Plato Quotes

365 Sourced Quotes

Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.

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
The affairs of music ought, somehow, to terminate in the love of the beautiful.

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

Plato
Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as none but the temperate can carry.

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

Plato
Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.

Plato
Socrates: The disgrace begins when a man writes not well, but badly.
Phaedrus: Clearly.
Socrates: And what is well and what is badly—need we ask Lysias, or any other poet or orator, who ever wrote or will write either a political or any other work, in metre or out of metre, poet or prose writer, to teach us this?

Plato
Again, truth should be highly valued; if, as we were saying, a lie is useless to the gods, and useful only as a medicine to men, then the use of such medicines should be restricted to physicians; private individuals have no business with them.

Plato
Whereas the truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst.

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
States will never be happy until
rulers become philosophers or
philosophers become rulers.

Plato
I am about to die, and that is the hour in which men are gifted with prophetic power.

Plato
If there is a good and wise God, then there also exists a progress of humanity toward perfection.

Plato
The true runner comes to the finish and receives the prize and is crowned.

Plato
What a poor appearance the tales of poets make when stripped of the colours which music puts upon them, and recited in simple prose.

Plato
May I deem the wise man rich, and may I have such a portion of gold as none but a prudent man can either bear or employ.

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
How well I remember the aged poet Sophocles, when in answer to the question, "How does love suit with age, Sophocles - are you still the man you were?" he replied, "Peace, most gladly have I escaped the thing of which you speak; I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master."

Plato
To escape from evil we must be made as far as possible like God; and the resemblance consists in becoming just and holy and wise.

Plato
A man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong - acting the part of a good man or of a bad.

Plato
For when there are no words, it is very difficult to recognize the meaning of the harmony and rhythm, or to see any worldly object is imitated by them.

Plato
Do not great crimes and the spirit of pure evil spring out of a fullness of nature ruined by education rather than from any inferiority, whereas weak natures are scarcely capable of any very great good or very great evil?

Plato
When a person supposes that he knows, and does not know; this appears to be the great source of all the errors of the intellect.

Plato
When a Benefit is wrongly conferred, the author of the Benefit may often be said to injure.

Plato
I shall never alter my ways, not even if I have to die many times.

Plato
And if we are good, we are beneficent: for all good things are beneficial. Are they not?

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

Plato
But the race of birds was created out of innocent light-minded men, who, although their minds were directed toward heaven, imagined, in their simplicity, that the clearest demonstration of the things above was to be obtained by sight.

Plato
Love is a madness produced by an unsatisfiable rational desire to understand the ultimate truth about the world.

Plato