Plato Quotes
-
I do not think it is permitted that a better man be harmed by a worse.
-
No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.
-
Man is the plumeless genus of bipeds, birds are the plumed.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.
-
Wisdom alone is the science of other sciences.
-
Conversion is not implanting eyes, for they exist already; but giving them a right direction, which they have not.
-
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!
-
When man is not properly trained, he is the most savage animal on the face of the globe.
-
The one who learns and learns and doesn't practice is like the one who plows and plows and never plants.
-
Lessons, however, that enter the soul against its will never grow roots and will never be preserved inside it.
-
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.
-
To go to the world below, having a soul which is like a vessel full of injustice, is the last and worst of all the evils.
-
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.
-
Perfect wisdom has four parts: Wisdom, the principle of doing things aright. Justice, the principle of doing things equally in public and private. Fortitude, the principle of not fleeing danger, but meeting it. Temperance, the principle of subduing desires and living moderately.
-
No one is so cowardly that Love could not inspire him to heroism.
-
Evil is the vulgar lover who loves the body rather than the soul, inasmuch as he is not even stable, because he loves a thing which is in itself unstable, and therefore when the bloom of youth which he was desiring is over, he takes wing and flies away, in spite of all his words and promises; whereas the love of the noble disposition is life-long, for it becomes one with the everlasting.
-
Wisdom is a blaze, kindled by a leaping spark.
-
Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood let alone believed by the masses.
-
When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.
-
Then the lover, who is true and no counterfeit, must of necessity be loved by his love.
-
A nation will prosper to the degree that it honors it's teachers.
-
We are too feeble and sluggish to make our way out to the upper limit of the air. If someone could reach the summit, or put on wings and fly aloft, when he put up his head he would see the world above, just as fishes see our world when they put up their heads out of the sea; and if his nature were able to bear the sight, he would recognize that that is the true heaven.