Plato’s “The Republic” Quotes (20 Quotes)

If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.

It's not at all uncommon to find a person's desires compelling him to go against his reason, and to see him cursing himself and venting his passion on the source of the compulsion within him. It's as if there were two warring factions, with passion fighting on the side of reason. But I'm sure you won't claim that you had ever, in yourself or in anyone else, met a case of passion siding with his desires against the rational mind, when the rational mind prohibits resistance.

Knowledge unqualified id knowledge simply of something learned.

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

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 heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.

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.

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

The philosopher whose dealings are with divine order himself acquires the characteristics of order and divinity.

The soul takes nothing with her to the next world but her education and her culture. At the beginning of the journey to the next world, one's education and culture can either provide the greatest assistance, or else act as the greatest burden, to the person who has just died.

And then, at this stage, every dictator comes up with the notorious and typical demand: he asks the people for bodyguards to protect him, the people's champion.

Then we shan't regard anyone as a lover of knowledge or wisdom who is fussy about what he studies…

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.

There is a constant suspicion that headache and giddiness are to be ascribed to philosophy, and hence all practising or making trial of virtue in the higher sense is absolutely stopped; for a man is always fancying that he is being made ill, and is in constant anxiety about the state of his body.

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

There is in every one of us, even those who seem to be most moderate, a type of desire that is terrible, wild, and lawless.

Either we shall find what it is we are seeking or at least we shall free ourselves from the persuasion that we know what we do not know.

There's no chance of their having a conscious glimpse of the truth as long as they refuse to disturb the things they take for granted and remain incapable of explaining them. For if your starting-point is unknown, and your end-point and intermediate stages are woven together out of unknown material, there may be coherence, but knowledge is completely out of the question.

Have you ever sensed that our soul is immortal and never dies?

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.