These Plato quotes on love, life and philosophy have the potential to make you wise.
Plato born on 428/427 or 424/423 BC was an Greek philosopher during the classical period. He was one of the brightest student of Scorates. He was also the founder of Platonist school of thought and the Academy which was the first institute of higher learning in the Western world.
There is no proper biographical account has been made at his time that tells us about the life Plato lived so we are depending on the biographies written after he died for references.
Before being the student of Socrates, Plato studied painting, wrote poems and wrestled. He became a philosopher and pursue his career in politics after meeting Socrates. When Socrates was sentenced to death, he gave up on his political career and started traveling, trying to learn anything he could on philosophy, mathematics, science and religion.
Plato traveled for 12 years and returned to Greece where he opened The Academy. Student of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle, Plato was the pivotal figure in the history of Ancient Greek and Western philosophy.
It is believed that his entire body of work survived intact for over 2400 years. Cosidered as one of the most brilliant writer ever lived, his work has been consistently read and been studied. His writings covered a wide range of topics such as love, life, music, knowledge, education, politics, justice etc.
Here we are sharing a collection of Plato quotes on love, life and philosophy for you to read the wisdom he had shared with the world.
Plato Quotes
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”
― Plato
“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.”
― Plato
“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
“Have you ever sensed that our soul is immortal and never dies?”
― Plato, The Republic
“Any man may easily do harm, but not every man can do good to another.”
― Plato
“The first and best victory is to conquer self”
― Plato
“Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.”
― Plato, The Symposium
“To be afraid of death is only another form of thinking that one is wise when one is not; it is to think that one knows what one does not know. No one knows with regard to death whether it is not really the greatest blessing that can happen to man, but people dread it as though they were certain it is the greatest evil.” -The Last Days of Socrates”
― Plato
“I thought to myself: I am wiser than this man; neither of us probably knows anything that is really good, but he thinks he has the knowledge, when he has not, while I, having no knowledge, do not think I have.”
― Plato, Apology
“Good actions give strength to ourselves and inspire good actions in others. ”
― Plato
Plato Famous Quotes
“You’re my Star, a stargazer too,
and I wish that I were Heaven,
with a billion eyes to look at you!”
― Plato
“Excellence” is not a gift, but a skill that takes practice.
We do not act “rightly” because we are “excellent”,
in fact we achieve “excellence” by acting “rightly”.”
― Plato
“True friendship can exist only between equals.”
― Plato
“The soul takes nothing with her to the next world but her education and her culture. At the beginning of the journey to the next world, one’s education and culture can either provide the greatest assistance, or else act as the greatest burden, to the person who has just died.”
― Plato, The Republic
“How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state? ”
― Plato
“A house that has a library in it has a soul.”
― Plato
“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.”
― Plato
“Necessity is the mother of invention.”
― Plato
“The greatest wealth is to live content with little.”
― Plato
“Death is not the worst that can happen to men.”
― Plato
Plato Quotes On Love
“Only the dead have seen the end of the war.”
― Plato
“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.”
― Plato
“Writing is the geometry of the soul. ”
― Plato
“The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.”
― Plato, The Republic
“According to Greek mythology, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves.”
― Plato, The Symposium
“…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…”
― Plato, The Symposium
“There is truth in wine and children”
― Plato, Symposium / Phaedrus
“Those who tell the stories rule society.”
― Plato
“Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge. ”
― Plato
“Books are immortal sons defying their sires.”
― Plato
Plato Quotes On Life
“At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.”
― Plato
“Love’ is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete.”
― Plato, The Symposium
“Man is a being in search of meaning.”
― Plato
“The soul takes flight to the world that is invisible but there arriving she is sure of bliss and forever dwells in paradise.”
― Plato
“The madness of love is the greatest of heaven’s blessings.”
― Plato, Phaedrus
“Education is teaching our children to desire the right things.”
― Plato
“There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.”
― Plato
“Courage is knowing what not to fear.”
― Plato
“You should not honor men more than truth.”
― Plato
“There are two things a person should never be angry at, what they can help, and what they cannot.”
― Plato
Plato Philosophy Quotes
“When men speak ill of thee, live so as nobody may believe them.”
― Plato
“The beginning is the most important part of the work.”
― Plato, The Republic
“Either we shall find what it is we are seeking or at least we shall free ourselves from the persuasion that we know what we do not know.”
― Plato, The Republic
“How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?”
― Plato, The Allegory of the Cave
“No wealth can ever make a bad man at peace with himself”
― Plato
“Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be a sort of amusement; you will then be better able to discover the child’s natural bent.”
― Plato
“False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.”
