Plato Quotes

I would fain grow old learning many things.

The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction.

He who is of calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden.

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil.

People are like dirt. They can either nourish you and help you grow as a person or they can stunt your growth and make you wilt and die.

The blame is his who chooses: God is blameless.

Knowledge is true opinion.

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.

He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.

Injustice is censured because the censures are afraid of suffering, and not from any fear which they have of doing injustice.

Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men.

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.

The wisest have the most authority.

Knowledge without justice ought to be called cunning rather than wisdom.

States are as the men, they grow out of human characters.

Hardly any human being is capable of pursuing two professions or two arts rightly.

The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.

A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.

Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man.

The beginning is the most important part of the work.

One man cannot practice many arts with success.

Attention to health is life’s greatest hindrance.

The god of love lives in a state of need. It is a need. It is an urge. It is a homeostatic imbalance. Like hunger and thirst, it’s almost impossible to stamp out.

Honesty is for the most part less profitable than dishonesty.

Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety.

When a Benefit is wrongly conferred, the author of the Benefit may often be said to injure.

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.

Let parents bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence.

Democracy… is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder; and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.

The gods’ service is tolerable, man’s intolerable.

Death is not the worst that can happen to men.

To love rightly is to love what is orderly and beautiful in an educated and disciplined way.

It is right to give every man his due.

No one is a friend to his friend who does not love in return.

The highest reach of injustice is to be deemed just when you are not.

To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he might have the less.

Then not only custom, but also nature affirms that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice, and that justice is equality.

Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.

We do not learn; and what we call learning is only a process of recollection.

This City is what it is because our citizens are what they are.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

Whatever deceives men seems to produce a magical enchantment.

The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men.

Philosophy is the highest music.

Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

When there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income.

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.

A hero is born among a hundred, a wise man is found among a thousand, but an accomplished one might not be found even among a hundred thousand men.

Excess generally causes reaction, and produces a change in the opposite direction, whether it be in the seasons, or in individuals, or in governments.

Apply yourself both now and in the next life. Without effort, you cannot be prosperous. Though the land be good, You cannot have an abundant crop without cultivation.

No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.

The most important part of education is proper training in the nursery.

Science is nothing but perception.

There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.

For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories.

When men speak ill of thee, live so as nobody may believe them.

It is a common saying, and in everybody‘s mouth, that life is but a sojourn.