Plato Quotes

( Plato (c. 427 BC – c. 347 BC) was an immensely influential classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, teacher of Aristotle, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy and science.)

1. Can any man be courageous who has the fear of death in him?
    
2. False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.
    
3. God is not the author of all things, but of good only.
    
4. Excellence" is not a gift, but a skill that takes practice.
   We do not act "rightly" because we are "excellent",
   in fact we achieve "excellence" by acting "rightly"
    
5. Man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door of his prison and run away... A man should wait, and not take his own life until God summons him.
    
6. No evil can happen to a good man, neither in life nor after death.
    
7. The beginning is the most important part of the work.
    
8. You should not honor men more than truth.
    
9. The measure of a man is what he does with power.
    
10. Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity — I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only a euphemism for folly.
     
11. Mankind censure injustice fearing that they may be the victims of it, and not because they shrink from committing it.
     
12. When there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income.
     
13. But the chief penalty is to be governed by someone worse if a man will not himself hold office and rule.
     
14. Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.
     
15. Truth should be highly valued; if, as we were saying, a lie is useless to the gods, and useful only as a medicine to men, then the use of such medicines should be restricted to physicians; private individuals have no business with them.
     
16. Love is the pursuit of the whole.
     
17. Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul; on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful; and also because he who has received this education of the inner being will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the good, and becomes noble and good, he will justly blame and hate the bad, now in the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the reason why; and when reason comes he will recognise and salute the friend with whom his education has made him long familiar.
     
18. The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life.
     
19. Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
     
20. Death is not the worst that can happen to men.
     
21. The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.