Plato Quotes
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The whole life of the philosopher is a preparation for death.
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The heaviest penalty for deciding to engage in politics is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.
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The beginning is the most important part of the work.
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One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
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Boys should abstain from all use of wine until their eighteenth year, for it is wrong to add fire to fire.
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A written discourse on any subject is bound to contain much that is fanciful.
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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.
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I do not think it is permitted that a better man be harmed by a worse.
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States will never be happy until rulers become philosophers or philosophers become rulers.
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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.
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The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men.
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They certainly give very strange names to diseases.
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Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
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Love is a serious mental disease.
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We do not learn; and what we call learning is only a process of recollection.
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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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Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.
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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.
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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.
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To escape from evil we must be made as far as possible like God; and the resemblance consists in becoming just and holy and wise.
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Attention to health is life's greatest hindrance.
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This City is what it is because our citizens are what they are.
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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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Arithmetic has a very great and elevating effect, compelling the soul to reason about abstract number, and rebelling against the introduction of visible or tngible objects into the argument.