Plato Quotes

A wise man speaks because he has something to say; a fool because he has to say something.

No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

The first and the best victory is to conquer self.

Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

Learning to live ought to mean learning to die - to acknowledge, to accept, an absolute mortality - without positive outcome,or resurrection, or redemption, for oneself or for anyone else. That has been the old philosophical injunction since Plato: to be a philosopher is to learn how to die.

Plato had defined Man as an animal, biped and featherless, and was applauded. Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it into the lecture-room with the words, "Behold Plato's man!"

The greatest wealth is to live content with little.

Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.

Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.

the old axiom that 'all power corrupts' has doubtful validity, because it derives from our neglect of Plato's advice to find men carefully and train them by methods which make them fit for heroes.

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

A good decision is based on knowledge, and not on numbers.

Ignorance, the root and the stem of every evil.

My mind and fingers have worked like the damned. Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are all around me. I study them. I devour them with fury.

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.

Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder.

The people always have some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness. ... This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.

In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill... we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.

The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction.

There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.

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

He is unworthy of the name of man who is ignorant of the fact that the diagonal of a square is incommensurable with its side.

Man is a being in search of meaning.