A List of Famous Plato Quotes

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.

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.

Old age has a great sense of calm and freedom. When the passions have relaxed their hold and have escaped, not from one master, but from many.

The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.

The most important part of education is proper training in the nursery.

Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.

They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth.

Attention to health is life greatest hindrance.

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

All things will be produced in superior quantity and quality, and with greater ease, when each man works at a single occupation, in accordance with his natural gifts, and at the right moment, without meddling with anything else.

Let parents bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence.

The beginning is the most important part of the work.

When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.

In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill... we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.

To the rulers of the state then, if to any, it belongs of right to use falsehood, to deceive either enemies or their own citizens, for the good of the state: and no one else may meddle with this privilege.

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.

There are few people so stubborn in their atheism who when danger is pressing in will not acknowledge the divine power.

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.

Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.

When men speak ill of thee, live so as nobody may believe them.

That makes me think, my friend, as I have often done before, how natural it is that those who have spent a long time in the study of philosophy appear ridiculous when they enter the courts of law as speakers. Those who have knocked about in courts and the like from their youth up seem to me, when compared with those who have been brought up in philosophy and similar pursuits, to be as slaves in breeding compared with freemen.

Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety.

Wisdom alone is the science of others sciences.

Democracy is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequal alike.

Whatever deceives men seems to produce a magical enchantment.

He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.

Thinking is the talking of the soul with itself.

These, then, will be some of the features of democracy... it will be, in all likelihood, an agreeable, lawless, parti-colored commonwealth, dealing with all alike on a footing of equality, whether they be really equal or not.

Hereditary honors are a noble and a splendid treasure to descendants.

Let us describe the education of our men. What then is the education to be? Perhaps we could hardly find a better than that which the experience of the past has already discovered, which consists, I believe, in gymnastic, for the body, and music for the mind.

At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.

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

Is it not also true that no physician, in so far as he is a physician, considers or enjoins what is for the physician's interest, but that all seek the good of their patients? For we have agreed that a physician strictly so called, is a ruler of bodies, and not a maker of money, have we not?

He who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden.

Excess generally causes reaction, and produces a change in the opposite direction, whether it be in the seasons, or in individuals, or in governments.

In the world of knowledge, the essential Form of Good is the limit of our inquiries, and can barely be perceived; but, when perceived, we cannot help concluding that it is in every case the source of all that is bright and beautiful --in the visible world giving birth to light and its master, and in the intellectual world dispensing, immediately and with full authority, truth and reason --and that whosoever would act wisely, either in private or in public, must set this Form of Good before his eyes.

The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men.

Those who intend on becoming great should love neither themselves or their own things, but only what is just, whether it happens to be done by themselves or others.

There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.

Honesty is for the most par less profitable than dishonesty.

Man is a two-legged animal without feathers.