Plato Quotes

365 Sourced Quotes

No one is so cowardly that Love could not inspire him to heroism.

Plato
For this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.

Plato
When a beautiful soul harmonizes with a beautiful form, and the two are cast in one mould, that will be the fairest of sights to him who has the eye to contemplate the vision.

Plato
He who advises a sick man, whose manner of life is prejudicial to health, is clearly bound first of all to change his patient's manner of life.

Plato
Violent pleasures which reach the soul through the body are generally of this sort-they are reliefs of pain.

Plato
Most people affirm pleasure to be the good, but the finer sort of wits say it is knowledge.

Plato
That which is apprehended by intelligence and reason is always in the same state; but that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is.

Plato
Men of sound sense have Law for their god, but men without sense Pleasure.

Plato
When man is not properly trained, he is the most savage animal on the face of the globe.

Plato
As being is to becoming, so is pure intellect to opinion. And as intellect is to opinion, so is science to belief.

Plato
Great is the issue at stake, greater than appears, whether a man is to be good or bad. And what will any one be profited if, under the influence of money or power, he neglect justice and virtue?

Plato
We must infer that all things are produced more plentifully and easily and of a better quality when one man does one thing which is natural to him and does it at the right time, and leaves other things.

Plato
Serious things cannot be understood without laughable things, nor opposites at all without opposites.

Plato
Love is of something, and that which love desires is not that which love is or has; for no man desires that which he is or has. And love is of the beautiful, and therefore has not the beautiful. And the beautiful is the good, and therefore, in wanting and desiring the beautiful, love also wants and desires the good.

Plato
People regard the same things, some as just and others as unjust, - about these they dispute; and so there arise wars and fightings among them.

Plato
If the head and the body are to be well, you must begin by curing the soul.

Plato
The first step in learning is the destruction of human conceit.

Plato
Time and the heavens came into being at the same instant, in order that, if they were ever to dissolve, they might be dissolved together. Such was the mind and thought of God in the creation of time.

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

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

Plato
There is nothing so delightful as the hearing, or the speaking of truth. For this reason, there is no conversation so agreeable as that of the man of integrity, who hears without any intention to betray, and speaks without any intention to deceive.

Plato
I think that you should... consider not only the consequences which flow from a given hypothesis; but also the consequences which flow from denying the hypothesis.

Plato
Education and admonition commence in the first years of childhood, and last to the very end of life.

Plato
All who do evil and dishonorable things do them against their will.

Plato
Had we never seen the stars, and the sun, and the heaven, none of the words which we have spoken about the universe would ever have been uttered.

Plato
Vain would be the attempt of telling all the figures of them circling as in a dance, and their juxtapositions, and the return of them in their revolutions upon themselves, and their approximations...

Plato
Those wretches who never have experienced the sweets of wisdom and virtue, but spend all their time in revels and debauches, sink downward day after day, and make their whole life one continued series of errors.

Plato
All soul is immortal. For that which is always in movement is immortal; that which moves something else, and is moved by something else, in ceasing from movement ceases from living. So only that which moves itself, because it does not abandon itself, never stops moving. But it is also source and first principle of movement for the other things which move.

Plato
We are too feeble and sluggish to make our way out to the upper limit of the air. If someone could reach the summit, or put on wings and fly aloft, when he put up his head he would see the world above, just as fishes see our world when they put up their heads out of the sea; and if his nature were able to bear the sight, he would recognize that that is the true heaven...

Plato
If you are willing to reflect on the courage and moderation of other people, you will find them strange.

Plato