Quote collection
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"And we must beg Homer and the other poets not to be angry if we strike out these and similar passages, not because they are unpoetical, or unattractive to the popular ear, but because the greater the poetical charm in them, the less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who are meant to be free, and who should fear slavery more than death."
"The race of the guardians must be kept pure."
"As the proverb says, "a good beginning is half the business" and "to have begun well" is praised by all."
"He that lendeth to another in time of prosperity, shall never want help himself in the time of adversity."
"Let us affirm what seems to be the truth, that, whether one is or is not, one and the others in relation to themselves and one another, all of them, in every way, are and are not, and appear to be and appear not to be."
"Before all it's necessary to look after the Soul, if you want the head and the rest of the body to function correctly."
".. we shall not be properly educated ourselves, nor will the guardians whom we are training, until we can recognise the qualities of discipline, courage, generosity, greatness of mind, and others akin to them, as well as their opposites in all their manifestations."
"The truth is that we isolate a particular kind of love and appropriate it for the name of love, which really belongs to a wider whole."
"Wine fills the heart with courage."
"He whom loves touches not walks in darkness."
"Is it not the excess and greed of this and the neglect of all other things that revolutionizes this constitution too and prepares the way for the necessity of a dictatorship?"
"Madness, provided it comes as the gift of heaven, is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings... the men of old who gave things their names saw no disgrace or reproach in madness; otherwise they would not have connected it with the name of the noblest of arts, the art of discerning the future, and called it the manic art... So, according to the evidence provided by our ancestors, madness is a nobler thing than sober sense... madness comes from God, whereas sober sense is merely human."
"You need some knowledge to recognize knowledge, so where does the first knowledge come from?"
"I really do not know, Socrates, how to express what I mean. For somehow or other our arguments, on whatever ground we rest them, seem to turn round and walk away from us."
"You ought not attempt to cure the eyes without the head, or the head without the body, so neither ought you attempt to cure the body without the soul."
"It's like this, I think: the excellence of a good body doesn't make the soul good, but the other way around: the excellence of a good soul makes the body as good as it can be."
"Time is the moving imago of the unmoving eternity."
"Music gives wings to the mind and flight to the imagination."
"For the poet is a light winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses and the mind is no longer with him. When he has not attained this state he is powerless and unable to utter his oracles."
"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."