Plato Quotes

365 Sourced Quotes

Just as things in a picture, when viewed from a distance, appear to be all in one and the same condition and alike.

Plato
For he who would proceed aright... should begin in youth to visit beautiful forms... out of that he should create fair thoughts; and soon he will of himself perceive that the beauty of one form is akin to the beauty of another, and that beauty in every form is one and the same.

Plato
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.

Plato
This universe is called Cosmos, or order, not disorder or misrule.

Plato
Seven years of silent inquiry are needful for a man to learn the truth, but fourteen in order to learn how to make it known to his fellow-men.

Plato
The good are not willing to rule either for the sake of money or of honor.

Plato
The true champion of justice, if he intends to survive even for a short time, must necessarily confine himself to private life and leave politics alone.

Plato
No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.

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

Plato
The prison of lust is just that very one of which the soul shuts the doors upon herself; for each act of indulgence is the shooting of a fresh bolt.

Plato
He who is gracious to his lover under the impression that he is rich, and is disappointed of his gains because he turns out to be poor, is disgraced all the same: for he has done his best to show that he would give himself up to any one's "uses base" for the sake of money; but this is not honourable.

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

Plato
The love, more especially, which is concerned with the good, and which is perfected in company with temperance and justice, whether among gods or men, has the greatest power, and is the source of all our happiness and harmony, and makes us friends with the gods who are above us, and with one another.

Plato
If we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself.

Plato
If anyone comes to the gates of poetry and expects to become an adequate poet by acquiring expert knowledge of the subject without the Muses' madness, he will fail, and his self-controlled verses will be eclipsed by the poetry of men who have been driven out of their minds.

Plato
For a poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him.

Plato
The greatest penalty of evildoing—namely, to grow into the likeness of bad men.

Plato
Oh 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.

Plato
And this which you deem of no moment is the very highest of all: that is whether you have a right idea of the gods, whereby you may live your life well or ill.

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

Plato
Much sleep is not required by nature, either for our souls or bodies, or for the action in which they are concerned.

Plato
He who can properly define and divide is to be considered a god.

Plato
Those who reproach injustice do so because they are afraid not of doing it but of suffering it.

Plato
Can we devise one of those lies—the kind which crop up as the occasion demands, which we were talking about not so long ago—so that with a single noble lie we can indocrinate the rulers themselves, preferably, but at least the rest of the community?

Plato
He who has knowledge of the just and the good and beautiful... will not, when in earnest, write them in ink.

Plato