Plato > Quotes

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”
― Plato

“Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.”
― Plato

“Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination
and life to everything.”
― Plato

“Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.”
― Plato

“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”
― Plato

“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.”
― Plato

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
― Plato

“The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.”
― Plato, The Republic

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”
― Plato

“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

“Love is a serious mental disease.”
― Plato, Phaedrus

“One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”
― Plato

“There is truth in wine and children”
― Plato, Symposium/Phaedrus

“The madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings”
― Plato

“Never discourage anyone...who continually makes progress, no matter how slow.”
― Plato

“good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws”
― Plato

“Those who tell the stories rule society.”
― Plato

“Ignorance, the root and stem of every evil.”
― Plato

“I know not how I may seem to others, but to myself I am but a small child wandering upon the vast shores of knowledge, every now and then finding a small bright pebble to content myself with.”
― Plato

“There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.”
― Plato

“When men speak ill of thee, live so that nobody will believe them.”
― Plato

“Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the laws of the State always change with them.”
― Plato, Plato's Republic: The Theatre of the Mind

“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

“I'm trying to think, don't confuse me with facts.”
― Plato

“Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge. ”
― Plato

“If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.”
― Plato, The Republic

“Education is teaching our children to desire the right things.”
― Plato

“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.”
― Plato

“Death is not the worst that can happen to men.”
― Plato

“The soul takes nothing with her to the next world but her education and her culture. At the beginning of the journey to the next world, one's education and culture can either provide the greatest assistance, or else act as the greatest burden, to the person who has just died.”
― Plato, The Republic of Plato

“Excellence" is not a gift, but a skill that takes practice.
We do not act "rightly" because we are "excellent",
in fact we achieve "excellence" by acting "rightly".”
― Plato

“Character is simply habit long continued.”
― Plato

“Necessity is the mother of invention.”
― Plato

“A hero is born among a hundred, a wise man is found among a thousand, but an accomplished one might not be found even among a hundred thousand men. ”
― Plato

“Love is the pursuit of the whole.”
― Plato

“Good actions give strength to ourselves and inspire good actions in others. ”
― Plato

“You should not honor men more than truth.”
― Plato

“You're my Star, a stargazer too,
and I wish that I were Heaven,
with a billion eyes to look at you!”
― Plato

“Courage is knowing what not to fear.”
― Plato

“An empty vessel makes the loudest sound, so they that have the least wit are the greatest babblers.”
― Plato

“The measure of a man is what he does with power.”
― Plato

“There are two things a person should never be angry at, what they can help, and what they cannot.”
― Plato

“…if a man can be properly said to love something, it must be clear that he feels affection for it as a whole, and does not love part of it to the exclusion of the rest.”
― Plato, The Republic and Other Works

“Any man may easily do harm, but not every man can do good to another.”
― Plato

“To be afraid of death is only another form of thinking that one is wise when one is not; it is to think that one knows what one does not know. No one knows with regard to death wheather it is not really the greatest blessing that can happen to man; but people dread it as though they were certain it is the greatest evil." -The Last Days of Socrates”
― Plato

“Books are immortal sons defying their sires.”
― Plato

“The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful.”
― Plato, The Republic

“Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable.”
― Plato

“People are like dirt. They can either nourish you and help you grow as a person or they can stunt your growth and make you wilt and die.”
― Plato

“The beginning is the most important part of the work.”
― Plato, The Republic