One of history’s greatest minds, Plato had so much to teach us.
The Republic Quotes
“The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself."
Plato, The Republic
“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing."
Plato, The Republic
“If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things."
Plato, The Republic
“The beginning is the most important part of the work.”
Plato, The Republic
“The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful.”
Plato, The Republic
“Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.”
Plato, The Republic
“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.”
Plato, The Republic
“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.”
Plato, The Republic
“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.”
Plato, The Republic
“Have you ever sensed that our soul is immortal and never dies?”
Plato, The Republic
Nothing beautiful without struggle.”
Plato, The Republic
“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.”
Plato, The Republic
“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.”
Plato, The Republic
“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.”
Plato, Republic: The Theatre of the Mind
“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.”
Plato, The Republic
“Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.”
Plato, The Republic
“Money-makers are tiresome company, as they have no standard but cash value.”
Plato, The Republic
“You know that the beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more readily taken….Shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they are grown up? We cannot….Anything received into the mind at that age is likely to become indelible and unalterable; and therefore it is most important that the tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous thoughts….”
Plato, The Republic
“Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes.”
Plato, The Republic
“… when someone sees a soul disturbed and unable to see something, he won't laugh mindlessly, but he'll take into consideration whether it has come from a brighter life and is dimmed through not having yet become accustomed to the dark or whether it has come from greater ignorance into greater light and is dazzled by the increased brillance.”
Plato, The Republic
“Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes.”
Plato, The Republic
“The philosopher whose dealings are with divine order himself acquires the characteristics of order and divinity.”
Plato, The Republic
“Those who don't know must learn from those who do.”
Plato, The Republic
“Excess of liberty, whether it lies in state or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.”
Plato, The Republic
“And whenever any one informs us that he has found a man who knows all the arts, and all things else that anybody knows, and every single thing with a higher degree of accuracy than any other man –whoever tells us this, I think that we can only imagine him to be a simple creature who is likely to have been deceived by some wizard or actor whom he met, and whom he thought all-knowing, because he himself was unable to analyze the nature of knowledge and ignorance and imitation.”
Plato, The Republic
“Excess of liberty, whether it lies in state or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.”
Plato, The Republic
“And then, at this stage, every dictator comes up with the notorious and typical demand: he asks the people for bodyguards to protect him, the people's champion.”
“Here's something else I'd like your opinion about," I said. "If he went back underground and sat down again in the same spot, wouldn't the sudden transition from the sunlight mean that his eyes would be overwhelmed by darkness?"
"Certainly," he replied.
"Now, the process of adjustment would be quite long this time, and suppose that before his eyes had settled down and while he wasn't seeing well, he had once again to compete against those same old prisoners at identifying those shadows. Would he make a fool of himself? Wouldn't they say that he'd come back from his upward journey with his eyes ruined, and that it wasn't even worth trying to go up there? And would they -- if they could -- grab hold of anyone who tried to set them free and take them up there and kill him?”
Plato, The Republic
“What shall we say about those spectators, then, who can see a plurality of beautiful things, but not beauty itself, and who are incapable of following if someone else tries to lead them to it, and who can see many moral actions, but not morality itself, and so on? That they only ever entertain beliefs, and do not know any of the things they believe?
Plato, The Republic
" Imagine that the keeper of a huge, strong beast notices what makes it angry, what it desires, how it has to be approached and handled, the circumstances and the conditions under which it becomes particularly fierce or calm, what provokes its typical cries, and what tones of voice make it gentle or wild. Once he's spent enough time in the creature's company to acquire all this information, he calls it knowledge, forms it into a systematic branch of expertise, and starts to teach it, despite total ignorance, in fact, about which of the creature's attitudes and desires is commendable or deplorable, good or bad, moral or immoral. His usage of all these terms simply conforms to the great beast's attitudes, and he describes things as good or bad according to its likes and dislikes, and can't justify his usage of the terms any further, but describes as right and good the things which are merely indispensable, since he hasn't realised and can't explain to anyone else how vast a gulf there is between necessity and goodness."
Plato, The Republic
“It's not at all uncommon to find a person's desires compelling him to go against his reason, and to see him cursing himself and venting his passion on the source of the compulsion within him. It's as if there were two warring factions, with passion fighting on the side of reason. But I'm sure you won't claim that you had ever, in yourself or in anyone else, met a case of passion siding with his desires against the rational mind, when the rational mind prohibits resistance.”
Plato, The Republic
“Do you mean that the tyrant will dare to use violence against the people who fathered him, and raise his hand against them if they oppose him? So the tyrant is a parricide, and little comfort to his old parent.”
Plato, The Republic
“Appearance tyrannizes over truth.”
Plato, The Republic
“Physical excellence does not of itself produce a good mind and character: on the other hand, excellence of mind and character will make the best of the physique it is given.”
Plato, The Republic
“Whereas, our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already; and that just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being, and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words, of the good.”
