Plato Quotes
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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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Mankind censure injustice fearing that they may be the victims of it, and not because they shrink from committing it.
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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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Attention to health is life's greatest hindrance.
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When man is not properly trained, he is the most savage animal on the face of the globe.
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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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Each living creature is said to be alive and to be the same individual - as for example someone is said to be the same person from when he is a child until he comes to be an old man. And yet, if he's called the same, that's despite the fact that he's never made up from the same things, but is always being renewed, and losing what he had before, whether it's hair, or flesh, or bones, or blood, in fact the whole body.
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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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Writing is the geometry of the soul.
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This City is what it is because our citizens are what they are.
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Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind's eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter light, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light.
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Wisdom is a blaze, kindled by a leaping spark.
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Shall we not, then, lay down a law, in the first place, that boys shall abstain altogether from wine till their eighteenth year, thereby teaching that it is wrong to add fire to fire, as through a funnel, pouring it into their body and soul before they proceed to the labor of life, thus exercising a caution as to the maddening habits of youth.
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Don't ask a poet to explain himself. He cannot.
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Enjoy life. There's plenty of time to be dead. Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.
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Nothing in human affairs is worth any great anxiety.
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Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back.
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We do not learn, and that what we call learning is only a process of recollection.
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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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Madness, provided it comes as the gift of heaven, is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings... the men of old who gave things their names saw no disgrace or reproach in madness; otherwise they would not have connected it with the name of the noblest of arts, the art of discerning the future, and called it the manic art... So, according to the evidence provided by our ancestors, madness is a nobler thing than sober sense... madness comes from God, whereas sober sense is merely human.
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Train children not by compulsion but as if they were playing.
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Knowledge is the food of the soul; and we must take care, my friend, that the Sophist does not deceive us when he praises what he sells, like the dealers wholesale or retail who sell the food of the body; for they praise indiscriminately all their goods, without knowing what are really beneficial or hurtful.
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There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.
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If one has made a mistake, and fails to correct it, one has made a greater mistake.