Plato Quotes: 57

• Life must be lived as play.

• Love is the joy of the good, the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the Gods.

• Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.

• 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.

• At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.

• 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.

• Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.

• 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.

• Only the dead have seen the end of war.

• The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.

• Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.

• Love is a serious mental disease.

  Phaedrus

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

• ...and when one of them meets the other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy and one will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment...

  The Symposium

• Education is teaching our children to desire the right things.

• In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill... we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.

• You should not honor men more than truth.

• Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

• Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

  The Republic

• The soul takes nothing with her to the next world but her education and her culture. At the beginning of the journey to the next world, one's education and culture can either provide the greatest assistance, or else act as the greatest burden, to the person who has just died.

  The Republic of Plato

• Writing is the geometry of the soul.

• For this feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy.

  Theaetetus

• I thought to myself: I am wiser than this man; neither of us probably knows anything that is really good, but he thinks he has knowledge, when he has not, while I, having no knowledge, do not think I have.

  Apology

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

• False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

• Either we shall find what it is we are seeking or at least we shall free ourselves from the persuasion that we know what we do not know.

  The Republic

• For to fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise without really being wise, for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For no one knows whether death may not be the greatest good that can happen to man.

  Apology

• How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?

  The Allegory of the Cave

• He was a wise man who invented God.

• Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

• Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be a sort of amusement; you will then be better able to discover the child's natural bent.

• In practice people who study philosophy too long become very odd birds, not to say thoroughly vicious; while even those who are the best of them are reduced by...[philosophy] to complete uselessness as members of society.

  Republic: The Theatre of the Mind

• Wise men talk because they have something to say; Fools, because they have to say something.

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

• That's what education should be,"I said, "the art of orientation. Educators should devise the simplest and most effective methods of turning minds around. It shouldn't be the art of implanting sight in the organ, but should proceed on the understanding that the organ already has the capacity, but is improperly aligned and isn't facing the right way.

  The Republic

• Philosophy is the highest music.

• Ideas are the source of all things

• Only a philosopher's mind grows wings, since its memory always keeps it as close as possible to those realities by being close to which the gods are divine.

  Phaedrus

• Knowledge is the food of the soul.

• Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.

  The Republic

• Knowledge becomes evil if the aim be not virtuous.

• Then the lover, who is true and no counterfeit, must of necessity be loved by his love.

• let the speaker speak truly and the judge decide justly.

  Plato I: Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. Phaedrus.

• The philosopher whose dealings are with divine order himself acquires the characteristics of order and divinity.

  The Republic

• Calligraphy is a geometry of the soul which manifests itself physically.

• The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things.

• Those who don't know must learn from those who do.

  The Republic

• Then we shan’t regard anyone as a lover of knowledge or wisdom who is fussy about what he studies…

  The Republic and Other Works

• To conquer oneself is the best and noblest victory; to be vanquished by one's own nature is the worst and most ignoble defeat.

• The soul of him who has education is whole and perfect and escapes the worst disease, but, if a man's education be neglected, he walks lamely through life and returns good for nothing to the world below.

• O dear Pan and all the other gods of this place, grant that I may be beautiful inside. Let all my external possessions be in friendly harmony with what is within. May I consider the wise man rich. As for gold, let me have as much as a moderate man could bear and carry with him.

  Phaedrus

• Knowledge unqualified is knowledge simply of something learned.

• It is the task of the enlightened not only to ascend to learning and to see the good but to be willing to descend again to those prisoners and to share their troubles and their honors, whether they are worth having or not. And this they must do, even with the prospect of death.

  The Allegory of the Cave

• Socrates: This man, on one hand, believes that he knows something, while not knowing [anything]. On the other hand, I – equally ignorant – do not believe [that I know anything].

  Apology

• ....I am inclined to think that these muscles and bones of mine would have gone off long ago to Megara or Boeotia—by the dog they would, if they had been moved only by their own idea of what was best.(tr Jowett)

  Phaedo

• A poet, you see, is a light thing, and winged and holy, and cannot compose before he gets inspiration and loses control of his senses and his reason has deserted him.

• 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.