Plato

No one ever teaches well who wants to teach, or governs well who wants to govern.

Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.

Necessity... the mother of invention.

The measure of a man is what he does with power.

Honesty is for the most part less profitable than dishonesty.

Courage is a kind of salvation.

There are two things a person should never be angry at, what they can help, and what they cannot.

If a man neglects education, he walks lame to the end of his life.

To be sure I must; and therefore I may assume that your silence gives consent.

This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.

People are like dirt. They can either nourish you and help you grow as a person or they can stunt your growth and make you wilt and die.

This City is what it is because our citizens are what they are.

Tyranny naturally arises out of democracy.

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.

Attention to health is life's greatest hindrance.

All the gold which is under or upon the earth is not enough to give in exchange for virtue.

No law or ordinance is mightier than understanding.

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.

Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?

Knowledge is true opinion.

The rulers of the state are the only persons who ought to have the privilege of lying, either at home or abroad; they may be allowed to lie for the good of the state.

The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction.

When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.

To suffer the penalty of too much haste, which is too little speed.

Any man may easily do harm, but not every man can do good to another.

Man never legislates, but destinies and accidents, happening in all sorts of ways, legislate in all sorts of ways.

To love rightly is to love what is orderly and beautiful in an educated and disciplined way.

No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.

Wonder is the feeling of the philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.

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

The eyes of the soul of the multitudes are unable to endure the vision of the divine.

The most virtuous are those who content themselves with being virtuous without seeking to appear so.

If particulars are to have meaning, there must be universals.

When there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income.

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

It is a common saying, and in everybody's mouth, that life is but a sojourn.

Whatever deceives men seems to produce a magical enchantment.

It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other.

I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work.

No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.

There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.

A state arises, as I conceive, out of the needs of mankind; no one is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants.

Virtue is relative to the actions and ages of each of us in all that we do.

Man is a wingless animal with two feet and flat nails.

I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly conflict.

The community which has neither poverty nor riches will always have the noblest principles.

Not to help justice in her need would be an impiety.

To go to the world below, having a soul which is like a vessel full of injustice, is the last and worst of all the evils.

When a Benefit is wrongly conferred, the author of the Benefit may often be said to injure.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.