Plato

Greek Philosopher (427-347 B.C.)

As a student of Socrates, and the son of wealthy influential Athenian parents, Plato was destined to be a great thinker. Often concealing his own views behind his former teacher, Plato wrote dialogues expressing realistic conversations about singular issues such as morality. The Apology, which was a description of the philosophical life and teachings of Socrates, pervaded a defence before the Athenian jury and challenged whether an individual citizen could ever be justified in refusing to obey the state. Although throughout his dialogues Socrates is a fictional character, he diversely changes as Plato develops, expresses, and defends his own conclusions about central philosophical questions.

Plato’s grandeur is shown in his dialogue the Republic. Delving into the nature of justice, what it means to be virtuous, courage, friendship, wisdom, moderation and courage, it challenged both the individual and the society as a whole. With his allegory of the cave, whereby life is nothing more than images flickering from the shadow of a fire, and his interpretation of government and elucidation of love, Plato grasped the essence of the inhumanity and injustice caused by those unworthy to rule whilst contrasting reality by showing how humanity must live virtuously, and by doing so, prosper.

Quotes:

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

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

No human thing is of serious importance.

The heaviest penalty for deciding to engage in politics is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.

Good actions give strength to ourselves and inspire good actions in others.

When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.

If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.

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

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

I shall assume that your silence gives consent.

The greatest wealth is to live content with little.

Excess of liberty, whether it lies in state or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.

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

As the builders say, the larger stones do not lie well without the lesser.

The good is the beautiful.

How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?

The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.

Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.

The gods’ service is tolerable, man’s intolerable.

Science is nothing but perception.

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.

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.

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.

Ignorance of all things is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all; but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune.
He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.

Let parents bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence.

Man…is a tame or civilized animal; never the less, he requires proper instruction and a fortunate nature, and then of all animals he becomes the most divine and most civilized; but if he be insufficiently or ill- educated he is the most savage of earthly creatures.

Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.

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.

Knowledge becomes evil if the aim be not virtuous.

Friends have all things in common.

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

Death is not the worst than can happen to men.

Ignorance, the root and the stem of every evil.

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.