Plato

Death is not the worst than can happen to men.
– Plato

The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
– Plato

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

The worst form of injustice is pretended justice.
– Plato

The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live
under the government of worse men.
– Plato

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

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.
– Plato

Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say
something.
– Plato

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

Only the dead have seen the end of war.
– Plato

Education is teaching our children to desire the right things.
– Plato

To do injustice is more disgraceful than to suffer it.
– Plato

Man… is a tame or civilized animal; nevertheless, he requires proper instruction and a
fortunate nature, and then of all animals he becomes the most divine and most civilized; but
if he be insufficiently or ill-educated he is the most savage of earthly creatures.
– Plato

Pleasure is the greatest incentive to evil.
– Plato

The measure of a man is what he does with power.
– Plato

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.
– Plato

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

Democracy passes into despotism.
– Plato

Boys should abstain from all use of wine until after their eighteenth year, for it is wrong to add
fire to fire.
– Plato

This city is what it is because our citizens are what they are.
– Plato

The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life.
– Plato

The soul of man is immortal and imperishable.
– Plato

Well, my art of midwifery is in most respects like theirs; but differs, in that I attend men and
not women, and I look after their souls when they are in labor, and not after their bodies:
and the triumph of my art is in thoroughly examining whether the thought which the mind of
the young man brings forth is a false idol or a noble and true birth.
– Plato

You should not honor men more than truth.
– Plato

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.
– Plato

You are young, my son, and, as the years go by, time will change and even reverse many of
your present opinions. Refrain therefore awhile from setting yourself up as a judge of the
highest matters.
– Plato

The beginning is the most important part of the work.
– Plato

The greatest penalty of evildoing – namely, to grow into the likeness of bad men.
– Plato

Any man may easily do harm, but not every man can do good to another.
– Plato

Cunning is but the low mimic of wisdom.
– Plato

He was a wise man who invented beer.
– Plato

Good actions give strength to ourselves and inspire good actions in others.
– Plato

The soul takes nothing with her to the other world but her education and culture; and these,
it is said, are of the greatest service or of the greatest injury to the dead man, at the very
beginning of his journey thither.
– Plato

Better a little which is well done, than a great deal imperfectly.
– Plato

For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories.
– Plato

The man who makes everything that leads to happiness depend 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.
– Plato

You cannot conceive the many without the one.
– Plato

The life which is unexamined is not worth living.
– Plato

Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is
acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
– Plato

Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.
– Plato

Wealth is the parent of of luxury and indolence, and poverty of meanness and viciousness,
and both of discontent.
– Plato

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

Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.
– Plato

Not one of them who took up in his youth with this opinion that there are no gods ever
continued until old age faithful to his conviction.
– Plato

Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable.
– Plato

Socrates is a doer of evil, who corrupts the youth; and who does not believe in the gods of
the state, but has other new divinities of his own. Such is the charge.
– Plato

What is the prime of life? May it not be defined as a period of about twenty years in a
woman’s life, and thirty in a man’s?
– Plato

Oligarchy: A government resting on a valuation of property, in which the rich have power and
the poor man is deprived of it.
– Plato

Courage is knowing what not to fear.
– Plato

The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways – I to die, and you to live. Which is
better God only knows.
– Plato

Let early education be a sort of amusement; you will then be better able to find out the
natural bent.
– Plato

The people have always 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

Life must be lived as play.
– Plato

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

Democracy, which is a charming from of government, full of variety and disorder, and
dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.
– Plato

Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety.
– Plato

There is no harm in repeating a good thing.
– Plato