Quotes By Plato

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

We ought to esteem it of the greatest importance that the fictions which children first hear should be adapted in the most perfect manner to the promotion of virtue.

He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.

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

When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.

All things will be produced in superior quantity and quality, and with greater ease, when each man works at a single occupation, in accordance with his natural gifts, and at the right moment, without meddling with anything else.

The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future in life.

There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.

He who is of calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden.

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

We are twice armed if we fight with faith.

The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction.

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.

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

The beginning is the most important part of the work.

The most virtuous are those who content themselves with being virtuous without seeking to appear so.

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

There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.

When there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income.

Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety.

Your silence gives consent.

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.

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

Life must be lived as play.

There is no harm in repeating a good thing.

There's a victory, and defeat; the first and best of victories, the lowest and worst of defeats which each man gains or sustains at the hands not of another, but of himself.

A state arises, as I conceive, out of the needs of mankind; no one is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants.

As the builders say, the larger stones do not lie well without the lesser.

The rulers of the state are the only persons who ought to have the privilege of lying, either at home or abroad; they may be allowed to lie for the good of the state.

Courage is a kind of salvation.