Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Plato (Ancient Greek Philosopher)

Plato (c.429–c.347 BCE) was a Greek philosopher. A pupil of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle, Plato founded the Academy, one of antiquity’s great philosophical schools. Plato is the most widely studied of all the ancient Greek philosophers. His beliefs had an enormous impact on the development of Western philosophy.

Born an Athenian nobleman, Plato rejected social privilege to devote his life to philosophy. According to legend, when Plato was just twenty, he was on his way to a theater festival to present his manuscript for a tragedy. By chance, he heard Socrates speak. Plato was so stirred that he burned his manuscript at once, and decided to follow Socrates. The Pythagoreans also influenced Plato, as did the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers Heraclitus and Parmenides.

Plato established the dialogue as a vehicle of philosophical thought. With Socrates as the principal speaker, Plato wrote about topics as varied as love, government, politics, ethics, friendship, metaphysics, law, and cosmology. Plato’s works are the reason we know much about Socrates; Plato’s dialogues characterize Socrates as a shrewd and versatile interrogator. Plato never makes himself a part of the dialogues in his works, nor does he claim that he heard any of the dialogues.

After the death of Socrates, Plato traveled to Egypt and Italy studied in Pythagoras and then remained as an advisor for the rulers of Syracuse. When he returned to Athens around the age of forty he started his own academy, where he tried to impart the Socratic style of teaching to his students. The Academy operated till 529 CE after which it was closed, thinking it was a threat to Christianity.

All of Plato’s 36 works endure. His most famous dialogues include Gorgias (on rhetoric as an art of flattery,) Phaedo (on death and the immortality of the soul,) and the Symposium (a discussion on the nature of love.)

Plato’s most significant work was the Republic, a protracted discussion on justice. In it, he proposed his ideal political system based on the division of the population into three classes—rulers, police and armed forces, and civilians—determined not by birth or affluence but by education.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Plato

By education I mean that training in excellence from youth upward which makes a man passionately desire to be a perfect citizen, and teaches him to rule, and to obey, with justice. This is the only education which deserves the name.
—Plato
Topics: Excellence

You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.
—Plato
Topics: Discovery

To be curious about that which is not one’s concern while still in ignorance of oneself is ridiculous.
—Plato
Topics: Curiosity

Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men.
—Plato

Justice is having and doing what is one’s own.
—Plato
Topics: Justice

Wealth does not bring excellence, but that wealth comes from excellence.
—Plato
Topics: Excellence

Time is the moving image of eternity.
—Plato
Topics: Time Management

They do certainly give very strange, and newfangled, names to diseases.
—Plato
Topics: Peculiarity, Oddity, Medicine, Science

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.
—Plato
Topics: Politics, Politicians

Attention to health is life’s greatest hindrance.
—Plato
Topics: Health, One liners, Attention

Man is a two-legged animal without feathers.
—Plato
Topics: Humankind, Humanity

A well begun is half ended.
—Plato
Topics: Action

Truth is its own reward.
—Plato
Topics: Truth

The life that is unexamined is not worth living.
—Plato

All loves should be simply stepping-stones to the love of God. So it was with me; and blessed be his name for his great goodness and mercy.
—Plato
Topics: Love

For just as poets love their own works, and fathers their own children, in the same way those who have created a fortune value their money, not merely for its uses, like other persons, but because it is their own production. This makes them moreover disagreeable companions, because they will praise nothing but riches.
—Plato
Topics: Riches, Wealth

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.
—Plato
Topics: Deception/Lying

I would rather not be a king than to forfeit my liberty.
—Plato
Topics: Liberty

Excellent things are rare.
—Plato
Topics: Excellence

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

The passionate are like men standing on their heads; they see all things the wrong way.
—Plato
Topics: Passion

You cannot conceive the many without the one.
—Plato

Whenever a person strives, by the help of dialectic, to start in pursuit of every reality by a simple process of reason, independent of all sensuous information—never flinching, until by an act of the pure intelligence he has grasped the real nature of good—he arrives at the very end of the intellectual world.
—Plato
Topics: Reason

What a poor appearance the tales of poets make when stripped of the colors which music puts upon them, and recited in simple prose.
—Plato
Topics: Appearance

Knowledge is the food of the soul.
—Plato
Topics: Knowledge

Too much attention to health is a hindrance to learning, to invention, and to studies of any kind, for we are always feeling suspicious shootings and swimmings in our heads, and we are prone to blame studies from them.
—Plato
Topics: Learning

Princes are never without flatterers to seduce them; ambition to deprave them; and desires to corrupt them.
—Plato
Topics: Kings

No human thing is of serious importance.
—Plato
Topics: Worry

If I were sure God would pardon me, and men would not know my sin, yet I should be ashamed to sin, because of its essential baseness.
—Plato
Topics: Sin

You will soon break the bow if you keep it always stretched.
—Plato
Topics: Achievement, Success & Failure

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