Plato Biography | Inspiration Quotations | Motivation Quotes

Plato Motivational Quotations:

• “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.”

•  “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”

•  “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.”

•  “Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.”

•  “The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”

•  “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

•  “The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.”

•  “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.”

1.  “Love is a serious mental disease.”

•  “According to Greek mythology, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves.”

•  “Never discourage anyone...who continually makes progress, no matter how slow.”

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

•  “good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws”

  

•  “One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”

•  “I'm trying to think, don't confuse me with facts.”

•  “Ignorance, the root and stem of every evil.”

•  “There is truth in wine and children”

•  “If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.”

•  “...and when one of them meets the other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy and one will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment...”

•  “The measure of a man is what he does with power.”

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

•  “Those who tell the stories rule society.”

•  “Education is teaching our children to desire the right things.”

•  “The madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings”

•  “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.”

•  “There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.”

•  “When men speak ill of thee, live so as nobody may believe them.”

•  “Courage is knowing what not to fear.”

•  “You should not honor men more than truth.”

•  “There are two things a person should never be angry at, what they can help, and what they cannot.”

•  “The greatest wealth is to live content with little.”

•  “Death is not the worst that can happen to men.”

•  “Character is simply habit long continued.”

•  “Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.”

•  “No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nature and education.”

•  “Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder”

•  “Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.”

•  “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.”

•  “An empty vessel makes the loudest sound, so they that have the least wit are the greatest babblers.”

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

•  “Love is simply the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole.”

•  “Good actions give strength to ourselves and inspire good actions in others.”

•  “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.”

•  “The soul takes nothing with her to the next world but her education and her culture. At the beginning of the journey to the next world, one's education and culture can either provide the greatest assistance, or else act as the greatest burden, to the person who has just died.”

•  “There is in every one of us, even those who seem to be most moderate, a type of desire that is terrible, wild, and lawless.”

•  “I thought to myself: I am wiser than this man; neither of us probably knows anything that is really good, but he thinks he has knowledge, when he has not, while I, having no knowledge, do not think I have.”

•  “Love is the pursuit of the whole.”

•  “I would teach children music, physics, and philosophy; but most importantly music, for the patterns in music and all the arts are the keys to learning”

•  “Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.”

•  “Writing is the geometry of the soul.”

•  “Any man may easily do harm, but not every man can do good to another.”

•  “For this feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy.”

•  “Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.”  

• “…if a man can be properly said to love something, it must be clear that he feels affection for it as a whole, and does not love part of it to the exclusion of the rest.”

• “The first and best victory is to conquer self”

•  “To be afraid of death is only another form of thinking that one is wise when one is not; it is to think that one knows what one does not know. No one knows with regard to death wheather it is not really the greatest blessing that can happen to man; but people dread it as though they were certain it is the greatest evil." -The Last Days of Socrates”

  

   

• “At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.”

•  “Books are immortal sons defying their sires.”

•  “The soul takes flight to the world that is invisible but there arriving she is sure of bliss and forever dwells in paradise.”

•  “Man is a being in search of meaning.”

•  “Have you ever sensed that our soul is immortal and never dies?”

•  “True friendship can exist only between equals.”

•  “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.” 

•  “And so, when a person meets the half that is his very own, whatever his orientation, whether it's to young men or not, then something wonderful happens: the two are struck from their senses by love, by a sense of belonging to one another, and by desire, and they don't want to be separated from one another, not even for a moment.”

•  “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.”

•   “How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?”

•  “No wealth can ever make a bad man at peace with himself”

•  “He was a wise man who invented God.”

•  “False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.”

•  “No human thing is of serious importance.”

•  “Love' is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete.”

•  “Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be a sort of amusement; you will then be better able to discover the child's natural bent.”

•  “The society we have described can never grow into a reality or see the light of day, and there will be no end to the troubles of states, or indeed, my dear Glaucon, of humanity itself, till philosophers become rulers 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.”

•  “All I really know is the extent of my own ignorance”

•  “The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”

•  “The man who finds that in the course of his life he has done a lot of wrong often wakes up at night in terror, like a child with a nightmare, and his life is full of foreboding: but the man who is conscious of no wrongdoing is filled with cheerfulness and with the comfort of old age.”

•  “A dog has the soul of a philosopher.”

•  “Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.”

•  “In practice people who study philosophy too long become very odd birds, not to say thoroughly vicious; while even those who are the best of them are reduced by...[philosophy] to complete uselessness as members of society.”

•  “All is flux, nothing stays still”

•  “Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable.”

•  “That's what education should be," I said, "the art of orientation. Educators should devise the simplest and most effective methods of turning minds around. It shouldn't be the art of implanting sight in the organ, but should proceed on the understanding that the organ already has the capacity, but is improperly aligned and isn't facing the right way.”

•  “He whom loves touches not walks in darkness.”

•  “Philosophy is the highest music.”

•  “The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life”

•  “Wise men talk because they have something to say; Fools, because they have to say something.”

•  “Ideas are the source of all things”

•  “Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity”

•  “Time is the moving image of reality”

•  “Is there a perfect world?”

•  “Knowledge is the food of the soul.”

•  “The difficulty, my friends, is not in avoiding death, but in avoiding unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death.”

•  “Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being”

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

•  “The man who makes everything that leads to happiness depends 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.”

•  “I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.”  “Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.”

• “Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes.”

•  “Only a philosopher's mind grows wings, since its memory always keeps it as close as possible to those realities by being close to which the gods are divine.”

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

•  “Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.”

•  “Excess of liberty, whether it lies in state or individuals seems only to pass into excess of slavery.”

•  “Money-makers are tiresome company, as they have no standard but cash value.”