Quotes from Plato

There is no such thing as a lover's oath.

for the unexamined life is not worth living.

It is our duty to select the best and most dependable theory that human intelligence can supply, and use it as a raft to ride the seas of life.

Love is merely the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole.

O dear Pan and all the other gods of this place, grant that I may be beautiful inside. Let all my external possessions be in friendly harmony with what is within. May I consider the wise man rich. As for gold, let me have as much as a moderate man could bear and carry with him.

The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself.

Love is of something, and that which love desires is not that which love is or has; for no man desires that which he is or has. And love is of the beautiful, and therefore has not the beautiful. And the beautiful is the good, and therefore, in wanting and desiring the beautiful, love also wants and desires the good.

If anyone comes to the gates of poetry and expects to become an adequate poet by acquiring expert knowledge of the subject without the Muses' madness, he will fail, and his self-controlled verses will be eclipsed by the poetry of men who have been driven out of their minds.

Then we shan't regard anyone as a lover of knowledge or wisdom who is fussy about what he studies…

Appearance tyrannizes over truth.

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.

T]hose who practice philosophy in the right way are in training for dying and they fear death least of all men.

And isn't it a bad thing to be deceived about the truth, and a good thing to know what the truth is? For I assume that by knowing the truth you mean knowing things as they really are.

Pleasure is the bait of sin

A sensible man will remember that the eyes may be confused in two ways - by a change from light to darkness or from darkness to light; and he will recognise that the same thing happens to the soul.

No thing more excellent nor more valuable than wine was ever granted mankind by God.

Love is a madness produced by an unsatisfiable rational desire to understand the ultimate truth about the world.

Time is the moving image of eternity.

But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea.

I prefer nothing, unless it is true.

The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself; to be conquered by yourself is of all things most shameful and vile.

They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth. -Plato, philosopher (427-347 BCE)

For as there are misanthropists, or haters of men, there are also misologists, or haters of ideas, and both spring from the same cause, which is ignorance of the world.

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.