Plato Quotes

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.

Love is a serious mental disease.

Writing is the geometry of the soul.

The reason is that they utter these words of theirs not by virtue of a skill, but by a divine power - otherwise, if they knew how to speak well on one topic thanks to a skill, they would know how to speak about every other topic too.

But I don't think we shall quarrel about a word - the subject of our inquiry is too important for that.

If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.

...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.

You should not honor men more than truth.

Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.

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.

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

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.

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

In practice people who study philosophy too long become very odd birds, not to say thoroughly vicious; while even those who are the best of them are reduced by...[philosophy] to complete uselessness as members of society.

How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?

For this feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy.

Philosophy is the highest music.

Only a philosopher's mind grows wings, since its memory always keeps it as close as possible to those realities by being close to which the gods are divine.