Below are 50 must-read life lessons from Plato:

  • We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.
  • Knowledge becomes evil if the aim be not virtuous.
  • I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work.
  • Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil.
  • A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.
  • Wealth is well known to be a great comforter.
  • Excess generally causes reaction, and produces a change in the opposite direction, whether it be in the seasons, or in individuals, or in governments.
  • For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories.
  • Good actions give strength to ourselves and inspire good actions in others.
  • Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.
  • Hardly any human being is capable of pursuing two professions or two arts rightly.
  • He was a wise man who invented beer.
  • He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.
  • He who is not a good servant will not be a good master.
  • 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.
  • He who steals a little steals with the same wish as he who steals much, but with less power.
  • Honesty is for the most part less profitable than dishonesty.
  • Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.
  • Those who intend on becoming great should love neither themselves nor their own things, but only what is just, whether it happens to be done by themselves or others.
  • To love rightly is to love what is orderly and beautiful in an educated and disciplined way.
  • To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he might have the less.
  • Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man.
  • Twice and thrice over, as they say, good is it to repeat and review what is good.
  • Virtue is relative to the actions and ages of each of us in all that we do.
  • We are twice armed if we fight with faith.
  • I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.
  • I shall assume that your silence gives consent.
  • I would fain grow old learning many things.
  • If a man neglects education, he walks lame to the end of his life.
  • If particulars are to have meaning, there must be universals.
  • 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.
  • It is right to give every man his due.
  • No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.
  • Knowledge is true opinion.
  • Knowledge without justice ought to be called cunning rather than wisdom.
  • Let parents bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence.
  • We do not learn; and what we call learning is only a process of recollection.
  • Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.
  • Whatever deceives men seems to produce a magical enchantment.
  • When men speak ill of thee, live so as nobody may believe them.
  • When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.
  • Wisdom alone is the science of other sciences.
  • Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.
  • All the gold which is under or upon the earth is not enough to give in exchange for virtue.
  • Your silence gives consent.
  • A hero is born among a hundred, a wise man is found among a thousand, but an accomplished one might not be found even among a hundred thousand men.
  • Any man may easily do harm, but not every man can do good to another.
  • As the builders say, the larger stones do not lie well without the lesser.
  • Courage is knowing what not to fear.
  • Death is not the worst that can happen to men.