Plato (427 BC-347 BC)

Quotes

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

• 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.

• You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.

• No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.

• The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways - I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.

• Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?

• The partisan, when he is engaged in a dispute, cares nothing about the rights of the question, but is anxious only to convince his hearers of his own assertions.

• Friends have all things in common.

• The greatest penalty of evildoing - namely, to grow into the likeness of bad men.

• 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.

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

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

• He who is of calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden.

• Mankind censure injustice fearing that they may be the victims of it, and not because they shrink from committing it.

• The beginning is the most important part of the work.

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

• The soul of man is immortal and imperishable.

• There are three arts which are concerned with all things: one which uses, another which makes, and a third which imitates them.

• Wealth is the parent of luxury and indolence, and poverty of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.

• A tyrant is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.