Born: 428/427 or 424/423 BCE in Athens
Died: 348/347 BCE (aged c. 80) in Athens
Nationality: Greek
Interests: Rhetoric, art, literature, epistemology, justice, virtue, politics, education, family, militarism
Ideas: Theory of Forms, Platonic idealism, Platonic realism, hyperuranion, metaxy, khôra
Plato was a philosopher, as well as mathematician, in Classical Greece.
1) Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.
2) Wise men speak because they have something to say, fools because they have to say something.
3) Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.
4) Good actions give strength to ourselves and inspire good actions in others.
5) 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.
6) We are twice armed if we fight with faith.
7) 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.
8) Thinking: the talking of the soul with himself.
9) Life must be lived as play.
10) Life is a serious mental disease.
11) Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination
and life to everything.
12) For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories.
13) 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.
14) The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
15) The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.
16) I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.
17) The beginning is the most important part of the work.
18) Death is not the worst that can happen to men.
19) If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.
20) Ignorance, the root and the stem of every evil.
21) Never discourage anyone... who continually makes progress, no matter how slow.
22) There is no such thing as a lover's oath.
23) You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.
24) You cannot conceive the many without the one.
25) Democracy is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequal alike.
