Top 200 Plato Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “You should not honor men more than truth.”

— Plato

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

— Plato

53. “He was a wise man who invented God.”

— Plato

54. “A hero is born among a hundred, a wise man is found among a thousand, but an accomplished one might not be found even among a hundred thousand men.”

— Plato

55. “Death is not the worst that can happen to men.”

— Plato

56. “Writing is the geometry of the soul.”

— Plato

57. “The penalty that good men pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by men worse than themselves.”

— Plato

58. “At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.”

— Plato

59. “There is truth in wine and children.”

— Plato

60. “No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nature and education.”

— Plato

61. “True friendship can exist only between equals.”

— Plato

62. “The soul takes flight to the world that is invisible but there arriving she is sure of bliss and forever dwells in paradise.”

— Plato

63. “You’re my Star, a stargazer too, and I wish that I were Heaven, with a billion eyes to look at you!”

— Plato

64. “Love is the pursuit of the whole.”

— Plato

65. “There should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty nor again excessive wealth, for both are productive of great evil.”

— Plato

66. “As the builders say, the larger stones do not lie well without the lesser.”

— Plato

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

— Plato

68. “The most virtuous are those who content themselves with being virtuous without seeking to appear so.”

— Plato

69. “Is there a perfect world?”

— Plato

70. “False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.”

— Plato

71. “Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable.”

— Plato

72. “Courage is a kind of salvation.”

— Plato

73. “All the gold which is under or upon the earth is not enough to give in exchange for virtue.”

— Plato

74. “For this feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy.”

— Plato

75. “Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be a sort of amusement; you will then be better able to discover the child’s natural bent.”

— Plato

76. “The highest reach of injustice is to be deemed just when you are not.”

— Plato

77. “How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?”

— Plato

78. “Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the laws of the State always change with them.”

— Plato

79. “Perhaps there is a pattern set up in the heavens for one who desires to see it, and having seen it, to find one in himself.”

— Plato

80. “I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.”

— Plato

81. “When there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income.”

— Plato

82. “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.”

— Plato

83. “A dog has the soul of a philosopher.”

— Plato

84. “And we have made of ourselves living cesspools, and driven doctors to invent names for our diseases.”

— Plato

85. “The soul takes nothing with her to the next world but her education and her culture. At the beginning of the journey to the next world, one’s education and culture can either provide the greatest assistance, or else act as the greatest burden, to the person who has just died.”

— Plato

86. “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 full of foreboding: but the man who is conscious of no wrongdoing is filled with cheerfulness and with the comfort of old age.”

— Plato

87. “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.”

— Plato

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

— Plato

89. “Books are immortal sons defying their sires.”

— Plato

90. “Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.”

— Plato

91. “Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.”

— Plato

92. “Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.”

— Plato

93. “Either we shall find what it is we are seeking or at least we shall free ourselves from the persuasion that we know what we do not know.”

— Plato

94. “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 may require a leader.”

— Plato

95. “Have you ever sensed that our soul is immortal and never dies?”

— Plato

96. “Any one 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.”

— Plato

97. “When the mind’s eye is fixed on objects illuminated by truth and reality, it understands and knows them, and its possession of intelligence is evident; but when it is fixed on the twilight world of change and decay, it can only form opinions, its vision is confused and its opinions shifting, and it seems to lack intelligence.”

— Plato

98. “Itself, by itself, solely, one everlasting, and single.”

— Plato

99. “For no government of men depends solely upon force; without some corruption of literature and morals – some appeal to the imagination of the masses – some pretence to the favour of heaven – some element of good giving power to evil, tyranny, even for a short time, cannot be maintained.”

— Plato

100. “The ruin of oligarchy is the ruin of democracy; for there is a law of contraries; the excess of freedom passes into the excess of slavery, and the greater the freedom the greater the slavery.”

— Plato