Quotes from 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.

Education and admonition commence in the first years of childhood, and last to the very end of life.

The good man is the only excellent musician, because he gives forth a perfect harmony not with a lyre or other instrument but with the whole of his life.

Attention to health is life greatest hindrance.

In order to seek one's own direction, one must simplify the mechanics of ordinary, everyday life.

The life which is not examined is not worth living.

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?

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

Those who intend on becoming great should love neither themselves nor their own things, but only what is just, whether it happens to be done by themselves or others.

All the gold which is under or upon the earth is not enough to give in exchange for virtue.

Better a little which is well done, than a great deal imperfectly.

This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.

To suffer the penalty of too much haste, which is too little speed.

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

The community which has neither poverty nor riches will always have the noblest principles.

If the head and the body are to be well, you must begin by curing the soul.

Of all the things of a man's soul which he has within him, justice is the greatest good and injustice the greatest evil.

The ultimate design of the Mysteries ... was to lead us back to the principles from which we descended, ... a perfect enjoyment of intellectual [spiritual] good.

Love is a great spirit. Everything spiritual is in between god and mortal.

Apply yourself both now and in the next life. Without effort, you cannot be prosperous. Though the land be good, you cannot have an abundant crop without cultivation.

Let him know how to choose the mean and avoid the extremes on either side, as far as possible. . . . For this is the way of happiness.

Life should be lived as play.

Self conquest is the greatest of victories.

I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly conflict.