Quotes by Plato

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

The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.

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

...[T]he right way is to give ones attention first to the highest good of the young, just as you expect a good gardener to give his attention first to the young plants, and after that to the others. - Socrates

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

All is flux, nothing stays still

All began to change in the reverse direction and grow more tender. The white hair of the elderly began to grow black; the cheeks of the bearded to grow smooth, and one and all to return to the season of bloom that they had left behind them. Young men’s bodies grew smoother and smaller day by day and night by night till they reverted alike in mind and body to the likes of a newborn infant, and then dwindled right away and were clean lost to sight.

if someone got to see the Beautiful itself, absolute, pure, unmixed, not polluted by human flesh or colors or any other great nonsense of mortality, but if he could see the divine Beauty itself in its one form? Do you think it would be a poor life for a human being to look there and to behold it by that which he ought, and to be with it? Or havent you remembered that in that life alone, when he looks at Beauty in the only way what Beauty can be seen - only then will it become possible for him to give birth no to images of virtue (because hes in touch with no images) but to true virtue (because he is in touch with the true Beauty). The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given birth to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he.

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

... when someone sees a soul disturbed and unable to see something, he wont laugh mindlessly, but hell 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 by the increased brillance.

if someone got to see the Beautiful itself, absolute, pure, unmixed, not polluted by human flesh or colors or any other great nonsense of mortality, but if he could see the divine Beauty itself in its one form? Do you think it would be a poor life for a human being to look there and to behold it by that which he ought, and to be with it? Or havent you remembered that in that life alone, when he looks at Beauty in the only way what Beauty can be seen - only then will it become possible for him to give birth no to images of virtue but to true virtue. The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given birth to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he.

All good and evil, whether in the body or in human nature, originates in the soul, and overflows from thence, as if from the head into the eyes.

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

....harmony that would fittingly imitate the utterances and accents of a brave man who is engaged in warfare or in any enforced business, and who, when he has failed […] confronts fortune with steadfast endurance and repels her strokes

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

Physical excellence does not of itself produce a good mind and character: on the other hand, excellence of mind and character will make the best of the physique it is given.

So when a man surrenders to the sound of music and lets its sweet, soft, mournful strains, which we have just described, be funnelled into his soul through his ears, and gives up all his time to the glamorous moanings of song, the effect at first on his energy and initiative of mind, if he has any, is to soften it as iron is softened in a furnace, and made workable instead of hard and unworkable: but if he persists and does not break the enchantment, the next stage is that it melts and runs, till the spirit has quite run out of him and his mental sinews (if I may so put it) are cut, and he has become what Homer calls a feeble fighter.

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