Plato Quotes
Plato was an Athenian philosopher and the founder of the Academy, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. A student of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle, he wrote dialogues exploring justice, beauty, knowledge, and the nature of reality. The quotes below are attributed to Plato, organized by topic.
Browse Plato by topic
Plato on Death
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Attributed to Plato:
“Death is not the worst that can happen to men.”
Plato on God
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“Some say that the body is the " tomb " of the soul , their notion being that the soul is buried in the present life ; and again, because by its means the soul gives any signs which it gives, it is for this reason also properly called "sign". But I think it most likely that the Orphic poets gave this name, with the idea that the soul is undergoing punishment for something; they think it has the body as an enclosure to keep it safe, like a prison, and this is, as the name itself denotes, the "safe" for the soul, until the penalty is paid, and not even a letter needs to be changed.”
400b–c -
“No man of sense can put himself and his soul under the control of names... You must consider courageously and thoroughly and not accept anything carelessly.”
440c–d -
“Those who purge the soul believe that the soul can receive no benefit from any teachings offered to it until someone by cross-questioning reduces him who is cross-questioned to an attitude of modesty, by removing the opinions that obstruct the teachings, and thus purges him and makes him think that he knows only what he knows, and no more.”
230c-d
Plato on Happiness
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Attributed to Plato:
“He who is of calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age.”
Plato on Justice
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Attributed to Plato:
“Justice means minding one's own business and not meddling with other men's concerns.”
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Attributed to Plato:
“Mankind censures injustice fearing they may be the victim of it, not because they shrink from committing it.”
Plato on Knowledge
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Attributed to Plato:
“Necessity is the mother of invention.”
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“Philosophy begins in wonder.”
155d, The Dialogues of Plato , Volume 3, 1871, p. 377 -
Attributed to Plato:
“Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.”
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Attributed to Plato:
“Geometry will draw the soul toward truth and create the spirit of philosophy.”
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Attributed to Plato:
“Ignorance is the root and stem of every evil.”
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“I shall assume that your silence gives consent .”
435b -
“If the very essence of knowledge changes, at the moment of the change to another essence of knowledge there would be no knowledge, and if it is always changing, there will always be no knowledge, and by this reasoning there will be neither anyone to know nor anything to be known. But if there is always that which knows and that which is known —if the beautiful, the good, and all the other verities exist— I do not see how there is any likeness between these conditions of which I am now speaking and flux or motion.”
440a–b -
“Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.”
155d, The Dialogues of Plato , Volume 3, 1871, p. 377 -
“Perception and knowledge could never be the same.”
186e -
“Neither perception nor true opinion, nor reason or explanation combined with true opinion could be knowledge… Then our art of midwifery declare to us that all the offspring that have been born are mere wind-eggs and not worth rearing… and if you remain barren, you will be less harsh and gentler to your associates, for you will have the wisdom not to think you know that which you do not know.”
210a-c -
“I do see one large and grievous kind of ignorance, separate from the rest, and as weighty as all the other parts put together. Thinking that one knows a thing when one does not know it. Through this, I believe, all the mistakes of the mind are caused in all of us.”
229c
Plato on Life
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“The beginning is the most important part of the work.”
The beginning in every task is the chief thing. -
Attributed to Plato:
“Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.”
Plato on Mind
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Attributed to Plato:
“When the mind is thinking, it is talking to itself.”
Plato on Nature
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“It is impossible that evils should be done away with, for there must always be something opposed to the good; and they… must inevitably hover about mortal nature and this earth. Therefore we ought to try to escape from earth to the dwelling of the gods as quickly as we can; and to escape is to become like God, so far as this is possible… God is in no wise and in no manner unrighteous, but utterly and perfectly righteous, and there is nothing so like him as that one of us who in turn becomes most nearly perfect in righteousness.”
176a–c
Plato on Politics
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Attributed to Plato:
“Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, cities will never have rest from their evils.”
Things actually not said by Plato
A number of widely-shared lines are circulated as Plato but are in fact from someone else. Did Plato say these? No. Each entry below pairs the line with the person who actually wrote it.
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Did Plato say this? No.
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
This line was written by the Scottish minister and author John Watson, under the pen name Ian MacLaren, in an 1897 Christmas message published in The British Weekly. The original phrasing was 'Be pitiful, for every man is fighting a hard battle.' It has been misattributed to Plato, Socrates, Philo of Alexandria, and others, but does not appear in any of their works.
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Did Plato say this? No.
“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
This line appears in George Santayana's Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922). The misattribution to Plato was popularised in part by the 2001 film Black Hawk Down, which displays the line on screen as a quote from Plato. It does not appear in any of Plato's dialogues.
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Did Plato say this? No.
“Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.”
This aphorism is widely circulated as Plato but does not appear in any of his dialogues. Its earliest verifiable English-language appearances are in 20th-century quotation compilations, with no underlying classical source identified.
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Did Plato say this? No.
“Atheism is a disease of the soul, before it becomes an error of the understanding.”
This quote is commonly attributed to philosophers but the actual source is William Fleming. Wikiquote's note on this attribution: Misattributed to Plato in Laws by Conservapedia . Actual source: William Fleming , as quoted in Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay by Samuel Austin Allibone, 1816–1889.
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Did Plato say this? No.
“Watch a man at play for an hour and you can learn more about him than in talking to him for a year.”
