Plato Quotes - Page 4

For I am certain, O men of Athens, that if I had engaged in politics, I should have perished long ago and done no good either to you or to myself.

... there is no necessity for the man who means to be an orator to understand what is really just but only what would appear so to the majority of those who will give judgment; and not what is really good or beautiful but whatever will appear so; because persuasion comes from that and not from the truth.

Do you mean that the tyrant will dare to use violence against the people who fathered him, and raise his hand against them if they oppose him? So the tyrant is a parricide, and little comfort to his old parent.

And yet even in reaching for the beautiful there is beauty, and also in suffering whatever it is that one suffers en route.

There can be no fairer spectacle than that of a man, who combines the possession of moral beauty in his soul with outward beauty of form, corresponding and harmonizing with the former, because the same great pattern enters both.

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

Si vis pacem, para bellum

If a painter, then, paints a picture of an ideally beautiful man, complete to the last detail, is he any the worse painter because he cannot show that such a man could really exist?

[...]make sure you raise your children by having them play in their studies, and don't use force.

Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination
and life to everything.

Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.

No wealth can ever make a bad man at peace with himself

I would teach children music, physics, and philosophy; but most importantly music, for the patterns in music and all the arts are the keys to learning

Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything".

let me make the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its law.

All is flux, nothing stays still

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

good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws

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

The measure of a man is what he does with power.