Plato, The Republic
“All the same, we ought to point out that if the kinds of poetry and representation which are designed merely to give pleasure can come up with a rational argument for their inclusion in a well-governed community, we'd be delighted -- short of compromising the truth as we see it, which wouldn't be right -- to bring them back from exile: after all, we know from our own experience all about their spell. I mean haven't you ever fallen under the spell of poetry, Glaucon, especially when the spectacle is provided by Homer."
Plato, The Republic
“It is only just that anything that grows up on its own should feel it has nothing to repay for an upbringing which it owes no one.”
Plato, The Republic
“I shall try to persuade first the Rulers and soldiers, and then the rest of the community, that the upbringing and education we have given them was all something that happened to them only in a dream. In reality they were fashioned and reared, and their arms and equipment manufactured, in the depths of the earth, and Earth herself, their mother, brought them up, when they were complete, into the light of day; so now they must think of the land in which they live as their mother and protect her if she is attacked, while their fellow citizens they must regard as brothers born of the same mother earth…. That is the story. Do you know of any way of making them believe it?”
“Not in the first generation,” he said, “but you might succeed with the second, and later generations.”
Plato, The Republic
“Until philosophers rule as kings or those who are now called kings and leading men genuinely and adequately philosophise, that is, until political power and philosophy entirely coincide, while the many natures who at present pursue either one exclusively are forcibly prevented from doing so, cities will have no rest from evils,… nor, I think, will the human race." (Republic 473c-d)
Plato, The Republic
“But I am too stupid to be convinced by him.”
Plato, The Republic
“You take the words in the sense which is most damaging to the argument.”
Plato, The Republic
“The worst type of man behaves as badly in his waking life as some men do in their dreams."
Plato, The Republic
“There's no chance of their having a conscious glimpse of the truth as long as they refuse to disturb the things they take for granted and remain incapable of explaining them. For if your starting-point is unknown, and your end-point and intermediate stages are woven together out of unknown material, there may be coherence, but knowledge is completely out of the question.”
Plato, The Republic
“.. the men of the cave would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes…”
Plato, The Republic
“Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance”
Plato, The Republic
“Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind's eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye”
Plato, The Republic
“SOCRATES: Perhaps we may be wrong; if so, you in your wisdom should convince us that we are mistaken in preferring justice to injustice.
THRASYMACHUS: And how am I to convince you, he said, if you are not already convinced by what I have just said; what more can I do for you? Would you have me put the proof bodily into your souls?”Plato, The Republic
“He who is of a 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.”
Plato, The Republic
“Since then, as philosophers prove, appearance tyrannizes over truth and is lord of happiness, to appearance I must devote myself.”
Plato, The Republic
“The best is to do injustice without paying the penalty; the worst is to suffer it without being able to take revenge. Justice is a mean between these two extremes. People value it not because it is a good but because they are too weak to do injustice with impunity.”
Plato, The Republic
“Noticing that, he made a trail of the ring, to see if it had that power; and he found that whenever he turned the collet inside, he was invisible, when he turned it outside, visible. After he found this out he managed to be appointed one of the messengers to the king; when he got there, he seduced the king's wife, and with her set upon the king, and killed him, and seized the empire. Then if there could be two such rings, and if the just man put one on and the unjust the other, no one, as it would be thought, would be so adamantine as to abide in the practice of justice, no one could endure to hold back from another's goods and not to touch, when it was in his power to take what he would even out of the market without fear, and to go into any house and lie with anyone he wished, and to kill or set free from prison those he might wish, and to do anything else in the world like a very god. And in doing so he would do just the same as the other; both would go the same way. Surely one would call this a strong proof that no one is just willingly but only under a strong compulsion, believing that it is not a good to him personally; since wherever each thinks he will be able to do injustice, he does injustice.”
Plato, The Republic
“those who govern ought not to be lovers of the task? For, if they are, there will be rival lovers, and they will fight.”
Plato, The Republic
“We've heard many people say and have often said ourselves that justice is doing one's own work and not meddling with what isn't one's own … Then, it turns out that this doing one's own work-provided that it comes to be in a certain way-is justice.”
Plato, The Republic
“And I think that you must have observed again and again what a poor appearance the tales of poets make when stripped of the colours which music puts upon them, and recited in simple prose.”
Plato, The Republic
“For he, Adeimantus, whose mind is fixed upon true being, has surely no time to look down upon the affairs of earth, or to be filled with malice and envy, contending against men”
Plato, The Republic
“I say that justice is nothing other than the advantage of [c] the stronger.”
Plato, The Republic
“The man who has no self-respect, on the contrary, will imitate anybody and anything; sounds of nature and cries of animals alike; his whole performance will be imitation of gesture and voice.”
Plato, The Republic
“…each individual can only do one thing well. He can't do lots of things. If he tries, he will be jack of all trades, and master of none.”
Socrates, The Republic
“you don’t seem to love money too much. And those who haven’t made their own money are usually like you. But those who have made it for themselves are twice as fond of it as those who [c] haven’t."
Plato, The Republic
“you don’t seem to love money too much. And those who haven’t made their own money are usually like you. But those who have made it for themselves are twice as fond of it as those who [c] haven’t."
Plato, The Republic