The Quotes from Plato

  

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

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 beginning is the most important part of the work.

Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.

Philosophy is the highest music.

Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything. Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

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.

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

At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.

Love is a serious mental disease.

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

There are two things a person should never be angry at, what they can help, and what they cannot.

Courage is knowing what not to fear. Courage is a kind of salvation.

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

The measure of a man is what he does with power.

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.

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.

Justice in the life and conduct of the State is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.

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.

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

Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.

We are twice armed if we fight with faith.

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

If a man neglects education, he walks lame to the end of his life.

For good nurture and education implant good constitutions.

Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil.

The learning and knowledge that we have, is, at the most, but little compared with that of which we are ignorant.

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

The greatest wealth is to live content with little.

Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.

Science is nothing but perception!

Necessity... the mother of invention.

Wonder is the feeling of the philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

He who is not a good servant will not be a good master.

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

To be sure I must; and therefore I may assume that your silence gives consent.

Justice means minding one's own business and not meddling with other men's concerns.

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

The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future in life.

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

All the gold which is under or upon the earth is not enough to give in exchange for virtue.

Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.

Life must be lived as play.

Man - a being in search of meaning.

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

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

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.

Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men

No law or ordinance is mightier than understanding.

There is no harm in repeating a good thing.

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

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.

And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.

The most virtuous are those who content themselves with being virtuous without seeking to appear so.

Knowledge becomes evil if the aim be not virtuous.

Excess of liberty, whether it lies in state or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.

As the builders say, the larger stones do not lie well without the lesser.

There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.

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.

Entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all; too much cleverness and too much learning, accompanied with ill bringing-up, are far more fatal.

Cunning... is but the low mimic of wisdom.

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

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

The community which has neither poverty nor riches will always have the noblest principles

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

Those who intend on becoming great should love neither themselves nor their own things, but only what is just, whether it happens to be done by themselves or others.

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

Then not only an old man, but also a drunkard, becomes a second time a child.

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