Plato Quotes
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Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
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Where it is a general rule that it is wrong to gratify lovers, this can be attributed to the defects of those who make that rule: the government's lust for rule and the subjects' cowardice.
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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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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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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.
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The object of knowledge is what exists and its function to know about reality.
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States will never be happy until rulers become philosophers or philosophers become rulers.
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And we shall most likely be defeated, and you will most likely be victors in the contest, if you learn so to order your lives as not to abuse or waste the reputation of your ancestors, knowing that to a man who has any self-respect, nothing is more dishonourable than to be honoured, not for his own sake, but on account of the reputation of his ancestors.
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The whole life of the philosopher is a preparation for death.
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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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The heaviest penalty for deciding to engage in politics is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.
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We do not learn; and what we call learning is only a process of recollection.
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Love is a serious mental disease.
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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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For our discussion is on no trifling matter, but on the right way to conduct our lives.
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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.
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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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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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One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
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Mankind censure injustice fearing that they may be the victims of it, and not because they shrink from committing it.
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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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They certainly give very strange names to diseases.
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I shall never alter my ways, not even if I have to die many times.
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This City is what it is because our citizens are what they are.