Quotes from Plato

States will never be happy until rulers become philosophers or philosophers become rulers.

Human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the pursuit of the whole is called love.

The wise man will want to be ever with him who is better than himself.

Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil.

There's no chance of their having a conscious glimpse of the truth as long as they refuse to disturb the things they take for granted and remain incapable of explaining them. For if your starting-point is unknown, and your end-point and intermediate stages are woven together out of unknown material, there may be coherence, but knowledge is completely out of the question.

We are twice armed if we fight with faith.

Must not all things at last be swallowed up in Death?

You take the words in the sense which is most damaging to the argument.

Men of Athens, I honor and I love you, but I will obey the god rather than you and as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to practice philosophy, to exhort you and in my usual way to point out to any one of you whom I happen to meet.

A poet, you see, is a light thing, and winged and holy, and cannot compose before he gets inspiration and loses control of his senses and his reason has deserted him.

both wealth and concord decline as possessions become pursued and honored. And virtue perishes with them as well.

for philosophy, Socrates, if pursued in moderation and at the proper age, is an elegant accomplishment, but too much philosophy is the ruin of human life.

The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods.

Wars and revolutions and battles, you see, are due simply and solely to the body and its desires. All wars are undertaken for the acquisition of wealth; and the reason why we have to acquire wealth is the body, because we are slaves in its service.

For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories.

But I am too stupid to be convinced by him.

all of a sudden he will catch sight of something wonderfully beautiful in its nature; that, Socrates, is the reason for all his earlier labors

The greatest mistake in the treatment of diseases is that there are physicians for the body and physicians for the soul, although the two cannot be separated.

I am inclined to think that these muscles and bones of mine would have gone off long ago to Megara or Boeotia—by the dog they would, if they had been moved only by their own idea of what was best. (tr Jowett)

According to Greek mythology, humans were orginally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them in two seperate beings, condeming them to spend their lives in search of their other halves.

The beginning is the most important part of any work.

The worst type of man behaves as badly in his waking life as some men do in their dreams.

Every king springs from a race of slaves, and every slave had kings among his ancestors.

The comprehensive mind is always dialectical.