Plato Quotes Page 3

“Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.”

“Those who tell the stories rule society.”

“To love rightly is to love what is orderly and beautiful in an educated and disciplined way.”

“True friendship can exist only between equals.”

“Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man.”

“We are twice armed if we fight with faith.”

“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.”

“When men speak ill of thee, live so as nobody may believe them.”

“When two friends, like you and me, are in the mood to chat, we have to go about it in a gentler and more dialectical way. By ‘more dialectical’, I mean not only that we give real responses, but that we base our responses solely on what the interlocutor admits that he himself knows.”

“When you feel grateful, you become great, and eventually attract great things.”

“Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.”

“Writing is the geometry of the soul.”

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”

“You should not honor men more than truth.”

“Your silence gives consent.”

“A man who really fights for justice must lead a private, not a public, life if he is to survive for even a short time.”

“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.”

“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 knowledge, when he has not, while I, having no knowledge, do not think I have.”

“My plainness of speech makes them hate me, and what is their hatred but a proof that I am speaking the truth.”

“No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew it was the greatest of evils.”

“The difficulty, my friends, is not in avoiding death, but in avoiding unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death.”

“The true champion of justice, if he intends to survive even for a short time, must necessarily confine himself to private life and leave politics alone.”

“Wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good for men, both individually and collectively.”

“Opinion is the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world. It requires profound purpose larger than the self. ”

“Love is a serious mental disease.”

“The madness of love is the greatest of heaven’s blessings.”

“Anyone who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind’s eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye.”

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

“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.”

“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.”