Plato (Philosopher)

Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something. ➡

Courage is knowing what not to fear. ➡

A work well begun is half-ended. ➡

The first and best victory is to conquer self. ➡

Never discourage anyone.....who continually makes progress, no matter how slow. ➡

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle. ➡

At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet. ➡

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. ➡

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

No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nature and education. ➡

Good actions give strength to ourselves and inspire good actions in others. ➡

You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation. ➡

Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge. ➡

Those who tell the stories rule society. ➡

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

If a man neglects education, he walks lame to the end of his life. ➡

Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds. ➡

There are two things a person should never be angry at; what they can help, and what they cannot. ➡

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. ➡

This City is what it is because our citizens are what they are. ➡

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

Socrates:  The shoemaker, for example, uses a square tool, and a circular tool, and other tools for cutting? ➡

Let him take heart who does advance, even in the smallest degree. ➡

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

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

Rhetoric, it seems, is a producer of persuasion for belief, not for instruction in the matter of right and wrongAnd so the rhetoricians business is not to instruct a law court or a public meeting in matters of right and wrong, but only to make them believe. ➡

A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers. ➡

Education and admonition commence in the first years of childhood, and last to the very end of life. ➡

1 Quotes1.1 Euthyphro 1.2 The Apology 1.3 Crito 1.4 Phaedo 1.5 Menexenus 1.6 Gorgias 1.7 Meno 1.8 Critias 1.9 Phaedrus 1.10 The Symposium 1.11 The Republic 1.12 The 7th Epistle 1.13 Parmenides 1.14 Timaeus 1.15 Laws 1.16 Cratylus 1.17 Alcibiades I 1.18 Theaetetus 1.19 Sophist 1.20 In Diogenes Laërtius ➡

Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depends on simplicity. ➡

Just as it would be madness to settle on medical treatment for the body of a person by taking an opinion poll of the neighbors, so it is irrational to prescribe for the body politic by polling the opinions of the people at large. ➡

Meno:  I feel, somehow, that I like what you are saying. Socrates:  And I, Meno, like what I am saying.  Some things I have said of which I am not altogether confident.  But that we shall be better and braver and less helpless if we think that we ought to enquire, than we should have been if we indulged in the idle fancy that there was no knowing and no use in seeking to know what we do not know; — that is a theme upon which I am ready to fight, in word and deed, to the utmost of my power. ➡

Original Greek, from Sophist 261b: θαρρεῖν, ὦ Θεαίτητε, χρὴ τὸν καὶ σμικρόν τι δυνάμενον εἰς τὸ πρόσθεν ἀεὶ προϊέναι. ➡

paraphrased in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig:  And what is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good—need we ask anyone to tell us these things? ➡

Remember how in that communion only, 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.” This famous aphorism is often misquoted, Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. ➡

The greatest penalty of evildoing - namely, to grow into the likeness of bad men. ➡

The inexperienced in wisdom and virtue, ever occupied with feasting and such, are carried downward, and there, as is fitting, they wander their whole life long, neither ever looking upward to the truth above them nor rising toward it, nor tasting pure and lasting pleasures. Like cattle, always looking downward with their heads bent toward the ground and the banquet tables, they feed, fatten, and fornicate. In order to increase their possessions they kick and butt with horns and hoofs of steel and kill each other, insatiable as they are.586a–b ➡

When men speak ill of thee, live so as nobody may believe them. ➡