Plato, The Republic
25 quotes
"And whenever any one informs us that he has found a man who knows all the arts, and all things else that anybody knows, and every single thing with a higher degree of accuracy than any other man –whoever tells us this, I think that we can only imagine him to be a simple creature who is likely to have been deceived by some wizard or actor whom he met, and whom he thought all-knowing, because he himself was unable to analyze the nature of knowledge and ignorance and imitation."
"That's what education should be," I said, "the art of orientation. Educators should devise the simplest and most effective methods of turning minds around. It shouldn't be the art of implanting sight in the organ, but should proceed on the understanding that the organ already has the capacity, but is improperly aligned and isn't facing the right way."
"The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself."
"Have you ever sensed that our soul is immortal and never dies?"
"... when someone sees a soul disturbed and unable to see something, he won't laugh mindlessly, but he'll take into consideration whether it has come from a brighter life and is dimmed through not having yet become accustomed to the dark or whether it has come from greater ignorance into greater light and is dazzled by the increased brillance."
"Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them."
"....harmony that would fittingly imitate the utterances and accents of a brave man who is engaged in warfare or in any enforced business, and who, when he has failed […] confronts fortune with steadfast endurance and repels her strokes"
"Money-makers are tiresome company, as they have no standard but cash value."
"Physical excellence does not of itself produce a good mind and character: on the other hand, excellence of mind and character will make the best of the physique it is given."
"But I don't think we shall quarrel about a word - the subject of our inquiry is too important for that."
"There is nothing which for my part I like better, Cephalus, than conversing with aged men; for I regard them as travellers who have gone a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to inquire, whether the way is smooth and easy, or rugged and difficult."
"Haven't you noticed that opinion without knowledge is always a poor thing? At the best it is blind—isn't anyone who holds a true opinion without understanding like a blind man on the right road?"
"What is honored in a culture gets cultivated there."
"The worst type of man behaves as badly in his waking life as some men do in their dreams."
"Then as for those who gaze upon many beautiful things but don't see the beautiful itself, and aren't even capable of following someone else who leads them to it, and upon many just things but not the just itself, and all the things like that, we'll claim that they accept the seeming of everything but discern nothing of what they have opinions about."
"He who is of a 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."
"We've heard many people say and have often said ourselves that justice is doing one's own work and not meddling with what isn't one's own ... Then, it turns out that this doing one's own work-provided that it comes to be in a certain way-is justice."
"Old age has a great sense of calm and freedom when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are free from the grasp, not of one mad master only, but of many."
"You take the words in the sense which is most damaging to the argument."
"The author's Socrates admonishes paramount awareness human limitations. If we do good to those we evaluate as good and evil to those we evaluate at the evil, and we are wrong, we have been made the world less just."
"Excess of liberty, whether it lies in state or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery."
"The tools that would teach men their own use would be beyond price."
"Justice is useful when money is useless."
"It is only just that anything that grows up on its own should feel it has nothing to repay for an upbringing which it owes no one."
"I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing."