Plato Quotes on Education (17 Quotes)

Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes.

The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful.

The true lover of learning then must his earliest youth, as far as in him lies, desire all truth.... He whose desires are drawn toward knowledge in every form will be absorbed in the pleasures of the soul, and will hardly feel bodily pleasures I mean, if he be a true philosopher and not a sham one ... Then how can he who has the magnificence of mind and is the spectator of all times and all existence, think much of human life He cannot. Or can such a one account death fearful No indeed.

The noblest of all studies is the study of what man is and of what life he should live.

Entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all; too much cleverness and too much learning, accompanied with ill bringing-up, are far more fatal.

If the study of all these sciences which we have enumerated, should ever bring us to their mutual association and relationship, and teach us the nature of the ties which bind them together, I believe that the diligent treatment of them will forward the objects which we have in view, and that the labor, which otherwise would be fruitless, will be well bestowed.

We do not learn; and what we call learning is only a process of recollection.

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

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

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

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

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

Let us describe the education of our men. What then is the education to be Perhaps we could hardly find a better than that which the experience of the past has already discovered, which consists, I believe, in gymnastic, for the body, and music for the mind.

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

The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things.

The most important part of education is proper training in the nursery.

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.