Plato Quotes

365 Sourced Quotes

Well, my art of midwifery is in most respects like theirs; but differs, in that I attend men and not women, and I look after their souls when they are in labor, and not after their bodies: and the triumph of my art is in thoroughly examining whether the thought which the mind of the young man brings forth is a false idol or a noble and true birth.

Plato
Fields and trees are not willing to teach me anything; but this can be effected by men residing in the city.

Plato
Are these things good for any other reason except that they end in pleasure, and get rid of and avert pain? Are you looking to any other standard but pleasure and pain when you call them good?

Plato
Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.

Plato
I only wish that wisdom were the kind of thing that flowed … from the vessel that was full to the one that was empty.

Plato
Wealth is the parent of luxury and indolence, and poverty of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.

Plato
Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?

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

Plato
In astronomy, as in geometry, we should employ problems, and let the heavens alone if we would approach the subject in the right way and so make the natural gift of reason to be of any real use.

Plato
That man is wisest who, like Socrates, realizes that his wisdom is worthless

Plato
Not every love, but only that which has a noble purpose, is noble and worthy of praise.

Plato
The judge should not be young; he should have learned to know evil, not from his own soul, but from late and long observation of the nature of evil in others: knowledge should be his guide, not personal experience.

Plato
If a man, fixing his attention on these and the like difficulties, does away with ideas of things and will not admit that every individual thing has its own determinate idea which is always one and the same, he will have nothing on which his mind can rest; and so he will utterly destroy the power of reasoning.

Plato
Few men are so obstinate in their atheism, that a pressing danger will not compel them to acknowledgment of a divine power.....

Plato
A delightful form of government, anarchic and motley, assigning a kind of equality indiscriminately to equals and unequals 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
All men are by nature equal, made all of the same earth by one Workman; and however we deceive ourselves, as dear unto God is the poor peasant as the mighty prince.

Plato
A fit of laughter, which has been indulged to excess, almost always produces a violent reaction.

Plato
Either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another.... Now if death be of such a nature, I say that to die is to gain; for eternity is then only a single night.

Plato
Education is the constraining and directing of youth towards that right reason, which the law affirms, and which the experience of the best of our elders has agreed to be truly right.

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
Even the good artisans fell into the same error as the poets; because they were good workmen they thought that they also knew all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom.

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

Plato
The mortal nature is seeking as far as is possible to be everlasting and immortal: and this is only to be attained by generation, because the new is always left in the place of the old.

Plato
This was the end, Echekrates, of our friend; a man of whom we may say that of all whom we met at that time he was the wisest and justest and best.
On the death of socrates

Plato