The Republic
Plato
translated by A.D. Lindsay
(London, David Campbell, Everyman Library, 1992)
If our world and Homers are no longer the same, that is largely because of Plato.
Page vii.
Plato’s paternalistic political authoritarianism, his radical metaphysical distinction between a sensible and an intelligible world, only the latter of which can be known, his conviction that the moral life can guarantee happiness, his exclusion of what we know consider as literature from his ideal state, his conviction that philosophers should be given ultimate political power, his proposal for the common possession of spouses and children among the elite of his city - these are all views which, if they can be contemplated at all, are nothing short of wildly controversial.
Page vii.
Plato realizes that the nature of the good human life cannot be determined independently of the place of human beings within society; that the nature of society depends on the education of its citizens; that proper education requires a view of knowledge and of the nature of the world that can be known; that theories of knowledge presuppose psychological accounts of the individual that are to be educated; that psychology dictates particular attitudes toward the arts.
Page viii.
The Republic is therefore not only a work of philosophy. It is in fact the first work of philosophy ever written. … The Republic inaugurates philosophy as a practice and discipline and establishes what we still consider its nature. … from now on, reason becomes essential in defining what counts as human and in solving both private and public problems. The emphasis on rationality, on the existence of objective truth, and on the unbreakable connection between the search for truth and the attainments of happiness are the features that separate Plato’s world from Homer’s. For the first time, wisdom replaces glory as the true aim of human life.
Page ix.
The Republic praises the most abstract, rigorous and theoretical mods of thought at the expense of the practical, the rhetorical and the literary.
Page ix.
The Republic argues for, but also seduces us into, rationality.
Page ix.
The Republic … attempts .. to paint a picture in which the life of justice is the best and happiest human life.
Page x.
Anything that has a function has a corresponding aretê which it exhibits when it performs that function well.
Page xi.
Aretê refers to whatever it is that makes something a good instance of its kind.
Pager xi.
We might try to understand aretê as the quality which makes something outstanding in its group, as the feature that accounts for its justified notability.
Page xi.
A fruitful way of reading this work is to see it in party as an attempt to rehabilitate Socrates in the eyes of the world.
Page xii.
Socrates was not only unrecognized as a good man; on the contrary, he was executed as a common criminal, charged with impiety and with undermining the faith of the young in the city’s traditional values.
Page xii.
Justice, even totally undetected, brings happiness in its train; injustice, even completely unexposed, makes for a miserable life.
Pages xiii-xiv.
Plato believes that … the just and the moral life guarantee happiness, and therefore people in their right mind will always choose them over any other alternative.
Page xiv.
Justice in the city is exactly like justice in the soul writ large’.
Page xiv.
We also censor children’s educational material - and we do it on similar grounds.
Page xv.
Poetry, he claimed, inevitably confuses its audience’s ability to discriminate between reality and imitation, between authentic and fake; it is essentially suited for depicting vulgar and repulsive subjects: good characters do not make for good dramatic material; finally, it predisposes its audience, even ‘the best among us’, by enjoying in imagination what it abhors in reality, to life in profoundly harmful ways.
Page xv.
Justice often refers to being satisfied with one’s possessions, to not desiring what others have. No class in the city wants more than what naturally belongs to it, none attempts to usurp the prerogatives of the others. This is for Plato the definition of social justice.
Page xvi.
Social justice is not Plato’s ultimate goal. What he wants to show is that the just individual leads the happiest life.
Page xvi.
Plato defines justice as the healthy state of the soul.
Page xviii.
Self-control, measure, and rationality ensure that one is an outstanding human being. And being outstanding is the most important element in being a happy person, a person who has the right desires and the ability to satisfy them.
Page xviii.
The ability to rule oneself is the best qualification for the responsibility of ruling the city. The pursuit of knowledge makes one the best possible human being.
Page xix.
Philosophy for Plato consists essentially in the belief that the world possesses an intelligible nature distinct from the sensible appearances with which we are generally acquainted. The intelligible is more real and more valuable than the sensible, and the object of any knowledge we can ever have.
Page xx.
Knowledge, goodness and happiness re one, thought they can only be achieved by a very few people.
Page xxi.
Plato’s identification of knowledge with goodness represents a rationalism of the most extreme sort.
Page xxi.
Today we believe in the value of freedom, even if it results in the gravest of errors. He was unwilling to sacrifice happiness, even if it meant renouncing autonomy.
Page xxi.
We never appraise skill by the selfishness of the man who exercises it, but by the advantage it confers on those upon or among whom it is exercised.
Page xlvi.
If we find that society is a natural expression of men’s natures, we may conclude that social justice is the natural expression of the justice and injustice in society.
Page xlvii.
The soldiers or guardians must be brave and yet gentle. Such a result can only be produced by making them lovers of wisdom, and for that education is necessary.
Page xlviii.
The aim of early education is not to impart information, but to produce a certain type of character.
Page xlviii.
Socrates asserts that a love of litigation and a desire for elaborate medical remedies are equally signs of a wrongly educated character.
Page xlviii.
There are four, and only four, important virtues which we may expect to find in the city - wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice.
Page xlix.
The virtues of the state are the virtues of its citizens.
Page clix.
Social justice is simply the social expression of this condition of the soul.
Page l.
People who recognize only particular things which they can see or touch have no knowledge, but only belief or opinion, and their belief has for its object what is half real and half unreal, the changing unstable world of sense.
Page lii.
A love of truth implies all other virtues. The true philosopher will be inevitably lofty-minded ad gracious, a lover and a kinsman of truth, justice, courage, and temperance.
Page lii.
The name of philosopher is usurped by those unworthy of it, and so philosophy is brought into disrepute.