― Plato
“All I really know is the extent of my own ignorance”
― Plato
“He was a wise man who invented God.”
― Plato
“He, whom loves touches not walks in darkness.”
― Plato, The Symposium
Plato Quotes On Knowledge
“A dog has the soul of a philosopher.”
― Plato
“The difficulty, my friends, is not in avoiding death, but in avoiding unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death.”
― Plato, Apology
“A hero is born among a hundred, a wise man is found among a thousand, but an accomplished one might not be found even among a hundred thousand men. ”
― Plato
“For this feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy.”
― Plato, Theaetetus
“Love is the pursuit of the whole.”
― Plato
“Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.”
― Plato
“The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful.”
― Plato, The Republic
“The man who finds that in the course of his life he has done a lot of wrongs often wakes up at night in terror, like a child with a nightmare, and his life is full of foreboding: but the man who is conscious of no wrongdoing is filled with cheerfulness and with the comfort of old age.”
― Plato, The Republic
“Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable.”
― Plato
“The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life”
― Plato
Plato Quotes On Education
“Time is the moving image of reality”
― Plato
“No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.”
― Plato
“Ideas are the source of all things”
― Plato
“The man who makes everything that leads to happiness depends upon himself, and not upon other men, has adopted the very best plan for living happily. This is the man of moderation, the man of manly character and of wisdom.”
― Plato
“Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity”
― Plato
“Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being”
― Plato
“According to Diotima, Love is not a god at all but is rather a spirit that mediates between people and the objects of their desire. Love is neither wise nor beautiful, but is rather the desire for wisdom and beauty.”
― Plato, The Symposium
“In order for man to succeed in life, God provided him with two means, education and physical activity. Not separately, one for the soul and the other for the body, but for the two together. With these means, man can attain perfection.”
― Plato
“The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things.”
― Plato
“Those who don’t know must learn from those who do.”
― Plato, The Republic
Plato Best Sayings On Music
“Is there a perfect world?”
― Plato
“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.”
― Plato, The Republic
“Never discourage anyone…who continually makes progress, no matter how slow.”
― Plato
“Love is a serious mental disease.”
― Plato, Phaedrus
“One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”
― Plato
“good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws”
― Plato
“The measure of a man is what he does with power.”
― Plato
“Ignorance, the root and stem of every evil.”
― Plato
“Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.”
― Plato, The Republic
“Love is simply the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole.”
― Plato, The Symposium
Plato Quotes On Democracy, Leadership
“An empty vessel makes the loudest sound, so they that have the least wit are the greatest babblers.”
― Plato
“Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder”
― Plato
“Character is simply a habit long continued.”
― Plato
“If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.”
― Plato, The Republic
“When there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income.”
― Plato
“Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.”
― Plato
“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.”
― Plato, Phaedrus
“I’m trying to think, don’t confuse me with facts.”
― Plato
“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”
― Plato
“No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nature and education.”
― Plato
Plato Quotes On Politics, Truth, Justice
“I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.”
― Plato
“Evil is the vulgar lover who loves the body rather than the soul, inasmuch as he is not even stable, because he loves a thing which is in itself unstable, and therefore when the bloom of youth which he was desiring is over, he takes wing and flies away, in spite of all his words and promises; whereas the love of the noble disposition is life-long, for it becomes one with the everlasting.”
― Plato, Symposium
“He feels particularly ashamed if ever he is seen by his lovers to be involved in something dishonorable.”
― Plato, The Symposium
“a life without investigation is not worth living”
― Plato, Apology/Crito/Phaedo
“Honesty is for the most part less profitable than dishonesty”
― Plato
“All learning has an emotional base.”
― Plato
“Man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door of his prison and run away… A man should wait, and not take his own life until God summons him.”
― Plato, Phaedrus
“To conquer oneself is the best and noblest victory; to be vanquished by one’s own nature is the worst and most ignoble defeat.”
― Plato
“Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught falsehoods in school. And the person that dares, to tell the truth, is called at once a lunatic and fool”
― Plato
“We are like people looking for something they have in their hands all the time; we’re looking in all directions except at the thing we want, which is probably why we haven’t found it.”
― Plato
Did you learn something new from these Plato quotes?
Plato was one of the most influential figure at his time. He was the one who founded the Academy in Athens, one of the first institutions of higher learning which brings change in the world.
There is no doubt, he was a wise man who had left his impact on this world. We hope you will learn something new from these Plato quotes on love, life, philosophy and education.
Do share your thoughts with us in the comment section and tell us which one was your favorite Plato quotes or if you want to ask any questions or have any query send them via Contact Us
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