Plato Quotes & Sayings

#1. Like mythology, Greek philosophy has a tendency to personify ideas. And the Sophist is not merely a teacher of rhetoric for a fee of one or fifty drachmae (Crat.), but an ideal of Plato's in which the falsehood of all mankind is reflected.

Plato

#2. And if we only have a guardian who has this knowledge our State will be perfectly ordered? Of course, he replied; but I wish that you would tell me whether you conceive this supreme principle of the good to be knowledge or pleasure, or different from either? Aye,

Plato

#3. Great parts produce great vices as well as virtues.

Plato

#4. Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.

Plato

#5. A work well begun is half-ended.

Plato

#6. Knowledge is the rediscovering of our own insight.

Plato

#7. And Agathon said, It is probable, Socrates, that I knew nothing of what I had said.
And yet spoke you beautifully, Agathon, he said.

Plato

#8. Every unjust man is unjust against his will.

Plato

#9. [M]ere knowledge of the truth will not give you the art of persuasion.

Plato

#10. For once touched by love, everyone becomes a poet

Plato

#11. Arguments, like men, are often pretenders.

Plato

#12. 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

#13. But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea.

Plato

#14. But tell me, this physician of whom you were just speaking, is he a moneymaker, an earner of fees, or a healer of the sick?

Plato

#15. Must not all things at last be swallowed up in Death?

Plato

#16. Mariner, do not ask whose tomb this may be, but go with good fortune: I wish you a kinder sea.

Plato

#17. The penalty that good men pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by men worse than themselves.

Plato

#18. The rhetorician need not know the truth about things; he has only to discover some way of persuading the ignorant that he has more knowledge than those who know.

Plato

#19. Time on its back bears all things far away - Full many a challenge is wrought by many a day - Shape, fortune, name, and nature all decay

Plato

#20. When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.

Plato

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

Plato

#22. I really do not know, Socrates, how to express what I mean. For somehow or other our arguments, on whatever ground we rest them, seem to turn round and walk away from us.

Plato

#23. [ ... ]make sure you raise your children by having them play in their studies, and don't use force.

Plato

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

Plato

#25. May not the wolf, as the proverb says, claim a hearing?

Plato

#26. He will find people there who, seeing the want, undertake the office of salesmen. In well-ordered states they are commonly those who are the weakest in bodily strength, and therefore of little use for any other purpose;

Plato

#27. Love is the joy of the good, the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the Gods.

Plato

#28. How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?

Plato

#29. Our need will be the real creator.

Plato

#30. The man who arrives at the doors of artistic creation with none of the madness of the Muses would be convinced that technical ability alone was enough to make an artist ... what that man creates by means of reason will pale before the art of inspired beings.

Plato

#31. Any man may easily do harm, but not every man can do good to another.

Plato

#32. They assembled together and dedicated these as the first-fruits of their love to Apollo in his Delphic temple, inscribing there those maxims which are on every tongue- 'know thyselP and 'Nothing overmuch.'

Plato

#33. Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil.

Plato

#34. Laws are partly formed for the sake of good men, in order to instruct them how they may live on friendly terms with one another, and partly for the sake of those who refuse to be instructed, whose spirit cannot be subdued, or softened, or hindered from plunging into evil.

Plato

#35. Simonides, then, after the manner of poets, would seem to have spoken darkly of the nature of justice; for he really meant to say that justice is the giving to each man what is proper to him, and this he termed a debt. That

Plato

#36. Man is a biped without feathers.

Plato

#37. You may feel irritated at being suddenly awakened when you are caught napping; and you may think that if you were to strike me dead as you easily might, then you would sleep on for the remainder of your lives, unless God in his care of you gives you another gadfly.

Plato

#38. 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

#39. He is divine
but then I call all philosophers that.

Plato

#40. Someday, in the distant future, our grand-children' s grand-children will develop a new equivalent of our classrooms. They will spend many hours in front of boxes with fires glowing within. May they have the wisdom to know the difference between light and knowledge.

Plato

#41. More will be accomplished, and better, and with more ease, if every man does what he is best fitted to do, and nothing else.

Plato

#42. They do certainly give very strange, and newfangled, names to diseases.

Plato

#43. 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

#44. Every king springs from a race of slaves, and every slave had kings among his ancestors.

Plato

#45. Repetitions. The Greek is in places very ungrammatical and intractable.

Plato

#46. Each man is capable of doing one thing well. If he attempts several, he will fail to achieve distinction in any.

Plato

#47. An empty vessel makes the loudest sound, so they that have the least wit are the greatest babblers.

Plato

#48. For we cannot suppose that States are made of 'oak and rock,' and not out of the human natures which are in them, and which in a figure turn the scale and draw other things after them? Yes,

Plato

#49. I am that gadfly which God has attached to the state, and all day long ... arousing and persuading and reproaching ... You will not easily find another like me.

Plato

#50. It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other.

Plato

#51. Necessity is literally the mother of invention.

Plato

#52. What is honored in a country will be cultivated there.

Plato

#53. No attempt should be made to cure the body without the soul

Plato

#54. Love' is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete.

Plato

#55. But Above all things truth beareth away the victory

Plato

#56. Man is a two-legged animal without feathers.

Plato

#57. If in a discussion of many matters ... we are not able to give perfectly exact and self-consistent accounts, do not be surprised: rather we would be content if we provide accounts that are second to none in probability.

Plato

#58. Virtue is relative to the actions and ages of each of us in all that we do.

Plato

#59. and we must endeavour to persuade those who are to be the principal men of our State to go and learn arithmetic, not as amateurs, but they must carry on the study until they see the nature of numbers with the mind only;

Plato

#60. Since then, as philosophers prove, appearance tyrannizes over truth and is lord of happiness, to appearance I must devote myself.

Plato

#61. 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

#62. The gods created certain kinds of beings to replenish our bodies ... they are the trees and the plants and the seeds.

Plato

#63. Virtue is voluntary, vice involuntary.

Plato

#64. There's a victory, and defeat; the first and best of victories, the lowest and worst of defeats which each man gains or sustains at the hands not of another, but of himself.

Plato

#65. Justice is having and doing what is one's own.

Plato

#66. 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

#67. Between knowledge of what really exists and ignorance of what does not exist lies the domain of opinion. It is more obscure than knowledge, but clearer than ignorance.

Plato

#68. All men, well interrogated, answer well.

Plato

#69. One man cannot practice many arts with success.

Plato

#70. We will be better and braver if we engage and inquire than if we indulge in
the idle fancy that we already know
or that it is of no use seeking to
know what we do not know.

Plato

#71. Geometry existed before creation.

Plato

#72. Love is the pursuit of the whole.

Plato

#73. It is our duty to select the best and most dependable theory that human intelligence can supply, and use it as a raft to ride the seas of life.

Plato

#74. A good education consists in knowing how to sing and dance well.

Plato

#75. Discordance is evil. Harmony is virtue.

Plato

#76. What a handsome face he had: but if he were naked you would forget he had a face, he is so beautiful in every way.

Plato

#77. So the nature required to make a really noble Guardian of our commonwealth will be swift and strong, spirited, and philosophic.

Plato

#78. Excellent things are rare.

Plato

#79. SOCRATES: But you do say that he who is a good rhapsode is also a good general. ION: Certainly.

Plato

#80. Not to help justice in her need would be an impiety.

Plato

#81. Art has no end but its own perfection.

Plato

#82. May I do to others as I would that they should do unto me.

Plato

#83. The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things.

Plato

#84. The man who finds that in the course of his life he has done a lot of wrong often wakes up at night in terror, like a child with a nightmare, and his life is full of foreboding: but the man who is conscious of no wrongdoing is filled with cheerfulness and with the comfort of old age.

Plato

#85. The knowledge of which geometry aims is the knowledge of the eternal.

Plato

#86. When you feel grateful, you become great, and eventually attract great things.

Plato

#87. Wisdom alone is the science of other sciences.

Plato

#88. The greatest mistake in the treatment of diseases is that there are physicians for the body and physicians for the soul, although the two cannot be separated.

Plato

#89. Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.

Plato

#90. The qualities which a man seeks in his beloved are those characteristics of his own soul, whether he knows it or not.

Plato

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

Plato

#92. The greatest mistake physicians make is that they attempt to cure the body without attempting to cure the mind, yet the mind and the body are one and should not be treated separately!

Plato

#93. O 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