James Wood, comp. Dictionary of Quotations. 1899.
Plato
[Greek]—Let nobody speak mischief of anybody.
[Greek]—Nothing in the affairs of mankind is worth serious anxiety.
All the pursuits of men are the pursuits of women also, and in all of them a woman is only a weaker man.
All things are for the sake of the good, and it is the cause of everything beautiful.
All things are symbolical, and what we call results are beginnings.
Animal implume bipes—A two-legged animal without feathers.His definition of man.
Do not train boys to learning by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be the better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.
Education is the constraining and directing of youth towards that right reason which the law affirms, and which the experience of the best of our elders has sanctioned as truly great.
Evils can never pass away; for there must always remain something which is antagonistic to good.
Excess generally causes reaction, and produces a change in the opposite direction, whether it be in the seasons, or in individuals, or in governments.
God does with His children as a master does with his pupils; the more hopeful they are, the more work He gives them to do.
Good poets are the inspired interpreters of the gods.
He best restrains anger who remembers God’s eye is upon him.
He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.
He who has not been a servant cannot become a praiseworthy master; 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, and next towards our elders.
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.
He who is good has no kind of envy.
He who spends himself for all that is noble, and gains by nothing but what is just, will hardly be notably wealthy or distressfully poor.
Hereditary honours are a noble and a splendid treasure to descendants.
I see thy vanity through the holes of thy coat.To the Cynic.
Just as gymnastic exercise is necessary to keep the body healthy, so is musical exercise necessary to keep the soul healthy; the proper nourishment of the intellect and passions can no more take place without music than the proper functions of the stomach and the blood without exercise.Interpreted by Ruskin.
Justice, self-command, and true thought are our salvation.
Knowledge becomes evil if the aim be not virtuous.
Knowledge without justice ought to be called cunning rather than wisdom.
Labour is preferable to idleness, as brightness to rust.
Love is the eldest, noblest, and mightiest of the gods, and the chiefest author and giver of virtue in life and happiness after death.
Next to the gods, of all man’s possessions his soul is the mightiest, being the most his own.
No one ever teaches well who wants to teach, or governs well who wants to govern.
No one knows whether death, which men in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.
Of all the possessions of a man, next to the gods, his soul is the mightiest, being the most his own.
Opinion is a medium between knowledge and ignorance.
Passionate people are like men who stand upon their heads; they see all things in the wrong way.
Philosophy is an elegant thing, if any one modestly meddles with it; but, if he is conversant with it more than is becoming, it corrupts the man.
Pleasure is the greatest incentive to evil.
Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
Reason, looking upwards, and carried to the true above, realises a delight in wisdom, unknown to the other parts of our nature.
Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men.
Such a genius as philosophers must of necessity have is wont but seldom, in all its parts, to meet in one man; but its different parts generally spring up in different persons.
The most important part of education is right training in the nursery.
The most virtuous of all men is he that contents himself with being virtuous without seeking to appear so.
The movement of sound, such as will reach the soul for the education of it in virtue, we call Music.
The problem of philosophy is, for all that exists conditionally, to find a ground unconditioned and absolute.
The things that destroy us are injustice, insolence, and foolish thoughts; and the things which save us are justice, self-command, and true thought, which things dwell in the loving powers of the gods.
There are few men so obstinate in their atheism whom a pressing danger will not reduce to an acknowledgment of the Divine power.
There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.
Trees and fields tell me nothing; men are my teachers.
Truth is the body of God, and light his shadow.
We must not regard what the many say of us; but what he, the one man who has understanding of just and unjust, will say, and what the truth will say.
We ought to regard our servants as friends in a lower state.
Whoso, without poetic frenzy, knocks at the doors of the Muses, presuming that his art alone will suffice to make him a poet, both he and his poetry are hopelessly thrown away.
Wisdom alone is a science of other sciences and of itself.
You begin in error when you suggest that we should regard the opinion of the many about just and unjust, good and evil, honourable and dishonourable.