Explore Quotes by Plato

Entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all; too much cleverness and too much learning, accompanied with ill bringing-up, are far more fatal.

I would fain grow old learning many things.

Life must be lived as play.

No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.

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

It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other.

It is a common saying, and in everybody's mouth, that life is but a sojourn.

There's a victory, and defeat; the first and best of victories, the lowest and worst of defeats which each man gains or sustains at the hands not of another, but of himself.

He who is of 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.

They certainly give very strange names to diseases.

It is right to give every man his due.

When a Benefit is wrongly conferred, the author of the Benefit may often be said to injure.

A state arises, as I conceive, out of the needs of mankind; no one is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants.

The gods' service is tolerable, man's intolerable.

Man never legislates, but destinies and accidents, happening in all sorts of ways, legislate in all sorts of ways.

He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.

This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.

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.

I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work.

The man who makes everything that leads to happiness depends upon himself, and not upon other men, has adopted the very best plan for living happily. This is the man of moderation, the man of manly character and of wisdom.

The learning and knowledge that we have, is, at the most, but little compared with that of which we are ignorant.