Best Plato Quotes

Plato was a Greek philosopher, a mathematician and founder of the Academy. He is the author of idealistic works of unequaled authority in Western thinking. He is regarded as an important figure in the development of philosophy. Here are some of the famous quotes by Plato.

1. “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.” - Plato
2. “The first and the best victory is to conquer self.” - Plato
3. “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.” - Plato
4. “Love is a serious mental disease.” - Plato
5. “Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.” - Plato
6. “Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.” - Plato
7. “Ignorance of all things is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all; but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune.” - Plato
8. “At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.” - Plato
9. “The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.” - Plato
10. “He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.” - Plato
11. “Truth is its own reward.” - Plato
12. “I have good hope that there is something after death.” - Plato
13. “All learning has an emotional base.” - Plato
14. “Old age has a great sense of calm and freedom. When the passions have relaxed their hold and have escaped, not from one master, but from many.” - Plato
15. “The beginning is the most important part of the work.” - Plato
16. “Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.” - Plato
17. “There are few people so stubborn in their atheism who when danger is pressing in will not acknowledge the divine power. - Plato
18. “The most important part of education is proper training in the nursery.” - Plato
19. “We are twice armed if we fight with faith.” - Plato
20. “Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.” - Plato
21. “Man is a being in search of meaning.” - Plato
22. “Thinking is the talking of the soul with itself.” - Plato
23. “A well begun is half ended.” - Plato
24. “Man is a two-legged animal without feathers.” - Plato
25. “States are as the men, they grow out of human characters.” - Plato
26. “A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.” - Plato
27. “Let us describe the education of our men. What then is the education to be? Perhaps we could hardly find a better than that which the experience of the past has already discovered, which consists, I believe, in gymnastic, for the body, and music for the mind.” - Plato
28. “They do certainly give very strange, and newfangled, names to diseases.” - Plato
29. “Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety.” - Plato
30. “Wisdom alone is the science of others sciences.” - Plato
31. “Let parents bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence.” - Plato
32. “They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth.” - Plato
33. “No one ever teaches well who wants to teach, or governs well who wants to govern.” - Plato
34. “Those who intend on becoming great should love neither themselves or their own things, but only what is just, whether it happens to be done by themselves or others.” - Plato
35. “The most virtuous are those who content themselves with being virtuous without seeking to appear so.” - Plato
36. “Honesty is for the most par less profitable than dishonesty.” - Plato
37. “He who is of a 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.” - Plato
38. “Attention to health is life greatest hindrance.” - Plato
39. “Democracy is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequal alike.” - Plato
40. “There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.” - Plato
41. “Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.” - Plato
42. “The wisest have the most authority.” - Plato
43. “Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depends on simplicity.” - Plato
44. “There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.” - Plato
45. “For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.” - Plato
46. “Pleasure is the greatest incentive to evil.” - Plato
47. “Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men.” - Plato
48. “Love is the joy of the good, the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the Gods.” - Plato
49. “When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.” - Plato
50. “Let nobody speak mischief of anybody.” - Plato
51. “Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.” - Plato
52. “The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men.” - Plato
53. “All things will be produced in superior quantity and quality, and with greater ease, when each man works at a single occupation, in accordance with his natural gifts, and at the right moment, without meddling with anything else.” - Plato
54. “He best keeps from anger who remembers that God is always looking upon him.” - Plato
55. “We ought to esteem it of the greatest importance that the fictions which children first hear should be adapted in the most perfect manner to the promotion of virtue.” - Plato
56. “Philosophy is an elegant thing, if anyone modestly meddles with it; but if they are conversant with it more than is becoming, it corrupts them.” - Plato
57. “Self conquest is the greatest of victories.” - Plato
58. “Even the gods love jokes.” - Plato
59. “No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.” - Plato
60. “Any city however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich. These are at war with one another.” - Plato
61. “I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly conflict.” - Plato
62. “When men speak ill of thee, live so as nobody may believe them.” - Plato
63. “We ought to fly away from earth to heaven as quickly as we can; and to fly away is to become like God, as far as this is possible; and to become like him is to become holy, just, and wise.” - Plato
64. “Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.” - Plato
65. “Whatever deceives men seems to produce a magical enchantment.” - Plato
66. “I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.” - Plato
67. “Science is nothing but perception.” - Plato
68. “Knowledge becomes evil if the aim be not virtuous.” - Plato
69. “Wealth is well known to be a great comforter.” - Plato
70. “The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction.” - Plato
71. “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.” - Plato
72. “Hereditary honors are a noble and a splendid treasure to descendants.” - Plato
73. “Excess generally causes reaction, and produces a change in the opposite direction, whether it be in the seasons, or in individuals, or in governments.” - Plato
74. “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.” - Plato
75. “Too much attention to health is a hindrance to learning, to invention, and to studies of any kind, for we are always feeling suspicious shootings and swimmings in our heads, and we are prone to blame studies from them.” - Plato
76. “To the rulers of the state then, if to any, it belongs of right to use falsehood, to deceive either enemies or their own citizens, for the good of the state: and no one else may meddle with this privilege.” - Plato
77. “Know one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.” - Plato
78. “The heaviest penalty for deciding to engage in politics is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.” - Plato
79. “Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?” - Plato
80. “Is it not also true that no physician, in so far as he is a physician, considers or enjoins what is for the physician’s interest, but that all seek the good of their patients? For we have agreed that a physician strictly so called, is a ruler of bodies, and not a maker of money, have we not?” – Plato

Above were the best quotes by Plato, which you must have enjoyed reading. If you have more of his quotes, share them in the comments section.