Quotes from Plato

no man should be angry at what is true. But those who love the truth in each thing are to be called lovers of wisdom and not lovers of opinion. Assuredly.

He who desires to be happy must pursue and practice temperance and run away from intemperance as fast as his legs will carry him.

From all these, then, they will be finally free, and they will live a happier life than that men count most happy, the life of victors at Olympia.

not to care for any of his belongings before caring that he himself should be as good and as wise as possible, not to care for the city's possessions more than for the city itself, and to care for other things in the same way.

Eat and drink and sit with the mighty, and make yourself agreeable to them; for from the good you will learn what is good, but if you mix with the bad you will lose the intelligence which you already have.

the champion of justice [...] would be as a man who has fallen among wild beasts, unwilling to share their misdeeds, and unable to hold out singly against the savagery of all.

Those who reproach injustice do so because they are afraid not of doing it but of suffering it.

Then Prometheus, in his perplexity as to what preservation he could devise, stole from Hephaestus and Athena wisdom in the arts together with fire -- since by no means without fire could it be acquired or helpfully used by any -- and he handed it there and then as a gift to man.

Wealth, and poverty; the one is the parent of luxury and indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.

A measure of such things which in any degree falls short of the whole truth is not fair measure; for nothing imperfect is the measure of anything, although persons are too apt to be contented and think that they need search no further.

We are completely perplexed, then, and you must clear up the question for us, of what you intend to signify when you use the word being. Obviously you must be quite familiar with what you mean, whereas we, who formerly imagined we knew, are now at a loss.

It is no good for rulers if the people they rule cherish ambitions for themselves or form strong bonds of friendship with one another.

This applies, however, only to those who are within the specified age: after that we allow them to range at will, except that a man may not marry his daughter or his daughter's daughter, or his mother or his mother's mother; and women, on the other hand, are prohibited from marrying their sons or fathers, or son's son or father's father, and so on in either direction.

Misanthropy develops when without art one puts complete trust in somebody thinking the man absolutely true and sound and reliable and then a little later discovers him to be bad and unreliable ... and when it happens to someone often ... he ends up ... hating everyone

SOCRATES: For doing evil to another is the same as injuring him? CRITO: Very true. SOCRATES: Then we ought not to retaliate or render evil for evil to anyone, whatever evil we may have suffered from him.

The most famous of them all was the overthrow of the island of Atlantis.

Pooh, he said. Much alike, aren't they, this case and that! There is nothing to hinder their being so, said I, but even if they are not alike and if the man thinks they are, do you believe he will any the less answer what appears to him, whether we forbid him or not?

thus our State, which is also yours, will be a reality, and not a dream only, and will be administered in a spirit unlike that of other States, in which men fight with one another about shadows only and are distracted in the struggle for power, which in their eyes is a great good.

This City is what it is because our citizens are what they are.

I must go beyond the dark world of sense information to the clear brilliance of the sunlight of the outside world. Once done, it becomes my duty to go back to the cave in order to illuminate the minds of those imprisoned in the 'darkness' of sensory knowledge.

O youth or young man, who fancy that you are neglected by the Gods, know that if you become worse you shall go to the worse souls, or if better to the better, and in every succession of life and death you will do and suffer what like may fitly suffer at the hands of like. This is the justice of heaven. Plato

Fire, air, earth, and water are bodies and therefore solids, and solids are contained in planes, and plane rectilinear figures are made up of triangles.

What of his beard? Are you not of Homer's opinion, who says Youth is most charming when the beard first appears?

Nothing could be more important than that the work of a soldier is well done. No tools will make a man a skilled workmen, or master of defense, or be of any use to him who has not learned how to handle them and has never bestowed any attention on them.