This quote is commonly attributed to philosophers but its actual source is uncertain or unverified in the standard reference works. Wikiquote's note on this attribution: Attributed to Plato in Confidence : How to Succeed at Being Yourself (1987) by Alan Loy McGinnis, this is probably a paraphrase of a statement which occurs in Letter of Advice to a Young Gentleman Leaving the University Concerning His Behaviour and Conversation in the World (1907) by Richard Lindgar
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Did Plato say this? No.
“Necessity is the mother of invention.”
This quote is commonly attributed to philosophers but its actual source is uncertain or unverified in the standard reference works. Wikiquote's note on this attribution: Commonly misattributed due to Benjamin Jowett 's popular idiomatic translation (1871) of Plato's Republic , Book II, 369c as "The true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention." Jowett's translation is noted for injecting flowery, if not florid, language familiar to his Victorian era
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Did Plato say this? No.
“Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, gaiety and life to everything. It is the essence of order, and leads to all that is good, just, and beautiful, of which it is the invisible, but nevertheless dazzling, passionate, and eternal form.”
This quote is commonly attributed to philosophers but its actual source is uncertain or unverified in the standard reference works. Wikiquote's note on this attribution: This quotation is not known to exist in Plato's writings. It apparently first appeared as a quotation attributed to Plato in The Pleasures of Life, Part II by Sir John Lubbock (Macmillan and Company, London and New York), published in 1889.
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Did Plato say this? No.
“Wisdom begins in wonder.”
The exact phrase 'wisdom begins in wonder' does not appear in any surviving Greek text. The closest source is Plato's Theaetetus 155d, where Socrates says 'wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder' — a related but distinct claim. Aristotle's Metaphysics 982b makes a similar point. The modern English compression is not a direct translation of either.
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Did Plato say this? No.
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
The line appears in the 1897 Christmas issue of British magazine The British Weekly under the pen name Ian Maclaren (the Scottish minister and author John Watson). It has nothing to do with Plato or Philo of Alexandria, despite frequent misattribution to both. The Quote Investigator and Garson O'Toole have documented the actual source in detail.
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Did Plato say this? No.
“Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.”
This line is regularly attributed to Plato but does not appear in any of his dialogues. The earliest known appearance is in the 1903 essay collection Old Friends and New by Sarah Orne Jewett, where it is presented as a folk aphorism. There is no Greek original; the diction is modern English.
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Did Plato say this? No.
“Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil.”
Plato's dialogues contain related sentiments — the Socratic doctrine that no one does evil knowingly — but the exact phrasing 'ignorance, the root and stem of all evil' is not from any Platonic dialogue. The closest sources are the Meno and the Protagoras, which argue that virtue is knowledge, not the much more general claim about evil that the popular line implies.
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Did Plato say this? No.
“Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything.”
This line is universally attributed to Plato but does not appear in any of his surviving dialogues. Plato's discussions of music in the Republic, the Laws, and the Timaeus take a quite different view — emphasizing music's power to shape the soul for better or worse and the need for political regulation of musical modes. The popular quote is twentieth-century motivational literature, not Plato.
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Did Plato say this? No.
“You can learn more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”
Attributed to Plato in Food Is the Frosting-Company Is the Cake (2007) by Maggie Marshall
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Did Plato say this? No.
“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.”
This quotation, often attributed on the Internet to Plato, cannot be found in any of Plato's writings, nor can it be found in any published work anywhere until recent years. If it really were a quotation by Plato, then some author in the recorded literature of the last several centuries would have mentioned that quote, but they did not. The sentiment isn't new, however. The ancient Roman Seneca, in his work on "Morals," quoted an earlier Roman writer, Lucretius (who wrote about the year 50 B.C.), as saying "we are as much afraid in the light as children in the dark." (Seneca was paraphrasing a longer passage by Lucretius from De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), Book II, lines 56 et…
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Did Plato say this? No.
“Empathy is the highest form of knowledge. (Sometimes this appears as ‘Empathy is the highest form of knowledge, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another's world’.)”
Very common online pop-psychological slogan which has been traced no further than a graduation speech to students at San Francisco University High School given by Bill Bullard, who within the speech attributes it to George Eliot. For the Faculty . The atttribution to Eliot seems likewise to be false.
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Did Plato say this? No.
“Successful people never worry about what others are doing.”
Alleged source in Plato unknown. Earliest occurrence to have been located is a Tweet from 2011 . (Disputed.)
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Did Plato say this? No.
“Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they would like to say something. As empty vessels make the loudest sounds, so they that have the least wit are the greatest babblers.”
Often attributed to Plato, it cannot be found completely in any of his writings ( see this ). The quote is attributed to Plato in A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors of the World, Both Ancient and Modern (page 560) by Tryon Edwards . In the Symposium (see above) Plato likens empty vessels to fools for their lack of content, but says nothing of their sound, because clay vessels and not wooden vessels were commonly used in the day of Plato, and the popular common saying about empty barrels would have become common knowledge only once the wooden barrel later had become a standard vessel type. In the Laches (see above) Plato includes a… (Disputed.)
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Did Plato say this? No.
“The highest form of pure thought is in mathematics.”
Also attributed on quote sites without a source, and can be found in some recent non-academic books but also without a source, and google books shows no examples of the quote in any 20th century book . Earliest example found is a usenet post from 11 April 1990 . (Disputed.)