If you harm a horse do you make him better or worse?””Worse.

…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...

…A MAN WHO HAS GIVEN HIS HEART TO LEARNING AND TRUE WISDOM AND EXERCISED THAT PART OF HIMSELF IS SURELY BOUND, IF HE ATTAINS TO TRUTH, TO HAVE IMMORTAL AND DIVINE THOUGHTS, AND CANNOT FAIL TO ACHIEVE IMMORTALITY AS FULL AS IS PERMITTED TO HUMAN NATURE; AND BECAUSE HE HAS ALWAYS LOOKED AFTER THE DIVINE...

The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.

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.

Then we got into a labyrinth, and, when we thought we were at the end,came out again at the beginning, having still to see as much as ever.

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.

Those who don’t know must learn from those who do.

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

Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity – I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only a euphemism for folly.

He who wishes to serve his country must have not only the power to think, but the will to act

O dear Pan and all the other gods of this place, grant that I may be beautiful inside. Let all my external possessions be in friendly harmony with what is within. May I consider the wise man rich. As for gold, let me have as much as a moderate man could bear and carry with...

It is the task of the enlightened not only to ascend to learning and to see the good but to be willing to descend again to those prisoners and to share their troubles and their honors, whether they are worth having or not. And this they must do, even with the prospect of death.

… when someone sees a soul disturbed and unable to see something, he won’t laugh mindlessly, but he’ll take into consideration whether it has come from a brighter life and is dimmed through not having yet become accustomed to the dark or whether it has come from greater ignorance into greater light and is dazzled...

The author’s Socrates admonishes paramount awareness human limitations. If we do good to those we evaluate as good and evil to those we evaluate at the evil, and we are wrong, we have been made the world less just.

Wars and revolutions and battles, you see, are due simply and solely to the body and its desires. All wars are undertaken for the acquisition of wealth; and the reason why we have to acquire wealth is the body, because we are slaves in its service.

Education is teaching our children to desire the right things.

For to fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise without really being wise, for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For no one knows whether death may not be the greatest good that can happen to man.

When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty and there is nothing to fear from them then he is always stirring up some wary or other in order that the people may require a leader.

I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.

Rather I think that a man who … is willing … to value learning as long as he lives, not supposing that old age brings him wisdom of itself, will necessarily pay more attention to the rest of his life.

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

Then we shan’t regard anyone as a lover of knowledge or wisdom who is fussy about what he studies…

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

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.

Laws are partly formed for the sake of good men, in order to instruct them how they may live on friendly terms with one another, and partly for the sake of those who refuse to be instructed, whose spirit cannot be subdued, or softened, or hindered from plunging into evil.

All of Western philosophy is but a footnote to Plato.

Calligraphy is a geometry of the soul which manifests itself physically.

Have you ever sensed that our soul is immortal and never dies?

No reproach for a person willing to give honorable service in the passion to become wise.

It is only just that anything that grows up on its own should feel it has nothing to repay for an upbringing which it owes no one.

You should not honor men more than truth.

He was a wise man who invented God.

They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth. -Plato, philosopher (427-347 BCE)

[W]hen men have both done and suffered injustice and have had experience of both, not being able to avoid the one and obtain the other, they think that they had better agree among themselves to have neither; hence there arise laws and mutual covenants; and that which is ordained by law is termed by them...

Is it not true that the clever rogue is like the runner who runs well for the first half of the course, but flags before reaching the goal: he is quick off the mark, but ends in disgrace and slinks away crestfallen and uncrowned. The crown is the prize of the really good runner who...

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

Knowledge unqualified is knowledge simply of something learned.

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.

If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered over the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions of some of them which well deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant, I should point to...

Time is the moving image of eternity.

Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.

A poet, you see, is a light thing, and winged and holy, and cannot compose before he gets inspiration and loses control of his senses and his reason has deserted him.

Knowledge is the food of the soul.

Old age has a great sense of calm and freedom when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are free from the grasp, not of one mad master only, but of many.

Justice is useful when money is useless.

…when he looks at Beauty in the only way that Beauty can be seen – only then will it become possible for him to give birth not to images of virtue (because he’s in touch with no images), but to true virtue [arete] (because he is in touch with true Beauty). The love of the...

You take the words in the sense which is most damaging to the argument.

…in the running of cities, virtually nothing is done by anyone that is conducive to political health, nor is there a single ally with whom one might go to the aid of justice and still remain alive; it would be a case of a solitary human among wild animals, neither wanting to join in their...

[“F]or it’s not possible,” [Socrates] said, “for anybody to experience a greater evil than hating arguments. Hatred of arguments and hatred of human beings come about in the same way. For hatred of human beings arises from artlessly trusting somebody to excess, and believing that human being to be in every way true and sound...