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
For let me tell you, that the more the pleasures of the body fade away, the greater to me is the pleasure and charm of conversation
—Plato
Topics: Pleasure
You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.
—Plato
Topics: Discovery
Each citizen should play his part in the community according to his individual gifts.
—Plato
Topics: Abilities, Talents, Work
To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he might have the less.
—Plato
States are as the men, they grow out of human characters.
—Plato
Topics: Nation, Nationalism, Nations, Nationality
Arguments, like men are often pretenders
—Plato
Topics: One liners, Arguments
The bees can abide no drones amongst them; but as soon as they begin to be idle, they kill them.
—Plato
Topics: Idleness
The mind ought sometimes to be diverted, that it may return the better to thinking.
—Plato
Topics: Pleasure, Mind
Wisdom alone is the science of others sciences.
—Plato
Topics: Wisdom
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
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.
—Plato
Topics: Living, Fear, Forgiveness, Light
Excess generally causes reaction, and produces a change in the opposite direction, whether it be in the seasons, or in individuals, or in governments.
—Plato
Topics: Excess
Courage is knowing what not to fear.
—Plato
Topics: Courage, Fear, Bravery
A nation rushing hastily too and fro, busily employed in idleness.
—Plato
Topics: Idleness
You are young, my son, and, as the years go by, time will change and even reverse many of your present opinions. Refrain therefore awhile from setting yourself up as a judge of the highest matters.
—Plato
Is it not also true that no physician, in so far as he is a physician, considers or enjoins what is for the physician’s interest, but that all seek the good of their patients? For we have agreed that a physician strictly so called, is a ruler of bodies, and not a maker of money, have we not?
—Plato
Topics: Doctors, Medicine
They do certainly give very strange, and newfangled, names to diseases.
—Plato
Topics: Science, Oddity, Medicine, Peculiarity
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: Family, Ancestors, Ancestry, Hope
All things will be produced in superior quantity and quality, and with greater ease, when each man works at a single occupation, in accordance with his natural gifts, and at the right moment, without meddling with anything else.
—Plato
Topics: Professionalism
Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity.
—Plato
Topics: Beauty, Harmony, Simplicity, Virtues
An alliance with a powerful person is never safe.
—Plato
Topics: Agreement
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
Wealth … and poverty: the one is the parent of luxury and indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.
—Plato
Topics: Poverty, Motivation
When men speak ill of thee, live so as nobody may believe them.
—Plato
Topics: Character, Criticism
Success tempts many to their ruin.
—Plato
Topics: Success & Failure, Success
There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings 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
—Plato
Topics: Philosophy
Wisdom is always an overmatch for strength.
—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
We ought to esteem it of the greatest importance that the fictions which children first hear should be adapted in the most perfect manner to the promotion of virtue.
—Plato
Topics: Storytelling
Ignorance of all things is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all; but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune.
—Plato
Topics: Learning
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Charles Sanders Peirce American Philosopher
Socrates Ancient Greek Philosopher
Pythagoras Greek Philosopher