to the state, and having proved it, to attain at once to absolute power, so do I indulge a hope that I shall be the supreme power over you, if I am able to prove my own great value to you.
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Ignorance, the root and the stem of every evil.
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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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To love rightly is to love what is orderly and beautiful in an educated and disciplined way.
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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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Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
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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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They do certainly give very strange, and newfangled, names to diseases.
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The god is the beautiful.
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All soul is immortal. For that which is always in movement is immortal; that which moves something else, and is moved by something else, in ceasing from movement ceases from living. So only that which moves itself, because it does not abandon itself, never stops moving. But it is also source and first principle of movement for the other things which move.
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And a democracy, I suppose, comes into being when the poor, winning the victory, put to death some of the other party, drive out others, and grant the rest of the citizens an equal share in both citizenship and offices.
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Those having torches will pass them on to others.
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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 makers of fortunes have a second love of money as a creation of their own, resembling the affection of authors for their own poems, or of parents for their children, besides that natural love of it for the sake of use and profit.
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Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil.