Top 100 Quotes About Plato
#1. We are bound to our bodies like an oyster to its shell.
Plato
#3. The one who learns and learns and doesn't practice is like the one who plows and plows and never plants.
Plato
#4. Let nobody speak mischief of anybody.
Plato
#5. But at three, four, five, and even six years the childish nature will require sports; now is the time to get rid of self-will in him, punishing him, but not so as to disgrace him.
Plato
#6. Your friend Plato holds that commonwealths will only be happy when either philosophers rule or rulers philosophize: how remote happiness must appear when philosophers won't even deign to share their thoughts with kings.
Thomas More
#7. I have read in Plato and Cicero sayings that are wise and very beautiful; but I have never read in either of them: Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden.
Augustine Of Hippo
#9. 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
#10. The Graces sought some holy ground,
Whose sight should ever please;
And in their search the soul they found
Of Aristophanes.
Plato
#11. As there are misanthropists or haters of men, so also are there misologists, or haters of ideas.
Plato
#12. 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
#13. With regards to political enemies Plato had a kill-and-banish principle ... In interpreting it , modern-day Platonists are clearly disturbed by it, even as they make elaborate attempts to defend Plato.
Karl Popper
#14. SOCRATES: For doing evil to another is the same as injuring him? CRITO: Very true. SOCRATES: Then we ought not to retaliate or render evil for evil to anyone, whatever evil we may have suffered from him.
Plato
#15. In a democracy only will the freeman of nature design to dwell.
Plato
#16. Most people affirm pleasure to be the good, but the finer sort of wits say it is knowledge.
Plato
#17. anarchy should have no place in the life of man or of the beasts who are subject to man.
Plato
#18. You need some knowledge to recognize knowledge, so where does the first knowledge come from?
Plato
#19. You're my Star, a stargazer too,
and I wish that I were Heaven,
with a billion eyes to look at you!
Plato
#20. Plato was right when he said that all evil comes from ignorance. He forgot that ignorance also comes from evil.
Peter Kreeft
#21. Plato found mathematics very absorbing because mathematical states never change.
Jostein Gaarder
#22. Education and admonition commence in the first years of childhood, and last to the very end of life.
Plato
#23. If we are to keep our flock at the highest pitch of excellence, there should be as many unions of the best of both sexes, and as few of the inferior as possible, and that only the offspring of the better unions should be kept.
Plato
#24. Socrates: I'm afraid that it might actually be sacrilegious to stand idly by while morality is being denigrated and not try to assist as long as one has breath in one's body and a voice to protest with.
Plato
#25. Pepper is small in quantity and great in virtue.
Plato
#26. Those who reproach injustice do so because they are afraid not of doing it but of suffering it.
Plato
#27. The only real ill-doing is the deprivation of knowledge.
Plato
#28. We shall not be properly educated ourselves, nor will the guardians whom we are training, until we can recognise the qualities of discipline, courage, generosity, greatness of mind, and others akin to them, as well as their opposites in all their manifestations.
Plato
#29. And even though we have read all the arguments of Plato and Aristotle, we shall never become philosophers if we are unable to make a sound judgement on matters which come up for discussion; in this case what we would seem to have learnt would not be science but history.
Rene Descartes
#30. Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants.
Timothy Snyder
#31. Honesty is for the most par less profitable than dishonesty.
Plato
#32. Surely you don't consider me so inflated with the theater as not even to know that for anyone in his right mind a sensible few are more terrifying than a foolish many.
Plato
#33. Ignorance: the root of all evil.
Plato
#34. Great parts produce great vices as well as virtues.
Plato
#35. Man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door of his prison and run away ... A man should wait, and not take his own life until God summons him.
Plato
#36. God is a geometrician.
Plato
#37. Let us suppose, that the Old and New worlds were formerly but one continent, and that, by a violent earthquake, the ancient Atalantis [sic] of Plato was sunk ... The sea would necessarily rush in from all quarters, and form what is now called the Atlantic ocean.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon
#38. Mr. Sampson, you forget the difference between Plato and Zenocrates.
Walter Scott
#39. To be at once exceedingly wealthy and good is impossible.
Plato
#40. If a man says that it is right to give every one his due, and therefore thinks within his own mind that injury is due from a just man to his enemies but kindness to his friends, he was not wise who said so, for he spoke not the truth, for in no case has it appeared to be just to injure any one.
Plato
#41. A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.
C.S. Lewis
#42. For harmony is a symphony, and symphony is an agreement; but an agreement of disagreements while they disagree there cannot be; you cannot harmonize that which disagrees.
Plato
#43. Do what nature now requires. Set thyself in motion, if it is in thy power, and do not look about thee to see if any one will observe it; nor yet expect Plato's Republic: but be content if the smallest thing goes on well, and consider such an event to be no small matter.
Marcus Aurelius
#45. In 'The Republic' he [Plato] states that the enjoyment of food is not a true pleasure because the purpose of eating is to relieve pain - hunger.
Mark Kurlansky
#46. Music is to the mind as air is to the body ...
Plato
#47. Miss Gregory took nearly everything. Her clothes. New girls don't have the privilege of wearing their own clothes. Her books. Socrates, Plato, Shakespeare? Much too stimulating. No wonder you have Ideas. Certainly, you don't wish to become a bluestocking!
Suzanne Lazear
#48. Crito we owe a rooster to Aesculapius
Plato
#49. Are not all things which have opposites generated out of their opposites? I
Plato
#50. The passionate are like men standing on their heads, they see all things the wrong way.
Plato
#51. As a genius St. Paul cannot be compared with either Plato or Shakespeare, as a coiner of beautiful similes he comes pretty low down in the scale, as a stylist his name is quite obscure--and as an upholsterer: well, I frankly admit I have no idea how to place him.
Soren Kierkegaard
#52. Injustice is censured because the censures are afraid of suffering, and not from any fear which they have of doing injustice.
Plato
#53. He who advises a sick man, whose manner of life is prejudicial to health, is clearly bound first of all to change his patient's manner of life.
Plato
#54. Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.
Plato
#55. We may state the question thus: - Imitation imitates the actions of men, whether voluntary or involuntary, on which, as they imagine, a good or bad result has ensued, and they rejoice or sorrow accordingly. Is there anything more? No, there is nothing else. But
Plato
#56. 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
#57. A work well begun is half-ended.
Plato
#58. Maximize the power of the beliefs that strengthen you and neutralize those that weaken you.
Plato
#59. Nothing can be colder than his head, when the lightnings of his imagination are playing in the sky.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#60. But now the giant heads of Plato and Socrates, each with an expression of penetrating wisdom carved on his white features, surveyed the river and the melon beds beyond.
J.G. Farrell
#61. When something goes wrong, accuse yourself first. Even the wisdom of Plato or Solomon can wobble and go blind
Rumi
#62. A delightful form of government, anarchic and motley, assigning a kind of equality indiscriminately to equals and unequals alike!
Plato
#63. For me music is central, so when one's talking about poetry, for the most part Plato's talking primarily about words, where I talk about notes, I talk about tone, I talk about timbre, I talk about rhythms.
Cornel West
#64. There are two things a person should never be angry at, what they can help, and what they cannot.
Plato
#65. Star of my life, to the stars your face is turned;
Would I were the heavens, looking back at you with ten thousand eyes.
Plato
#66. Geometry will draw the soul toward truth and create the spirit of philosophy.
Plato
#67. Ignorance of all things is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all; but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune.
Plato
#68. To begin with the wine jar in learning the potter's art.
Plato
#69. No attempt of curing the body should be made without curing the soul
Plato
#70. You two go and have fun. I have plenty of stuff here to entertain me with. Plato rocks! (Tory)
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#71. Beauty is a natural superiority.
Plato
#72. I take it that our state, having been founded and built up on the right lines, is good in the complete sense of the word.
Plato
#73. Thus rhetoric, it seems, is a producer of persuasion for belief, not for instruction in the matter of right and wrong ... And so the rhetorician's business is not to instruct a law court or a public meeting in matters of right and wrong, but only to make them believe.
Plato
#74. Then we got into a labyrinth, and, when we thought we were at the end,
came out again at the beginning, having still to see as much as ever.
Plato
#75. It's not from money that excellence comes, but from excellence money and the other things, all of them, come to be good for human beings, whether in private or in public life.
Plato
#76. Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
Plato
#77. The problem is simply finding the right person. Ask Plato. Just make sure she finishes your thoughts and you finish hers. That's all you need.
Elizabeth Kostova
#78. There is a constant suspicion that headache and giddiness are to be ascribed to philosophy, and hence all practising or making trial of virtue in the higher sense is absolutely stopped; for a man is always fancying that he is being made ill, and is in constant anxiety about the state of his body.
Plato
#79. For he, Adeimantus, whose mind is fixed upon true being, has surely no time to look down upon the affairs of earth, or to be filled with malice and envy, contending against men
Plato
#80. When the citizens of a society can see and hear their leaders, then that society should be seen as one.
Plato
#81. In order to be a good soldier it is necessary to know how to dance.
Plato
#82. Thinking and spoken discourse are the same thing, except that what we call thinking is, precisely, the inward dialogue carried on by the mind with itself without spoken sound.
Plato
#83. Cooking is a form of flattery ... a mischievous, deceitful, mean and ignoble activity, which cheats us by shapes and colors, by smoothing and draping ...
Plato
#84. A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.
Plato
#85. Knowledge is the rediscovering of our own insight.
Plato
#86. 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
#87. To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he might have the less.
Plato
#88. Plato said: 'He who approaches the temple of the Muses without inspiration in the belief that craftmanship alone suffices, will remain a bungler and his presumptuous poetry will be obscured by the songs of the maniacs.'
Chuck Palahniuk
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. Every unjust man is unjust against his will.
Plato
#92. [M]ere knowledge of the truth will not give you the art of persuasion.
Plato
#93. Yes, but do not persons often err about good and evil: many who are not good seem to be so, and conversely? That
Plato
#94. The qualities of number appear to lead to the apprehension of truth.
Plato
#95. It is impossible to conceive of many without one.
Plato
#96. All well bred men should have mastered the art of singing and dancing.
Plato
#97. The soul should concentrate itself by itself.
Plato
#98. Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.
Plato
#99. I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.
Plato
#100. A good education is that which prepares us for our future sphere of action and makes us contented with that situation in life in which God, in his infinite mercy, has seen fit to place us, to be perfectly resigned to our lot in life, whatever it may be.
Ann Plato
