Plato Quotes
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And is it not true that in like manner a leader of the people who, getting control of a docile mob, does not withhold his hand from the shedding of tribal blood, but by the customary unjust accusations brings a citizen into court and assassinates him, blotting out a human life, and with unhallowed tongue and lips that have tasted kindred blood, banishes and slays and hints at the abolition of debts and the partition of lands.
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More will be accomplished, and better, and with more ease, if every man does what he is best fitted to do, and nothing else.
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A true artist is someone who gives birth to a new reality.
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Love is a serious mental disease.
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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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If we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself.
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All things are in fate, yet all things are not decreed by fate.
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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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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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And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.
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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 do not learn; and what we call learning is only a process of recollection.
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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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It was Plato, according to Sosigenes, who set this as a problem for those concerned with these things, through what suppositions of uniform and ordered movements the appearances concerning the movements of the wandering heavenly bodies could be preserved.
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Let no-one ignorant of geometry enter. Said to have been inscribed above the door of Plato's Academy.
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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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There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.
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Only the dead have seen the end of war.
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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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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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This City is what it is because our citizens are what they are.
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The beginning is the most important part of the work.
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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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Many are the thyrsus-bearers, but few are the mystics.