Plato Quotes
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Many are the thyrsus-bearers, but few are the mystics.
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Wisdom is a blaze, kindled by a leaping spark.
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No law or ordinance is mightier than understanding.
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When you feel grateful, you become great, and eventually attract great things.
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Injustice is censured because the censures are afraid of suffering, and not from any fear which they have of doing injustice.
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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.
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All things are in fate, yet all things are not decreed by fate.
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They would be subject to no one, neither to lawful ruler nor to the reign of law, but would be altogether and absolutely free. That is the way they got their tyrants, for either servitude or freedom, when it goes to extremes, is an utter bane, while either in due measure is altogether a boon.
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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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The greatest penalty of evil-doing is to grow into the likeness of a bad man.
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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.
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To be at once exceedingly wealthy and good is impossible.
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Madness is a divine release of the soul from the yoke of custom and convention.
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Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood let alone believed by the masses.
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My love, Alcibiades, which I hardly like to confess, would long ago have passed away, as I flatter myself, if I saw you loving your good things, or thinking that you ought to pass life in the enjoyment of them.
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Let parents bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence.
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There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.
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A written discourse on any subject is bound to contain much that is fanciful.
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We will be better and braver if we engage and inquire than if we indulge in the idle fancy that we already know -- or that it is of no use seeking to know what we do not know.
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No one is so cowardly that Love could not inspire him to heroism.
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Love is a serious mental disease.
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This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.
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SOCRATES: Perhaps we may be wrong; if so, you in your wisdom should convince us that we are mistaken in preferring justice to injustice. THRASYMACHUS: And how am I to convince you, he said, if you are not already convinced by what I have just said; what more can I do for you? Would you have me put the proof bodily into your souls?
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The most important part of education is right training in the nursery. The soul of the child in his play should be trained to that sort of excellence in which, when he grows to manhood, he will have to be perfected.