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.
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
Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul
—Plato
Topics: Music, One liners
Pleasure is the greatest incentive to evil.
—Plato
Topics: Pleasure
He whom love touches not walks in darkness.
—Plato
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.
—Plato
Topics: Suicide
The wise man will want to be ever with him who is better than himself.
—Plato
Topics: Wisdom
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.
—Plato
Arguments, like men are often pretenders
—Plato
Topics: One liners, Arguments
The passionate are like men standing on their heads; they see all things the wrong way.
—Plato
Topics: Passion
Any city however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich. These are at war with one another.
—Plato
Topics: City Life, Cities
Whoever is detected in a shameful fraud is ever after not believed even if they speak the truth.
—Plato
Topics: Lying, Deception/Lying, Lies
Let us describe the education of our men. What then is the education to be? Perhaps we could hardly find a better than that which the experience of the past has already discovered, which consists, I believe, in gymnastic, for the body, and music for the mind.
—Plato
Topics: Education
The wisest have the most authority.
—Plato
Topics: Wisdom, One liners, Authority
Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men.
—Plato
Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher; and philosophy begins in wonder.
—Plato
Topics: Dreams
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
Know one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.
—Plato
Topics: Dying, Nature, Death
Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance deceives many; the intelligence of a few perceives what has been carefully hidden.
—Plato
Topics: Appearance, Intelligence, Understanding
Seven years of silent inquiry are needful for a man to learn the truth, but fourteen in order to learn how to make it known to his fellowmen.
—Plato
Topics: Truth
Those wretches who never have experienced the sweets of wisdom and virtue, but spend all their time in revels and debauches, sink downward day after day, and make their whole life one continued series of errors. They taste no real or substantial pleasure; but, resembling so many brutes, with eyes always fixed on the earth, and intent upon their loaden tables, they pamper themselves in luxury and excess.
—Plato
For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories.
—Plato
Topics: Discipline
I would rather not be a king than to forfeit my liberty.
—Plato
Topics: Liberty
Holiness is what is loved by all the gods. It is loved because it is holy, and not holy because it is loved.
—Plato
They do certainly give very strange, and newfangled, names to diseases.
—Plato
Topics: Medicine, Oddity, Science, Peculiarity
To the rulers of the state then, if to any, it belongs of right to use falsehood, to deceive either enemies or their own citizens, for the good of the state: and no one else may meddle with this privilege.
—Plato
Topics: Lies, Deception/Lying, Lying
Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.
—Plato
Topics: Poetry, Art
Wisdom alone is the science of others sciences.
—Plato
Topics: Wisdom
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
Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.
—Plato
Topics: Wisdom
Kindness which is bestowed on the good is never lost.
—Plato
Topics: Kindness
Old age has a great sense of calm and freedom. When the passions have relaxed their hold and have escaped, not from one master, but from many.
—Plato
Topics: Age
States are as the men, they grow out of human characters.
—Plato
Topics: Nation, Nations, Nationality, Nationalism
Nothing is more disgraceful than for a man who is nothing, to hold himself honored on account of his forefathers; and yet hereditary honors are a noble and splendid treasure to descendants.
—Plato
Topics: Ancestry, Family, Hope, Ancestors
Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.
—Plato
Books are immortal sons deifying their sires.
—Plato
Topics: Books
Education and admonition commence in the first years of childhood, and last to the very end of life.
—Plato
Topics: Education
It is as expedient that a wicked man be punished as that a sick man be cured by a physician; for all chastisement is a kind of medicine.
—Plato
Topics: Punishment
Laws are partly formed for the sake of good men, in order to instruct them how they may live on friendly terms with one another, and partly for the sake of those who refuse to be instructed, whose spirit cannot be subdued, or softened, or hindered from plunging into evil.
—Plato
When men speak ill of thee, live so as nobody may believe them.
—Plato
Topics: Character, Criticism
Democracy is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequal alike.
—Plato
Topics: Disorder, Democracy
From a short-sided view, the whole moving contents of the heavens seemed to them a parcel of stones, earth and other soul-less bodies, though they furnish the sources of the world order.
—Plato
Topics: Space
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Aristotle Ancient Greek Philosopher
Xenocrates Greek Philosopher, Scientist
Heraclitus Ancient Greek Philosopher
Epicurus Greek Philosopher
Epictetus Ancient Greek Philosopher
Plotinus Ancient Greek Philosopher, Mystic
Bias of Priene Greek Orator
Charles Sanders Peirce American Philosopher
Socrates Ancient Greek Philosopher
Pythagoras Greek Philosopher