Plato Quotes

“Be kind. Every person you meetis fighting a difficult battle.”

“No law or ordinance is mightier than understanding.”

“In order to be a good soldier it is necessary to know how to dance.”

“To love rightly is to love what is orderly and beautiful in an educated and disciplined way.”

“The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself; to be conquered by yourself is of all things most shameful and vile.”

“The three wishes of every man: to be healthy, to be rich by honest means, and to be beautiful.”

“To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise without really being wise, for it is to think that we know what we do not know.”

“Perfect wisdom has four parts: Wisdom, the principle of doing things aright. Justice, the principle of doing things equally in public and private. Fortitude, the principle of not fleeing danger, but meeting it. Temperance, the principle of subduing desires and living moderately.”

“To begin with the wine jar in learning the potter's art.”

“Much sleep is not required by nature, either for our souls or bodies, or for the action in which they are concerned.”

“When a Benefit is wrongly conferred, the author of the Benefit may often be said to injure.”

“Whence comes war and fighting, and factions? Whence but from the body and the lust of the body? Wars are occasioned by the love of money, and money has to be acquired for the same and service of the body.”

“What a poor appearance the tales of poets make when stripped of the colours which music puts upon them, and recited in simple prose.”

“The beginning is the most important part of the work.”

“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?”

“Poets do not compose their poems with knowledge, but by some inborn talent and by inspiration, like seers and prophets who also say many fine things without any understanding of what they say.”

“The people always have some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness. ... This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.”

“Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.”

“Let men of all ranks whether they are successful, or unsuccessful, whether they triumph or not; let them do their duty, and rest satisfied.”

“For as there are misanthropists, or haters of men, there are also misologists, or haters of ideas, and both spring from the same cause, which is ignorance of the world.”

“The beginning is half of the whole.”

“In an honest man there is always something of a child.”

“Wise men speak because they have something to say”

“Maximize the power of the beliefs that strengthen you and neutralize those that weaken you.”

“Love is the pursuit of the whole.”