quotations
Search
   HOME | AUTHOR INDEX | SUBJECT INDEX | LINKS | USE OUR QUOTATIONS | CONTRIBUTE QUOTES | FORUM
Quotation of the day
Thursday, 7 August 2008
Daily Quote:
"There is nothing so stupid as an educated man, if you get him off the thing he was educated in." (Rogers, Will - Experts)

rss 2.0
Subscribe
Unsubscribe
Send the Quote of the Day to a friend
Proverb of the Day
All that glitters is not gold.
Click here to see/listen to the equivalent proverb in:




Browse Quotations by Plato

A well begun is half ended.
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.
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.
Hereditary honors are a noble and a splendid treasure to descendants.
He best keeps from anger who remembers that God is always looking upon him.
It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other.
There are few people so stubborn in their atheism who when danger is pressing in will not acknowledge the divine power.
Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depends on simplicity.
When men speak ill of thee, live so as nobody may believe them.
Any city however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich. These are at war with one another.
I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly conflict.
The first and the best victory is to conquer self.
He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.
Know one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.
Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?
Whatever deceives men seems to produce a magical enchantment.
Democracy is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequal alike.
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.
Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.
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?
The most important part of education is proper training in the nursery.
Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
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.
There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.
-- Plato | 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.
We are twice armed if we fight with faith.
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.
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.
The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men.
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.
Attention to health is life greatest hindrance.
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.
Honesty is for the most par less profitable than dishonesty.
Man is a two-legged animal without feathers.
Man is a being in search of meaning.
Even the gods love jokes.
I have good hope that there is something after death.
Knowledge becomes evil if the aim be not virtuous.
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.
All learning has an emotional base.
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.
At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.
-- Plato | Love
Love is a serious mental disease.
-- Plato | Love
Love is the joy of the good, the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the Gods.
-- Plato | Love
They do certainly give very strange, and newfangled, names to diseases.
There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.
-- Plato | Men
Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.
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.
States are as the men, they grow out of human characters.
Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.
Let parents bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence.
Philosophy is an elegant thing, if anyone modestly meddles with it; but if they are conversant with it more than is becoming, it corrupts them.
The beginning is the most important part of the work.
Pleasure is the greatest incentive to evil.
Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.
The heaviest penalty for deciding to engage in politics is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.
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.
All things will be produced in superior quantity and quality, and with greater ease, when each man works at a single occupation, in accordance with his natural gifts, and at the right moment, without meddling with anything else.
When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.
Whenever a person strives, by the help of dialectic, to start in pursuit of every reality by a simple process of reason, independent of all sensuous information -- never flinching, until by an act of the pure intelligence he has grasped the real nature of good -- he arrives at the very end of the intellectual world.
The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction.
Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men.
For just as poets love their own works, and fathers their own children, in the same way those who have created a fortune value their money, not merely for its uses, like other persons, but because it is their own production. This makes them moreover disagreeable companions, because they will praise nothing but riches.
No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.
If the study of all these sciences which we have enumerated, should ever bring us to their mutual association and relationship, and teach us the nature of the ties which bind them together, I believe that the diligent treatment of them will forward the objects which we have in view, and that the labor, which otherwise would be fruitless, will be well bestowed.
I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.
Science is nothing but perception.
In particular I may mention Sophocles the poet, who was once asked in my presence, How do you feel about love, Sophocles? are you still capable of it? to which he replied, Hush! if you please: to my great delight I have escaped from it, and feel as if I had escaped from a frantic and savage master. I thought then, as I do now, that he spoke wisely. For unquestionably old age brings us profound repose and freedom from this and other passions.
-- Plato | Sex
Let nobody speak mischief of anybody.
We ought to esteem it of the greatest importance that the fictions which children first hear should be adapted in the most perfect manner to the promotion of virtue.
The democratic youth lives along day by day, gratifying the desire that occurs to him, at one time drinking and listening to the flute, at another downing water and reducing, now practicing gymnastic, and again idling and neglecting everything; and sometimes spending his time as though he were occupied in philosophy.
Too much attention to health is a hindrance to learning, to invention, and to studies of any kind, for we are always feeling suspicious shootings and swimmings in our heads, and we are prone to blame studies from them.
No one ever teaches well who wants to teach, or governs well who wants to govern.
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.
Thinking is the talking of the soul with itself.
Truth is its own reward.
They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth.