Plato Quotes

Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.

Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.

.. the men of the cave would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes...

States will never be happy until rulers become philosophers or philosophers become rulers.

They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth. -Plato, philosopher (427-347 BCE)

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

Then we shan’t regard anyone as a lover of knowledge or wisdom who is fussy about what he studies…

For to fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise without really being wise, for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For no one knows whether death may not be the greatest good that can happen to man.

Either we shall find what it is we are seeking or at least we shall free ourselves from the persuasion that we know what we do not know.

The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things.

The rhetorician need not know the truth about things; he has only to discover some way of persuading the ignorant that he has more knowledge than those who know.

I am smart because I know I nothing.

There is also a third kind of madness, which is possession by the Muses, enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyric....But he, who, not being inspired and having no touch of madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks he will get into the temple by the help of art — he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man is nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the madman.

So where it is a general rule that it is wrong to gratify lovers, this can be attributed to the defects of those who make that rule: the government's lust for rule and the subjects' cowardice

To the degree that I cease to persue my deepest passions, I will gradually be controlled by my deepest fears.