Plato Quotes
-
We will be better and braver if we engage and inquire than if we indulge in the idle fancy that we already know -- or that it is of no use seeking to know what we do not know.
-
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
-
Their military training will ensure success in war, but they must maintain unity by not allowing the state to grow to large, and by ensuring that the measures for promotion and demotion from one class to another are carried out. Above all they must maintain the educational system unchanged; for on education everything else depends, and it is an illusion to imagine that mere legislation without it can effect anything of consequence.
-
Socrates isguilty of corrupting the minds of the young, and of believing indeities of his own invention instead of the gods recognized by the state.
-
They certainly give very strange names to diseases.
-
The beginning is the most important part of the work.
-
Many are the noble words in which poets speak concerning the actions of men; but like yourself when speaking about Homer, they do not speak of them by any rules of art: they are simply inspired to utter that to which the Muse impels them, and that only; and when inspired, one of them will make dithyrambs, another hymns of praise, another choral strains, another epic or iambic verses- and he who is good at one is not good any other kind of verse: for not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine.
-
More will be accomplished, and better, and with more ease, if every man does what he is best fitted to do, and nothing else.
-
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.
-
A written discourse on any subject is bound to contain much that is fanciful.
-
We do not learn; and what we call learning is only a process of recollection.
-
The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men.
-
There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.
-
Love is a serious mental disease.
-
We see many instances of cities going down like sinking ships to their destruction. There have been such wrecks in the past and there surely will be others in the future, caused by the wickedness of captains and crews alike. For these are guilty men, whose sin is supreme ignorance of what matters most.
-
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.
-
States will never be happy until rulers become philosophers or philosophers become rulers.
-
We ought to esteem it of the greatest importance that the fictions which children first hear should be adapted in the most perfect manner to the promotion of virtue.
-
Boys should abstain from all use of wine until their eighteenth year, for it is wrong to add fire to fire.
-
This City is what it is because our citizens are what they are.
-
Attention to health is life's greatest hindrance.
-
Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back.
-
Enjoy life. There's plenty of time to be dead. Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.
-
If one has made a mistake, and fails to correct it, one has made a greater mistake.