Plato Men Quotations

Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.

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.

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.

All men are by nature equal, made all of the same earth by one Workman; and however we deceive ourselves, as dear unto God is the poor peasant as the mighty prince.

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.

There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.

A hero is born among a hundred, a wise man is found among a thousand, but an accomplished one might not be found even among a hundred thousand men.

The measure of a man is what he does with power.

Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety.

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

Justice means minding one's own business and not meddling with other men's concerns.

When there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income.

If a man neglects education, he walks lame to the end of his life.

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

Whatever deceives men seems to produce a magical enchantment.

Nothing can be more absurd than the practice that prevails in our country of men and women not following the same pursuits with all their strengths and with one mind, for thus, the state instead of being whole is reduced to half.

Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men.

When men speak ill of thee, live so as nobody may believe them.

The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men.

Death is not the worst that can happen to men.

Then not only an old man, but also a drunkard, becomes a second time a child.

No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nature and education.

For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories.

No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.

One man cannot practice many arts with success.

Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man.

It is right to give every man his due.

Any man may easily do harm, but not every man can do good to another.

Man is a wingless animal with two feet and flat nails.

States are as the men, they grow out of human characters.

The good man is the only excellent musician, because he gives forth a perfect harmony not with a lyre or other instrument but with the whole of his life.

You should not honor men more than truth.

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.

The soul of him who has education is whole and perfect and escapes the worst disease, but, if a man's education be neglected, he walks lamely through life and returns good for nothing to the world below.

The man who hath music in his soul will be most in love with the loveliest.

There's a victory and defeat-the first and best of victories, the lowest and worst of defeats-which each man gains or sustains at the hands not of another, but of himself.

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.

Let every man remind their descendants that they also are soldiers who must not desert the ranks of their ancestors, or from cowardice fall behind.

Either death is a state of nothingness and utter consciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if death be of such a nature, I say that to die is to gain; for eternity is then only a single night.

In heaven there is laid up a pattern which he who chooses may behold, and beholding, set his own house in order. The time has now arrived at which they must raise the eye of the soul to the Universal Light which lightens all things. With the eye ever directed toward things fixed and immutable which neither injure nor are injured - these they cannot help imitating. But I quite admit the difficulty of believing that in every man there is an eye of the soul which by the right direction is re-illumined, and is more precious far than ten thousand bodily eyes.

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; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter light, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light.

'But the man who is ready to taste every form of knowledge, is glad to learn and never satisfied - he's the man who deserves to be called a philosopher, isn't he?'

For neither does wealth bring honour to the owner, if he be a coward; of such a one the wealth belongs to another, and not to himself. Nor does beauty and strength of body, when dwelling in a base and cowardly man, appear comely, but the reverse of comely, making the possessor more conspicuous, and manifesting forth his cowardice.

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.

The soul of man is immortal and imperishable.

In order for man to succeed in life, God provided him with two means, education and physical activity. Not separately, one for the soul and the other for the body, but for the two together. With these means, man can attain perfection.

If a man be endowed with a generous mind, this is the best kind of nobility.

It would be better for me ... that multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself.

O youth or young man, who fancy that you are neglected by the gods, know that if you become worse, you shall go to worse souls, or if better to the better... In every succession of life and death, you will do and suffer what like may fitly suffer at the hands of like. This is the justice of heaven.

To a good man nothing that happens is evil.

The State which we have founded must possess the four cardinal virtues of wisdom, courage, discipline and justice ... Justice is the principle which has in fact been followed throughout, the principle of one man one job, of minding one s own business , in the sense of doing the job for which one is naturally fitted and not interfering with other people.

Watch a man at play for an hour and you can learn more about him than in talking to him for a year.

The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.

The cause of all the blunders committed by man arises from this excessive self-love. For the lover is blinded by the object loved; so that he passes a wrong judgment on what is just, good and beautiful, thinking that he ought always to honor what belongs to himself in preference to truth. For he who intends to be a great man ought to love neither himself nor his own things, but only what is just, whether it happens to be done by himself, or by another.

Neither human wisdom nor divine inspiration can confer upon man any greater blessing than this [live a life of happiness and harmony here on earth].

True opinions are a fine thing and do all sorts of good so long as they stay in their place; but they will not stay long. They run away from a man's mind, so they are not worth much until you tether them by working out the reason. Once they are tied down, they become knowledge, and are stable.

'But surely "blind" is just how you would describe men who have no true knowledge of reality, and no clear standard in their mind to refer to, as a painter refers to his model, and which they can study closely before they start laying down rules about what is fair or right or good where they are needed, or maintaining, as Guardians, any rules that already exist.' 'Yes, blind is just about what they are'

Again, truth should be highly valued; if, as we were saying, a lie is useless to the gods, and useful only as a medicine to men, then the use of such medicines should be restricted to physicians; private individuals have no business with them.

