Plato
88 quotes
Biography
"Love is the joy of the good, the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the Gods."
"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle."
"Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet."
"Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything."
"Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something."
"Only the dead have seen the end of war."
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."
"Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each."
"Love is a serious mental disease."
"One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."
"...and when one of them meets the other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy and one will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment..."
"Education is teaching our children to desire the right things."
"In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill... we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one."
"You should not honor men more than truth."
"Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself."
"The soul takes nothing with her to the next world but her education and her culture. At the beginning of the journey to the next world, one's education and culture can either provide the greatest assistance, or else act as the greatest burden, to the person who has just died."
"Writing is the geometry of the soul."
"For this feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy."
"I thought to myself: I am wiser than this man; neither of us probably knows anything that is really good, but he thinks he has knowledge, when he has not, while I, having no knowledge, do not think I have."
"False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil."
"Either we shall find what it is we are seeking or at least we shall free ourselves from the persuasion that we know what we do not know."
"For to fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise without really being wise, for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For no one knows whether death may not be the greatest good that can happen to man."
"How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?"
"He was a wise man who invented God."
"Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history."