Plato Quotes

Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance

~ Plato

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.

~ Plato

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

~ Plato

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.

~ Plato

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.

~ Plato

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

~ Plato

For, let me tell you that the more the pleasures of the body fade away, the greater to me are the pleasure and charm of conversation.

~ Plato

You take the words in the sense which is most damaging to the argument.

~ Plato

Courage is knowing what not to fear.

~ Plato

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

~ Plato

When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty and there is nothing to fear from them then he is always stirring up some wary or other in order that the people may require a leader.

~ Plato

The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.

~ Plato

They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth. -Plato, philosopher (427-347 BCE)

~ Plato

...[T]he right way is to give one's attention first to the highest good of the young, just as you expect a good gardener to give his attention first to the young plants, and after that to the others. - Socrates

~ Plato

If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.

~ Plato

All began to change in the reverse direction and grow more tender. The white hair of the elderly began to grow black; the cheeks of the bearded to grow smooth, and one and all to return to the season of bloom that they had left behind them. Young men’s bodies grew smoother and smaller day by day and night by night till they reverted alike in mind and body to the likes of a newborn infant, and then dwindled right away and were clean lost to sight.

~ Plato

if someone got to see the Beautiful itself, absolute, pure, unmixed, not polluted by human flesh or colors or any other great nonsense of mortality, but if he could see the divine Beauty itself in its one form? Do you think it would be a poor life for a human being to look there and to behold it by that which he ought, and to be with it? Or haven't you remembered that in that life alone, when he looks at Beauty in the only way what Beauty can be seen - only then will it become possible for him to give birth no to images of virtue (because he's in touch with no images) but to true virtue (because he is in touch with the true Beauty). The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given birth to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he.

~ Plato

Have you ever sensed that our soul is immortal and never dies?

~ Plato

... when someone sees a soul disturbed and unable to see something, he won't laugh mindlessly, but he'll take into consideration whether it has come from a brighter life and is dimmed through not having yet become accustomed to the dark or whether it has come from greater ignorance into greater light and is dazzled by the increased brillance.

~ Plato

if someone got to see the Beautiful itself, absolute, pure, unmixed, not polluted by human flesh or colors or any other great nonsense of mortality, but if he could see the divine Beauty itself in its one form? Do you think it would be a poor life for a human being to look there and to behold it by that which he ought, and to be with it? Or haven't you remembered that in that life alone, when he looks at Beauty in the only way what Beauty can be seen - only then will it become possible for him to give birth no to images of virtue but to true virtue. The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given birth to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he.

~ Plato

All good and evil, whether in the body or in human nature, originates in the soul, and overflows from thence, as if from the head into the eyes.

~ Plato

Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.

~ Plato

I would teach children music, physics, and philosophy; but most importantly music, for the patterns in music and all the arts are the keys to learning

~ Plato

....harmony that would fittingly imitate the utterances and accents of a brave man who is engaged in warfare or in any enforced business, and who, when he has failed […] confronts fortune with steadfast endurance and repels her strokes

~ Plato

Money-makers are tiresome company, as they have no standard but cash value.

~ Plato

Physical excellence does not of itself produce a good mind and character: on the other hand, excellence of mind and character will make the best of the physique it is given.

~ Plato

So when a man surrenders to the sound of music and lets its sweet, soft, mournful strains, which we have just described, be funnelled into his soul through his ears, and gives up all his time to the glamorous moanings of song, the effect at first on his energy and initiative of mind, if he has any, is to soften it as iron is softened in a furnace, and made workable instead of hard and unworkable: but if he persists and does not break the enchantment, the next stage is that it melts and runs, till the spirit has quite run out of him and his mental sinews (if I may so put it) are cut, and he has become what Homer calls a feeble fighter.

~ Plato

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

~ Plato

The reason is that they utter these words of theirs not by virtue of a skill, but by a divine power - otherwise, if they knew how to speak well on one topic thanks to a skill, they would know how to speak about every other topic too.

~ Plato

No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nature and education.

~ Plato

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

~ Plato

The greatest mistake in the treatment of diseases is that there are physicians for the body and physicians for the soul, although the two cannot be separated.

~ Plato

The greatest wealth is to live content with little.

~ Plato

But I don't think we shall quarrel about a word - the subject of our inquiry is too important for that.

~ Plato

Because a freeman ought not to be a slave in the acquisition of knowledge of any kind. Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

~ Plato

Education isn't what some people declare it to be, namely, putting knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting sight into blind eyes...The power to learn is present in everyone's soul and...the instrument with which each learns is like an eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light without turning the whole body... Then education is the craft concerned with doing this very thing, this turning around, and with how the soul can most easily and effectively be made to do it. it isn't the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education take for granted that sight is there but that it isn't turned the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries to redirect it appropriately.

~ Plato

No matter how hard you fight the darkness, every light casts a shadow, and the closer you get to the light, the darker that shadow becomes.

~ Plato

The Muse herself makes some men inspired, from whom a chain of other men is strung out who catch their own inspiration from theirs.

~ Plato

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

~ Plato

A dog has the soul of a philosopher.

~ Plato