Top 200 Plato Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 5

101. “He who is the victim of his passions and the slave of pleasure will of course desire to make his beloved as agreeable to himself as possible.”

— Plato

102. “In a city of good men, if it came into being, the citizens would fight in order not to rule, just as they now do in order to rule.”

— Plato

103. “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

104. “So where power is in the hands of a savage and uneducated tyrant, anyone who is greatly his superior will doubtless be an object of fear to the ruler, and never able to be on terms of genuine friendship with him.”

— Plato

105. “I am on the brink of death, while you will carry on living. The judgment of which is truly better rests only within the knowledge of God.”

— Plato

106. “When the modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.”

— Plato

107. “I dare say that you remember, and therefore I need not remind you, that a lover, if he is worthy of the name, ought to show his love, not to some one part of that which he loves, but to the whole.”

— Plato

108. “For the uneducated, when they engage in argument about anything, give no thought to the truth about the subject of discussion but are only eager that those present will accept the position they have set forth. I differ from them only to this extent: I shall not be eager to get the agreement of those present that what I say is true, except incidentally, but I shall be very eager that I should myself be thoroughly convinced that things are so.”

— Plato

109. “Every class, then, has plurality of being and infinity of not-being.”

— Plato

110. “For a young person cannot judge what is allegorical and what is literal; anything that he receives into his mind at that age is likely to become indelible and unalterable; and therefore it is most important that the tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous thoughts.”

— Plato

111. “May we not say that the most gifted minds, when they are ill-educated, become pre-eminently bad? Do not great crimes and the spirit of pure evil spring out of a fulness of nature ruined by education rather than from any inferiority whereas weak natures are scarcely capable of any very great good or very great evil?”

— Plato

112. “Everything that is responsible for creating something out of nothing is a kind of poetry; and so all the creations of every craft and profession are themselves a kind of poetry, and everyone who practices a craft is a poet.”

— Plato

113. “What I do not know, I don’t think I do.”

— Plato

114. “Wherefore, O judges, be of good cheer about death, and know of a certainty, that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.”

— Plato

115. “Because to the mortal creature, generation is a sort of eternity and immortality,′ she replied; ’and if, as has been already admitted, love is of the everlasting possession of the good, all men will necessarily desire immortality together with good: Wherefore love is of immortality.”

— Plato

116. “From this tale, Callicles, which I have heard and believe, I draw the following inferences: – Death, if I am right, is in the first place the separation from one another of two things, soul and body; nothing else.”

— Plato

117. “SOCRATES: First, then, let us consider whether the doing of injustice exceeds the suffering in the consequent pain: Do the injurers suffer more than the injured? POLUS: No, Socrates; certainly not.”

— Plato

118. “Now early life is very impressible, and children ought not to learn what they will have to unlearn when they grow up; we must therefore have a censorship of nursery tales, banishing some and keeping others.”

— Plato

119. “Neither do the ignorant seek after wisdom. For herein is the evil of ignorance, that he who is neither good nor wise is nevertheless satisfied with himself: he has no desire for that of which he feels no want.”

— Plato

120. “For wherever a man’s place is, whether the place which he has chosen or that in which he has been placed by a commander, there he ought to remain in the hour of danger; he should not think of death or of anything but of disgrace. And this, O men of Athens, is a true saying.”

— Plato

121. “What has caused my reputation is none other than a certain kind of wisdom. What kind of wisdom? Human wisdom, perhaps.”

— Plato

122. “There’s no difficulty in choosing vice in abundance: the road is smooth and it’s hardly any distance to where it lives. But the gods have put sweat in the way of goodness, and a long, rough, steep road.”

— Plato

123. “I, on the other hand, have a convincing witness that I speak the truth, my poverty.”

— Plato

124. “Try to pay attention to me,“, she said, ” as best as you can. You see, the man who has been thus far guided in matters of Love, who has beheld beautiful things in the right order and correctly, is coming now to the goal of Loving: all of a sudden he will catch sight of something wonderfully beautiful in its nature...”

— Plato

125. “The only office of state which I ever held, O men of Athens, was that of senator: the tribe Antiochis, which is my tribe, had the presidency at the trial of the generals who had not taken up the bodies of the slain after the battle of Arginusae; and you proposed to try them in a body, contrary to law, as you all thought afterwards;.”

— Plato

126. “Then whatever the soul possesses, to that she comes bearing life? Yes, certainly. And is there any opposite to life? There is, he said. And what is that? Death.”

— Plato

127. “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

128. “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

129. “The true lover of knowledge is always striving after being – that is his nature; he will not rest in the multiplicity of individuals which is an appearance only, but will go on – the keen edge will not be blunted, nor the force of his desire abate until he have attained the knowledge of the true nature of every essence by a sympathetic and kindred power in the soul.”

