Plato - Truth Quotes

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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
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
SOC: And all arithmetic and calculations have to do with number?
GLAUCON: Yes.
SOC: And they appear to lead the mind towards truth?
GLAUCON: Yes, in a very remarkable manner.

Plato
But he who has been earnest in the love of knowledge and of true wisdom, and has exercised his intellect more than any other part of him, must have thoughts immortal and divine. If he attain truth, and in so far as human nature is capable of sharing in immortality, he must altogether be immortal.

Plato
The truth is that we isolate a particular kind of love and appropriate it for the name of love, which really belongs to a wider whole.

Plato
Renouncing the honors at which the world aims, I desire only to know the truth... and to the maximum of power, I exhort all other men to do the same.

Plato
He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing.

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

Plato
Truth is the beginning of every good thing, both in heaven and
on earth; and he who would be blessed and happy should be from
the first a partaker of truth, for then he can be trusted.

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
The qualities of number appear to lead to the apprehension of truth.

Plato
The inexperienced in wisdom and virtue, ever occupied with feasting and such, are carried downward, and there, as is fitting, they wander their whole life long, neither ever looking upward to the truth above them nor rising toward it, nor tasting pure and lasting pleasures. Like cattle, always looking downward with their heads bent toward the ground and the banquet tables, they feed, fatten, and fornicate. In order to increase their possessions they kick and butt with horns and hoofs of steel and kill each other, insatiable as they are.

Plato
Let us affirm what seems to be the truth, that, whether one is or is not, one and the others in relation to themselves and one another, all of them, in every way, are and are not, and appear to be and appear not to be.

Plato
Then the case is the same in all the other arts for the orator and his rhetoric; there is no need to know the truth of the actual matters, but one merely needs to have discovered some device of persuasion which will make one appear to those who do not know to know better than those who know.

Plato
Geometry will draw the soul toward truth and create the spirit of philosophy.

Plato
In every man there is an eye of the soul, which...is more precious far than ten thousand bodily eyes, for by it alone is truth seen.

Plato
In good speaking, should not the mind of the speaker know the truth of the matter about which he is to speak.

Plato