Plato Quotes

And yet even in reaching for the beautiful there is beauty, and also in suffering whatever it is that one suffers en route.

~ Plato

There is nothing which for my part I like better, Cephalus, than conversing with aged men; for I regard them as travellers who have gone a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to inquire, whether the way is smooth and easy, or rugged and difficult.

~ Plato

[W]hen men have both done and suffered injustice and have had experience of both, not being able to avoid the one and obtain the other, they think that they had better agree among themselves to have neither; hence there arise laws and mutual covenants; and that which is ordained by law is termed by them lawful and just. This they affirm to be the origin and nature of justice;—it is a mean or compromise,between the best of all, which is to do injustice and not be punished, and the worst of all, which is to suffer injustice without the power of retaliation; and justice, being at a middle point between the two, is tolerated not as a good, but as the lesser evil…

~ Plato

Haven't you noticed that opinion without knowledge is always a poor thing? At the best it is blind—isn't anyone who holds a true opinion without understanding like a blind man on the right road?

~ Plato

He who wishes to serve his country must have not only the power to think, but the will to act

~ Plato

What is honored in a culture gets cultivated there.

~ Plato

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

~ Plato

There can be no fairer spectacle than that of a man, who combines the possession of moral beauty in his soul with outward beauty of form, corresponding and harmonizing with the former, because the same great pattern enters both.

~ Plato

As it is, the lover of inquiry must follow his beloved wherever it may lead him.

~ Plato

The worst type of man behaves as badly in his waking life as some men do in their dreams.

~ Plato

Then as for those who gaze upon many beautiful things but don't see the beautiful itself, and aren't even capable of following someone else who leads them to it, and upon many just things but not the just itself, and all the things like that, we'll claim that they accept the seeming of everything but discern nothing of what they have opinions about.

~ Plato

If there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army should be made up of lovers and their loves, they would be the very best governors of their own city, abstaining from all dishonour, and emulating one another in honour; and when fighting at each other's side, although a mere handful, they would overcome the world. For what lover would not choose rather to be seen by all mankind than by his beloved, either when abandoning his post or throwing away his arms? He would be ready to die a thousand deaths rather than endure this. Or who would desert his beloved or fail him in the hour of danger? The veriest coward would become an inspired hero, equal to the bravest, at such a time; Love would inspire him.

~ Plato

Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity – I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only a euphemism for folly.

~ Plato

He who is of a 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.

~ Plato

The State is like a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly which God has given the State and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you. You will not easily find another like me.

~ Plato

Then we got into a labyrinth, and, when we thought we were at the end,came out again at the beginning, having still to see as much as ever.

~ Plato

Old age has a great sense of calm and freedom when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are free from the grasp, not of one mad master only, but of many.

~ Plato

The best is to do injustice without paying the penalty, the worst is to suffer it without being able to take revenge. Justice is a mean between these two extremes. People value it not because it is a good but because they are too weak to do injustice with impunity.

~ Plato

Can I by justice or by crooked ways of deceit ascend a loftier tower which may he a fortress to me all my days? For what men say is that, if I am really just and am not also thought just profit there is none, but the pain and loss on the other hand are unmistakable. But if, though unjust, I acquire the reputation of justice, a heavenly life is promised to me. Since then, as philosophers prove, appearance tyrannizes over truth and is lord of happiness, to appearance I must devote myself.

~ Plato

...in the running of cities, virtually nothing is done by anyone that is conducive to political health, nor is there a single ally with whom one might go to the aid of justice and still remain alive; it would be a case of a solitary human among wild animals, neither wanting to join in their depredations nor able to stand alone against their collective savagery, dead before he'd done any good to his city or friends and useless both to himself and everybody else. Once a person has made all these calculations, he keeps his peace and minds his own business, like someone withdrawing from the prevailing wind into the shelter of a wall in a storm of dust or rain, and as he sees everyone else filling themselves full of lawlessness he is content if he himself can somehow live out life here untainted by injustice and impious actions, and leave it with fine hopes and in a spirit of kindness and good will.

~ Plato

[W]hen men have both done and suffered injustice and have had experience of both, not being able to avoid the one and obtain the other, they think that they had better agree among themselves to have neither; hence there arise laws and mutual covenants; and that which is ordained by law is termed by them lawful and just. This they affirm to be the origin and nature of justice;—it is a mean or compromise, between the best of all, which is to do injustice and not be punished, and the worst of all, which is to suffer injustice without the power of retaliation; and justice, being at a middle point between the two, is tolerated not as a good, but as the lesser evil…

~ Plato

We've heard many people say and have often said ourselves that justice is doing one's own work and not meddling with what isn't one's own ... Then, it turns out that this doing one's own work-provided that it comes to be in a certain way-is justice.

~ Plato

I am speaking like a book, but I believe that what I am saying is true.

~ Plato

The author's Socrates admonishes paramount awareness human limitations. If we do good to those we evaluate as good and evil to those we evaluate at the evil, and we are wrong, we have been made the world less just.

~ Plato

No reproach for a person willing to give honorable service in the passion to become wise.

~ Plato

At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet

~ Plato

The poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his sneses, and the mind is no longer in him.

~ Plato

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

~ Plato

Is it not true that the clever rogue is like the runner who runs well for the first half of the course, but flags before reaching the goal: he is quick off the mark, but ends in disgrace and slinks away crestfallen and uncrowned. The crown is the prize of the really good runner who perseveres to the end.

~ Plato

The tools that would teach men their own use would be beyond price.

~ Plato

Time is the moving image of eternity.

~ Plato

The man who finds that in the course of his life he has done a lot of wrong often wakes up at night in terror, like a child with a nightmare, and his life is full of foreboding: but the man who is conscious of no wrongdoing is filled with cheerfulness and with the comfort of old age.

~ Plato

If it were necessary either to do wrong or to suffer it, I should choose to suffer rather than do it.

~ Plato

There is nothing I like better than conversing with aged men. For I regard them as travelers who have gone a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to inquire whether the way is smooth and easy or rugged and difficult. Is life harder toward the end, or what report do you give it?

~ Plato

Every king springs from a race of slaves, and every slave had kings among his ancestors.

~ Plato

Rather I think that a man who ... is willing ... to value learning as long as he lives, not supposing that old age brings him wisdom of itself, will necessarily pay more attention to the rest of his life.

~ Plato

If you want to understand language, spend less time in the library with Plato and more time on the buses with people.

~ Plato

I shall try to persuade first the Rulers and soldiers, and then the rest of the community, that the upbringing and education we have given them was all something that happened to them only in a dream. In reality they were fashioned and reared, and their arms and equipment manufactured, in the depths of the earth, and Earth herself, their mother, brought them up, when they were complete, into the light of day; so now they must think of the land in which they live as their mother and protect her if she is attacked, while their fellow citizens they must regard as brothers born of the same mother earth…. That is the story. Do you know of any way of making them believe it?” “Not in the first generation,” he said, “but you might succeed with the second, and later generations.

~ Plato

It's like this, I think: the excellence of a good body doesn't make the soul good, but the other way around: the excellence of a good soul makes the body as good as it can be.

~ Plato

a life without investigation is not worth living

~ Plato