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Plato Quotes
427 BC–347 BC Greece
Plato (Πλάτων Plátōn; c. 427 BC – c. 347 BC) was a Greek philosopher from Athens during the Classical period in Ancient Greece, founder of the Platonist school of thought and the Academy (Akademia), the first institution of higher learning in the Western world.
Greece Philosophers Physicists Poets Also known as: Phaedrus (dialogue), Platonic, Platonists
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105 quotes
When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.
Socrates: The shoemaker, for example, uses a square tool, and a circular tool, and other tools for cutting?
Zeno: The many do not know that except by this devious passage through all things the mind cannot attain to the truth.
Perhaps there is a pattern set up in the heavens for one who desires to see it and seeing it, to found one in himself. But whether it exists anywhere or ever exists is no matter; for this is the only commonwealth in whose politics he can ever take part.
Beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may.
I would be better for me … that multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself.
God is truth and light his shadow.
As a breeze or an echo rebounds from the smooth rocks and returns whence it came, so does the stream of beauty, passing through the eyes which are the windows of the soul, come back to the beautiful one.
In those days, when people were not wise like you young people, they were content to listen to a tree or a rock in simple openness, just as long as it spoke the truth, but to you, perhaps, it makes a difference who is speaking and where he comes from.
It is difficult to set forth any of the greater ideas, except by the use of examples; for it would seem that each of us knows everything that he knows as if in a dream and then again, when he is as it were awake, knows nothing of it all.
Phaedrus: Socrates, you easily make up stories of Egypt or any country you please.
Parmenides: Just as things in a picture, when viewed from a distance, appear to be all in one and the same condition and alike.
Parmenides: It is impossible to conceive of many without one.
to seek office oneself and not await compulsion is thought disgraceful. But the chief penalty is to be governed by someone worse if a man will not himself hold office and rule.
The orators — and the despots — have the least power in their cities … since they do nothing that they wish to do, practically speaking, though they do whatever they think to be best.
The Paphian Queen to Cnidos made repair
You want to know whether I can make a long speech, such as you are in the habit of hearing; but that is not my way.
So it is with air: there is the brightest variety which we call aether, the muddiest which we call mist and darkness, and other kinds for which we have no name...
Knowledge is the food of the soul; and we must take care, my friend, that the Sophist does not deceive us when he praises what he sells, like the dealers wholesale or retail who sell the food of the body; for they praise indiscriminately all their goods, without knowing what are really beneficial or hurtful.
The vicious lover is the follower of earthly Love who desires the body rather than the soul; his heart is set on what is mutable and must therefore be inconstant. And as soon as the body he loves begins to pass the first flower of its beauty, he "spreads his wings and flies away," giving the lie to all his pretty speeches and dishonoring his vows, whereas the lover whose heart is touched by moral beauties is constant all his life, for he has become one with what will never fade.
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