"...when he looks at Beauty in the only way that Beauty can be seen - only then will it become possible for him to give birth not to images of virtue (because he's in touch with no images), but to true virtue [arete] (because he is in touch with true Beauty). The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he."

"How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?"

"Ignorance of all things is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all; but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune."

"For to fear death, men, is in fact nothing other than to seem to be wise, but not to be so. For it is to seem to know what one does not know: no one knows whether death does not even happen to be the greatest of all goods for the human being; but people fear it as though they knew well that it is the greatest of evils."

"Every king springs from a race of slaves, and every slave had kings among his ancestors."

"He who is of calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden."

"Knowledge becomes evil if the aim be not virtuous."

"There can be no fairer spectacle than that of a man, who combines the possession of moral beauty in his soul with outward beauty of form, corresponding and harmonizing with the former, because the same great pattern enters both."

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

"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."

"Philosophy is the highest music."

"For once touched by love, everyone becomes a poet."

"The gods' service is tolerable, man's intolerable."

"Because a freeman ought not to be a slave in the acquisition of knowledge of any kind. Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind."

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

"Caring about the happiness of others, we find our own."

"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."

"Your silence gives consent."

"No law or ordinance is mightier than understanding."

"Love - a grave mental disease."

"He was a wise man who invented beer."

"For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions."

"Every man is a poet when he is in love."

"The man who finds that in the course of his life he has done a lot of wrong often wakes up at night in terror, like a child with a nightmare, and his life is full of foreboding: but the man who is conscious of no wrongdoing is filled with cheerfulness and with the comfort of old age."

"Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them."

"Apply yourself both now and in the next life. Without effort, you cannot be prosperous. Though the land be good, You cannot have an abundant crop without cultivation."

"A dog has the soul of a philosopher."

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

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

"No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nature and education."

"The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort."

"And whenever any one informs us that he has found a man who knows all the arts, and all things else that anybody knows, and every single thing with a higher degree of accuracy than any other man "whoever tells us this, I think that we can only imagine him to be a simple creature who is likely to have been deceived by some wizard or actor whom he met, and whom he thought all-knowing, because he himself was unable to analyze the nature of knowledge and ignorance and imitation."

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

"Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity " I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only a euphemism for folly."

"Wise men talk because they have something to say; Fools, because they have to say something."

"...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."

"We've heard many people say and have often said ourselves that justice is doing one's own work and not meddling with what isn't one's own ... Then, it turns out that this doing one's own work-provided that it comes to be in a certain way-is justice."

"Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty."

"The poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his sneses, and the mind is no longer in him."

"Injustice is censured because the censures are afraid of suffering, and not from any fear which they have of doing injustice."

"Knowledge without justice ought to be called cunning rather than wisdom."

"The god of love lives in a state of need. It is a need. It is an urge. It is a homeostatic imbalance. Like hunger and thirst, it's almost impossible to stamp out."

"Rather I think that a man who ... is willing ... to value learning as long as he lives, not supposing that old age brings him wisdom of itself, will necessarily pay more attention to the rest of his life."

"One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."

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

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

"The life which is unexamined is not worth living."

"Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something."

"To conquer oneself is the best and noblest victory, to be vanquished by one's own nature is the worst and most ignoble defeat."

"The society we have described can never grow into a reality or see the light of day, and there will be no end to the troubles of states, or indeed, my dear Glaucon, of humanity itself, till philosophers become rulers in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands."