Top 105 Plato Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Plato Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

Man is a wingless animal with two feet and flat nails.

Man is a wingless animal with two feet and flat nails.
Plato
Apply yourself both now and in the next life. Without effort, you cannot be prosperous. Though the land be good, You cannot have an abundant crop without cultivation.
Plato
The empty vessel makes the loudest sound.
Plato
The most important part of education is proper training in the nursery.
Plato
At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.
Plato
Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.
Plato
Tyranny naturally arises out of democracy.
Plato
Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.
Plato
The beginning is the most important part of the work.
Plato
Wealth is well known to be a great comforter.
Plato
When men speak ill of thee, live so as nobody may believe them.
Plato
To be sure I must; and therefore I may assume that your silence gives consent.
Plato
Philosophy begins in wonder.
Plato
Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.
Plato
Courage is a kind of salvation.
Plato
One man cannot practice many arts with success.
Plato
Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.
Plato
For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories.
Plato
The eyes of the soul of the multitudes are unable to endure the vision of the divine.
Plato
Excess of liberty, whether it lies in state or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.
Plato
The wisest have the most authority.
Plato
This City is what it is because our citizens are what they are.
Plato
Knowledge without justice ought to be called cunning rather than wisdom.
Plato
Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men.
Plato
Let parents bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence.
Plato
The greatest wealth is to live content with little.
Plato
I would fain grow old learning many things.
Plato
Man – a being in search of meaning.
Plato
We are twice armed if we fight with faith.
Plato
I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.
Plato
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
Death is not the worst that can happen to men.

Death is not the worst that can happen to men.
Plato
People are like dirt. They can either nourish you and help you grow as a person or they can stunt your growth and make you wilt and die.
Plato
As the builders say, the larger stones do not lie well without the lesser.
Plato
The gods’ service is tolerable, man’s intolerable.
Plato
Man never legislates, but destinies and accidents, happening in all sorts of ways, legislate in all sorts of ways.
Plato
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.
Plato
He who is not a good servant will not be a good master.
Plato
Not to help justice in her need would be an impiety.
Plato
Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
Plato
Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.
Plato
Knowledge becomes evil if the aim be not virtuous.
Plato
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
Plato
Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.
Plato
He who steals a little steals with the same wish as he who steals much, but with less power.
Plato
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
Plato
They certainly give very strange names to diseases.
Plato
There are two things a person should never be angry at, what they can help, and what they cannot.
Plato
Virtue is relative to the actions and ages of each of us in all that we do.
Plato
There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.
Plato
The god of love lives in a state of need. It is a need. It is an urge. It is a homeostatic imbalance. Like hunger and thirst, it’s almost impossible to stamp out.
Plato
The rulers of the state are the only persons who ought to have the privilege of lying, either at home or abroad; they may be allowed to lie for the good of the state.
Plato
Wisdom alone is the science of other sciences.
Plato
The learning and knowledge that we have, is, at the most, but little compared with that of which we are ignorant.
Plato
Hardly any human being is capable of pursuing two professions or two arts rightly.
Plato
To love rightly is to love what is orderly and beautiful in an educated and disciplined way.
Plato
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
Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety.
Plato
Justice in the life and conduct of the State is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.
Plato
If a man neglects education, he walks lame to the end of his life.
Plato
When a Benefit is wrongly conferred, the author of the Benefit may often be said to injure.
Plato
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
Plato
Honesty is for the most part less profitable than disho

Honesty is for the most part less profitable than dishonesty.
Plato
Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.
Plato
Nothing can be more absurd than the practice that prevails in our country of men and women not following the same pursuits with all their strengths and with one mind, for thus, the state instead of being whole is reduced to half.
Plato
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
Man is a wingless animal with two feet and flat nails.
Plato
Life must be lived as play.
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
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
There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.
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
For good nurture and education implant good constitutions.
Plato
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
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.
Plato
Wonder is the feeling of the philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.
Plato
Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.
Plato
Injustice is censured because the censures are afraid of suffering, and not from any fear which they have of doing injustice.
Plato
No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.
Plato
To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he might have the less.
Plato
Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man.
Plato
The measure of a man is what he does with power.
Plato
To go to the world below, having a soul which is like a vessel full of injustice, is the last and worst of all the evils.
Plato
No law or ordinance is mightier than understanding.
Plato
Knowledge is true opinion.
Plato
To suffer the penalty of too much haste, which is too little speed.
Plato
There is no such thing as a lovers’ oath.
Plato
No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nature and education.
Plato
I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work.
Plato
Twice and thrice over, as they say, good is it to repeat and review what is good.
Plato
The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction.
Plato
Courage is knowing what not to fear.
Plato
The blame is his who chooses: God is blameless.
Plato
Those who intend on becoming great should love neither

Those who intend on becoming great should love neither themselves nor their own things, but only what is just, whether it happens to be done by themselves or others.
Plato
A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.
Plato
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
Cunning… is but the low mimic of wisdom.
Plato
No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.
Plato
When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.
Plato
Justice means minding one’s own business and not meddling with other men’s concerns.
Plato
Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil.
Plato
It is right to give every man his due.
Plato
There is no harm in repeating a good thing.
Plato
Better a little which is well done, than a great deal imperfectly.
Plato
The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself; to be conquered by yourself is of all things most shameful and vile.
Plato