Quotes from Plato

We do not learn, and that what we call learning is only a process of recollection.

He who approaches the temple of the Muses without inspiration, in the belief that craftsmanship alone suffices, will remain a bungler and his presumptuous poetry will be obscured by the songs of the maniacs.

He could not harm me, for I do not think it is permitted that a better man be harmed by a worse

But Above all things truth beareth away the victory

Be kind, because everyone is having a really hard time.

Calligraphy is a geometry of the soul which manifests itself physically.

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?

To conquer oneself is the best and noblest victory; to be vanquished by one's own nature is the worst and most ignoble defeat.

The soul of man is immortal and imperishable.

We are like people looking for something they have in their hands all the time; we're looking in all directions except at the thing we want, which is probably why we haven't found it.

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.

I am that gadfly which God has attached to the state, and all day long …arousing and persuading and reproaching…You will not easily find another like me.

let the speaker speak truly and the judge decide justly.

it's better in fact to be guilty of manslaughter than of fraud about what is fair and just.

At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.

He who wishes to serve his country must have not only the power to think, but the will to act

And Agathon said, It is probable, Socrates, that I knew nothing of what I had said. And yet spoke you beautifully, Agathon, he said.

The man deserved his fate, deny it who can; yes, but the fate did not deserve the man.

Then the lover, who is true and no counterfeit, must of necessity be loved by his love.

If it were necessary either to do wrong or to suffer it, I should choose to suffer rather than do it.

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

No matter how hard you fight the darkness, every light casts a shadow, and the closer you get to the light, the darker that shadow becomes.

For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories. He was a wise man who invented beer

What a strange thing that which men call pleasure seems to be, and how astonishing the relation it has with what is thought to be its opposite, namely pain! A man cannot have both at the same time. Yet if he pursues and catches the one, he is almost always bound to catch the other also, like two creatures with one head.