Plato Quotes
-
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.
-
There is no one who ever acts honestly in the administration of states, nor any helper who will save any one who maintains the cause of the just.
-
Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil.
-
If one has made a mistake, and fails to correct it, one has made a greater mistake.
-
Wisdom alone is the science of other sciences.
-
No law or ordinance is mightier than understanding.
-
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.
-
Wisdom is a blaze, kindled by a leaping spark.
-
For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.
-
Whereas the truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst.
-
It is as expedient that a wicked man be punished as that a sick man be cured by a physician; for all chastisement is a kind of medicine.
-
There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.
-
The rulers of the state are the only persons who ought to have the privilege of lying, either at home or abroad; they may be allowed to lie for the good of the state.
-
Nothing in human affairs is worth any great anxiety.
-
If one sins against the laws of proportion and gives something too big to something too small to carry it - too big sails to too small a ship, too big meals to too small a body, too big powers to too small a soul - the result is bound to be a complete upset. In an outburst of hubris the overfed body will rush into sickness, while the jack-in-office will rush into the unrighteousness that hubris always breeds.
-
Injustice is censured because the censures are afraid of suffering, and not from any fear which they have of doing injustice.
-
He whom Love touches not walks in darkness.
-
Do you, like a skilful weigher, put into the balance the pleasures and the pains, near and distant, and weigh them, and then say which outweighs the other? If you weigh pleasures against pleasures, you of course take the more and greater; or if you weigh pains against pains, then you choose that course of action in which the painful is exceeded by the pleasant, whether the distant by the near or the near by the distant; and you avoid that course of action in which the pleasant is exceeded by the painful.
-
Books are immortal sons deifying their sires.
-
The greatest mistake physicians make is that they attempt to cure the body without attempting to cure the mind, yet the mind and the body are one and should not be treated separately!
-
As the proverb says, "a good beginning is half the business" and "to have begun well" is praised by all.
-
Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.
-
Thinking and spoken discourse are the same thing, except that what we call thinking is, precisely, the inward dialogue carried on by the mind with itself without spoken sound.
-
A nation will prosper to the degree that it honors it's teachers.