Plato Quotes

“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.”

“SOCRATES: Perhaps we may be wrong; if so, you in your wisdom should convince us that we are mistaken in preferring justice to injustice. THRASYMACHUS: And how am I to convince you, he said, if you are not already convinced by what I have just said; what more can I do for you? Would you have me put the proof bodily into your souls?”

“Hardly any human being is capable of pursuing two professions or two arts rightly.”

“When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.”

“Don't quarrel with your parents even if you are on the right.”

“In particular I may mention Sophocles the poet, who was once asked in my presence, How do you feel about love, Sophocles? are you still capable of it? to which he replied, Hush! if you please: to my great delight I have escaped from it, and feel as if I had escaped from a frantic and savage master. I thought then, as I do now, that he spoke wisely. For unquestionably old age brings us profound repose and freedom from this and other passions.”

“There are some whom the applause of the multitude has deluded into the belief that they are really statesmen.”

“Do you, like a skilful weigher, put into the balance the pleasures and the pains, near and distant, and weigh them, and then say which outweighs the other? If you weigh pleasures against pleasures, you of course take the more and greater; or if you weigh pains against pains, then you choose that course of action in which the painful is exceeded by the pleasant, whether the distant by the near or the near by the distant; and you avoid that course of action in which the pleasant is exceeded by the painful.”

“Where love reigns, there's no need for laws.”

“Excess of liberty, whether it lies in state or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.”

“The bees can abide no drones amongst them; but as soon as they begin to be idle, they kill them.”

“All I would ask you to be thinking of is the truth and not Socrates.”

“If it is naturally in you to be a good orator, a notable orator you will be when you have acquired knowledge and practice.”

“I know nothing more worthy of a man's ambition than that his son be the best of men.”

“No one ever teaches well who wants to teach, or governs well who wants to govern.”

“Virtue is the desire of things honourable and the power of attaining them.”

“Education is the constraining and directing of youth towards that right reason, which the law affirms, and which the experience of the best of our elders has agreed to be truly right.”

“Love is an intermediate state between possession and deprivation.”

“So the state founded on natural principles is wise as a whole in virtue of the knowledge inherent in its smallest constituent class, which exercises authority over the rest. And the smallest class is the one which naturally possesses that form of knowledge which alone of all others deserves the title of wisdom.”

“Music is a more potent instrument than any other for education.”

“As it is, the lover of inquiry must follow his beloved wherever it may lead him.”

“At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.”

“The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”

“It is better to be wise, and not to seem so, than to seem wise, and not be so; yet men, for the most part, desire the contrary.”

“What is at issue is the conversion of the mind from the twilight of error to the truth, that climb up into the real world which we shall call true philosophy.”