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...

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...

… 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

[“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...

The man who finds that in the course of his life he has done a lot of wrong often wakes up at night in terror, like a child with a nightmare, and his life is...

Philosophy is the highest music.

And whenever any one informs us that he has found a man who knows all the arts, and all things else that anybody knows, and every single thing with a higher degree of accuracy than...

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

As it is, the lover of inquiry must follow his beloved wherever it may lead him.

Every king springs from a race of slaves, and every slave had kings among his ancestors.

To conquer oneself is the best and noblest victory; to be vanquished by one’s own nature is the worst and most ignoble defeat.

The Muse herself makes some men inspired, from whom a chain of other men is strung out who catch their own inspiration from theirs.

Money-makers are tiresome company, as they have no standard but cash value.

a life without investigation is not worth living

For once touched by love, everyone becomes a poet