Quotes by Plato

"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."

Plato on age and aging
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"Old age has a great sense of calm and freedom. When the passions have relaxed their hold and have escaped, not from one master, but from many."

Plato on age and aging   

"Whatever deceives men seems to produce a magical enchantment."

Plato on deception
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"Democracy is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequal alike."

Plato on democracy
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"These, then, will be some of the features of democracy... it will be, in all likelihood, an agreeable, lawless, parti-colored commonwealth, dealing with all alike on a footing of equality, whether they be really equal or not."

Plato on democracy   

"Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty."

Plato on dictators and dictatorship
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"Is it not also true that no physician, in so far as he is a physician, considers or enjoins what is for the physician's interest, but that all seek the good of their patients? For we have agreed that a physician strictly so called, is a ruler of bodies, and not a maker of money, have we not?"

Plato on doctors   

"The most important part of education is proper training in the nursery."

Plato on education   

"Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind."

Plato on education
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"Let us describe the education of our men. What then is the education to be? Perhaps we could hardly find a better than that which the experience of the past has already discovered, which consists, I believe, in gymnastic, for the body, and music for the mind."

Plato on education   

"There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good."

Plato on evil   

"Excess generally causes reaction, and produces a change in the opposite direction, whether it be in the seasons, or in individuals, or in governments."

Plato on excess
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"We are twice armed if we fight with faith."

Plato on faith
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"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."

Plato on forgiveness
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"Hereditary honors are a noble and a splendid treasure to descendants."

Plato on ancestry   

"In the world of knowledge, the essential Form of Good is the limit of our inquiries, and can barely be perceived; but, when perceived, we cannot help concluding that it is in every case the source of all that is bright and beautiful --in the visible world giving birth to light and its master, and in the intellectual world dispensing, immediately and with full authority, truth and reason --and that whosoever would act wisely, either in private or in public, must set this Form of Good before his eyes."

Plato on goodness   

"The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men."

Plato on government
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This quotation can be viewed in the context of a book

"Those who intend on becoming great should love neither themselves or their own things, but only what is just, whether it happens to be done by themselves or others."

Plato on greatness   

"Attention to health is life greatest hindrance."

Plato on health   

"We ought to fly away from earth to heaven as quickly as we can; and to fly away is to become like God, as far as this is possible; and to become like him is to become holy, just, and wise."

Plato on heaven   

This quotation can be viewed in the context of a book

"Honesty is for the most par less profitable than dishonesty."

Plato on honesty   

"Man is a two-legged animal without feathers."

Plato on humankind
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"Man is a being in search of meaning."

Plato on humankind
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"Even the gods love jokes."

Plato on humor   

"I have good hope that there is something after death."

Plato on immortality   

"Knowledge becomes evil if the aim be not virtuous."

Plato on knowledge
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"Ignorance of all things is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all; but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune."

Plato on learning   

"All learning has an emotional base."

Plato on learning
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"To the rulers of the state then, if to any, it belongs of right to use falsehood, to deceive either enemies or their own citizens, for the good of the state: and no one else may meddle with this privilege."

Plato on lies and lying   

"He best keeps from anger who remembers that God is always looking upon him."

Plato on anger
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"At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet."

Plato on love
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"Love is a serious mental disease."

Plato on love
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"Love is the joy of the good, the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the Gods."

Plato on love
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"They do certainly give very strange, and newfangled, names to diseases."

Plato on medicine
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"There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain."

Plato on men
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"Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue."

Plato on music
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"For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions."

Plato on music   

"States are as the men, they grow out of human characters."

Plato on nations   

"Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance."

Plato on opinions   

"Let parents bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence."

Plato on parents and parenting