It is proper for every one to consider, in the case of all men, that he who has not been a servant cannot become a praiseworthy master; and it is meet that we should plume ourselves rather on acting the part of a servant properly than that of the master, first, towards the laws, (for in this way we are servants of the gods), and next, towards our elders.

The soul takes nothing with her to the other world but her education and culture; and these, it is said, are of the greatest service or of the greatest injury to the dead man, at the very beginning of his journey hither.

What the expression is intended to mean, I think, is that there is a better and a worse element in the character of each individual, and that when the naturally better element controls the worse then the man is said to be "master of himself", as a term of praise. But when - as a result of bad upbringing or bad company one s better element is overpowered by the numerical superiority of one s worse impulses, then one is criticized for not being master of oneself and for lack of self control.

Man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door of his prison and run away. . . . A man should wait, and not take his own life until God summons hiom.

Man was not made for himself alone

Misanthropy ariseth from a man trusting another without having sufficient knowledge of his character, and, thinking him to be truthful, sincere, and honourable, finds a little afterwards that he is wicked, faithless, and then he meets with another of the same character. When a man experiences this often, and more particularly from those whom he considered his most dear and best friends, at last, having frequently made a slip, he hates the whole world, and thinks that there is nothing sound at all in any of them.

The man who arrives at the doors of artistic creation with none of the madness of the Muses would be convinced that technical ability alone was enough to make an artist... what that man creates by means of reason will pale before the art of inspired beings.

Nothing more excellent or valuable than wine was every granted by the gods to man.

And so, when a person meets the half that is his very own, whatever his orientation, whether it's to young men or not, then something wonderful happens: the two are struck from their senses by love, by a sense of belonging to one another, and by desire, and they don't want to be separated from one another, not even for a moment.

When a man drinks wine at dinner, he begins to be better pleased with himself.

A man is not learned until he can read, write and swim.

Every man is a poet when he is in love.

We understand why children are afraid of darkness ... but why are men afraid of light?

Wherever it has been established that it is shameful to be involved with sexual relationships with men, that is due to evil on the part of the rulers, and to cowardice on the part of the governed.

Man is a two-legged animal without feathers.

Man never legislates,but destinies and accidents,happening in all sorts of ways,legislate in all sorts of ways.

... Societies aren t made of sticks and stones, but of men whose individual characters, by turning the scale one way or another, determine the direction of the whole.

All well bred men should have mastered the art of singing and dancing.

...in every man there is an eye of the soul, which...is more precious far than ten thousand bodily eyes, for by it alone is truth seen.

As there are misanthropists or haters of men, so also are there misologists, or haters of ideas.

You may be sure, dear Crito, that inaccurate language is not only in itself a mistake: it implants evil in men's souls.

In an honest man there is always something of a child.

An old man is twice a child, and so is a drunken man.

Those who are not schooled and practised in truth [who are not honest and upright men] can never manage aright the government, nor yet can those who spend their lives as closet philosophers; because the former have no high purpose to guide their actions, while the latter keep aloof from public life....

I know nothing more worthy of a man's ambition than that his son be the best of men.

Every serious man in dealing with really serious subjects carefully avoids writing. ... There does not exist, nor will there ever exist, any writing of mine dealing with this subject.

Man's greatest victory is over oneself.

What if the man could see Beauty Itself, pure, unalloyed, stripped of mortality, and all its pollution, stains, and vanities, unchanging, divine,... the man becoming in that communion, the friend of God,... ?

He who advises a sick man, whose manner of life is prejudicial to health, is clearly bound first of all to change his patient's manner of life.

How well I remember the aged poet Sophocles, when in answer to the question, "How does love suit with age, Sophocles - are you still the man you were?" he replied, "Peace, most gladly have I escaped the thing of which you speak; I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master."

Not only is the old man twice a child, but also the man who is drunk.

If a man says that it is right to give every one his due, and therefore thinks within his own mind that injury is due from a just man to his enemies but kindness to his friends, he was not wise who said so, for he spoke not the truth, for in no case has it appeared to be just to injure any one.

The qualities which a man seeks in his beloved are those characteristics of his own soul, whether he knows it or not.

Let praise be given equally to women as well as men who have been distinguished in virtue.

Renouncing the honors at which the world aims, I desire only to know the truth... and to the maximum of power, I exhort all other men to do the same.

Wise men speak because they have something to say

In one sense it is evident that the art of kingship does include the art of lawmaking. But the political ideal is not full authority for laws but rather full authority for a man who understands the art of kingship and has kingly ability.

The well-nurtured youth is one who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he became a man of gentle heart.....

No man's nature is able to know what is best for the social state of man; or, knowing, always able to do what is best.

If you ask: What is the good of education? The answer is easy: Education makes good men and good men act nobly.

I would have you imagine, then, that there exists in the mind of man a block of wax... and that we remember and know what is imprinted as long as the image lasts; but when the image is effaced, or cannot be taken, then we forget or do not know.

Nothing is more unworthy of a wise man, or ought to trouble him more, than to have allowed more time for trifling, and useless things, than they deserve.