— Plato

130. “Isn’t the phrase self-mastery absurd? I mean, anyone who is his own master is also his own slave, of course, and vice-versa, since it’s the same person who is the subject in all these expressions.”

— Plato

131. “Both knowledge and truth are beautiful things, but the good is other and more beautiful than they.”

— Plato

132. “Such was the end of our comrade, Echecrates, a man who, we would say, was of all those we have known the best, and also the wisest and the most upright.”

— Plato

133. “And the same will be true of the orator and the oratory in relation to all other arts. The orator need have no knowledge of the truth about thongs; it is enough for him to have discovered a knack of persuading the ignorant that he seems to know more than the experts.”

— Plato

134. “CALLICLES: There is no end to the rubbish this fellow speaks. Tell me, Socrates, aren’t you ashamed at your age of laying these verbal traps and counting it a god-send if a man makes a slip of the tongue?”

— Plato

135. “O beloved Pan and all ye other gods of this place, grant to me that I be made beautiful in my soul within, and that all external possessions be in harmony with my inner man. May I consider the wise man rich; and may I have such wealth as only the self-restrained man can bear or endure.”

— Plato

136. “But a man whose actions do not agree with his words is an annoyance to me; and the better he speaks the more I hate him, and then I seem to be a hater of discourse.”

— Plato

137. “But he who desires to inflict rational punishment does not retaliate for a past wrong which cannot be undone; he has regard to the future, and is desirous that the man who is punished, and he who sees him punished, may be deterred from doing wrong again. He punishes for the sake of prevention, thereby clearly implying that virtue is capable of being taught.”

— Plato

138. “The law is not concerned with making any one class in the city do outstandingly well, but is contriving to produce this condition in the city as a whole.”

— Plato

139. “A mere speck that nevertheless constantly contributed to the good of the whole – is you, you who have forgotten that nothing is created except to provide the entire universe with a life of prosperity. You forget that creation is not for your benefit: you exist for the sake of the universe.”

— Plato

140. “EUTHYPHRO: The truth is, Socrates, that I’m at a loss as to how to say what I want to say; somehow or other whatever we put forward has a habit of moving around and refusing to stay wherever we try to make it stand.”

— Plato

141. “Now in the days of Cronos there existed a law respecting the destiny of man, which has always been, and still continues to be in Heaven, – that he who has lived all his life in justice and holiness shall go, when he is dead, to the Islands of the Blessed, and dwell there in perfect happiness out of the reach of evil; but that he who has lived unjustly and impiously shall go to the house of vengeance and punishment, which is called Tartarus.”

— Plato

142. “We should not allow into our minds the conviction that argumentation has nothing sound about it; much rather we should believe that it is we who are not yet sound and that we must take courage and be eager to attain soundness, you and the others for the sake of your whole life still to come, and I for the sake of death itself.”

— Plato

143. “Men of my age flock together; we are birds of a feather, as the old proverb says;.”

— Plato

144. “As being is to becoming, so is pure intellect to opinion. And as intellect is to opinion, so is science to belief, and understanding to the perception of shadows.”

— Plato

145. “Or do you think it possible for a city not to be destroyed if the verdicts of its courts have no force but are nullified and set at naught by private individuals?”

— Plato

146. “Knowledge is prior to any particular knowledge, and exists not in the previous state of the individual, but of the race. It is potential, not actual, and can only be appropriated by strenuous exertion.”

— Plato

147. “I understand; you mean that he will be a ruler in the city of which we are the founders, and which exists in idea only; for I do not believe that there is such an one anywhere on earth? In heaven, I replied, there is laid up a pattern of it, methinks, which he who desires may behold, and beholding, may set his own house in order. But whether such an one exists, or ever will exist in fact, is no matter; for he will live after the manner of that city, having nothing to do with any other.”

— Plato

148. “Then not he who does evil, but he who does good, is temperate? Yes, he said; and you, friend, would agree. No matter whether I should or not; just now, not what I think, but what you are saying, is the point at issue. Well, he answered; I mean to say, that he who does evil, and not good, is not temperate; and that he is temperate who does good, and not evil: for temperance I define in plain words to be the doing of good actions.”

— Plato

149. “Of old the saying, “Nothing too much,” appeared to be, and really was, well said. For he whose happiness rests with himself, if possible, wholly, and if not, as far as is possible, – who is not hanging in suspense on other men, or changing with the vicissitude of their fortune, – has his life ordered for the best.”

— Plato

150. “Because you seem not to be aware that any one who has an intellectual affinity to Socrates and enters into conversation with him is liable to be drawn into an argument; and whatever subject he may start, he will be continually carried round and round by him, until at last he finds that he has to give an account both of his present and past life; and when he is once entangled, Socrates will not let him go until he has completely and thoroughly sifted him.”

— Plato