The heaviest penalty for deciding to engage in politics is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.
Each citizen should play his part in the community according to his individual gifts.
The life which is unexamined is not worth living.
Love is a serious mental disease.
...and when one of them meets the other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy and one will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment...
You're my Star, a stargazer too, and I wish that I were Heaven, with a billion eyes to look at you!
Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.
…if a man can be properly said to love something, it must be clear that he feels affection for it as a whole, and does not love part of it to the exclusion of the rest.
Education is teaching our children to desire the right things.
Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.
One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill... we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.
False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.
Philosophy is the highest music.
In practice people who study philosophy too long become very odd birds, not to say thoroughly vicious; while even those who are the best of them are reduced by...[philosophy] to complete uselessness as members of society.
How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?
Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.
The philosopher whose dealings are with divine order himself acquires the characteristics of order and divinity.
For this feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy.
Only a philosopher's mind grows wings, since its memory always keeps it as close as possible to those realities by being close to which the gods are divine.