Pages lii-liii.
There is no value in knowing everything in the world unless that helps us to know the good.
Page liii.
Plato represents knowledge as a kind of conversion of the soul from darkness to light.
Page liii.
The state will then have rulers who regard office as a duty forced upon them, not as a prize to quarrel about or an opportunity for plunder.
Page liv.
The character of a state is the result of the character of its inhabitants.
Page lv.
I find that as I lose my taste for bodily pleasures, I grow more eager than ever for discussion, and enjoy it more.
Page 2.
Old age lays but a moderate burden on men who have order and peace within themselves, but ill-governed natures find youth and old age alike irksome.
Page 3.
Those who have made their money are twice as much attached to it as others; for as poets love their poems and fathers their children, just so money-makers value their money, not only for its uses, as other people do, but because it is their own production.
Page 4.
When a man faces the thought that he must die, there come upon him fear and foreboding about things that have not troubled him before.
Page 4.
To harm either his friend or any man is not the function of the just man.
Page 10.
It is never just to injure any man.
Page 11.
It is befitting surely to learn from wisdom.
Page 12.
No science either prescribes or seeks the advantage of the stronger, but the advantage of the weaker over which it rules.
Page 18.
The benefit of each art is confined to that art.
Page 22.
No art of government provides what is for its own benefit, but, as we said long ago, it provides and prescribes what is for the benefit of the subject, seeking the advantage of him who is weaker, not the advantage of the stronger.
Page 22.
A true ruler is in reality one who seeks not his own advantage but the advantage of the subject.
Page 23.
A man is good in the same respects as he is wise, and evil in the same respects as he is unwise.
Page 26.
The just man is like the good man and wise, but the unjust man like the bad and unlearned.
Page 27.
The just man is revealed to us as good and wise, but the unjust man as unlearned and bad.
Page 27.
We had now agreed to rank justice with virtue and wisdom, and injustice with vice and ignorance.
Page 27.
Don’t assent to what you don’t believe.
Page 27.
If this is your desire, follow it, and I shall ask questions.
Page 27.
Injustice and hatred make men quarrel and fight with one another, while justice makes them friendly and of ne mind.
Page 28.
The unjust man … will be the enemy, the just the friend of the gods.
Page 29.
The just are shown to be the wiser, the better, and the more capable in action; the unjust are unable even to act together.
Page 29.
The subject of our argument is no Trifling matter. It is the question of the right manner of life.
Page 30.
The function of each thing is that for which it is the indispensable or the t gest instrument.
Page 30.
Everything which has a function has also a corresponding virtue.
Page 30.
Things perform their own function well by reason of their proper virtue, badly by reason of the corresponding vice.
Page 31.
Justice is a virtue of the soul, and injustice a vice.
Page 31.
Do not be content with proving to us in your argument that justice is stronger than injustice, but show what effect each has in him who possesses it, that makes the one in itself and for itself good, and the other bad.
Page 42.
Do not be content with proving ot us that justice is stronger than injustice, but show what effect they each have on their possessors that makes them in themselves and by themselves, whether or not they be hid from gods and men, the one good and the other bad.
Page 43.
Justice, we say, is the attribute of an individual, but also of a whole city.
Page 44.
The origin of city … is, in my opinion, due to the fact that no one of us is sufficient for himself, but each is in need of many things.
Page 44.
The most important part of every task is the beginning of it. … For even then it can be most easily moulded, and whatever impression any one cares to stamp upon it sinks i.
Page 54.
We must not allow the poet to sat that those who were punished were miserable, and that God made them so. But we must allow them to say that the bad were miserable because they needed punishment, and were benefited by being punished at God’s hand. We must contend with all our might against the assertion that God, who is good, is the author of evil to any man.
Page 57.
Everything that is at its best, either in nature or in art, or both, suffers least change from without.
Page 58.
No one deliberately wishes to lie in the most vital part of him about the most vital matters. Every one fears above all to harbour a lie in that quarter.
Page 60.
God is simple and true in word and deed, he does not change himself; nor does he delude others, either in phantasies or words, or by sending signs, whether in waking moments or in dreams.
Page 61.
When any man indulges in excessive laughter, it is almost always followed by an equally violent reaction.
Page 65.
We must stop such stories lest they breed in our young men a ready disposition to evil.
Page 69.
We must not aim at a variety of rhythms with all kinds of metrical feet, but must discover what are the rhythms of an orderly and brave life. When we have done so, we must make our metre and our melody to suit the words describing such a life, and not make words to site metre and melody.
Page 78.
Good speech and good music, and grave and good rhythm, follow good nature, not that silliness which we call good nature in compliment, but the mind that is really well and nobly constituted in character.
Page 79.
Absence of grace and bad rhythm, and bad harmony are sisters to bad words and bad nature, while their opposites are sisters and copies of the opposite, a wise and good nature.
Page 79.
We must speak to our poets and compel them to impress upon their poems only the image of the good, or not to make poetry in our city.
Page 79.
We must seek out those craftsmen wo have the happy gift of tracing out the nature of the fair and graceful, that our young men may dwell as in a health-giving region where all that surrounds them is beneficent, whencesoever from fair works of art there smite upon their eyes and ears an affluence like a wind bringing health from happy regions, which, though they know it not, leads them from their earliest years into likeness and friendship and harmony with the principle of beauty.
Page 80.
Is not musical education of paramount importance for those reasons, because rhythm and harmony enter most powerfully into the innermost part of the soul and lay forcible hands upon it, bearing grace with them, so making graceful him who is rightly trained, and him who is not, the reverse?
Page 80.
That which is fairest is most to be beloved.
Page 81.
It is not my opinion that a healthy body by its excellence makes the soul good. The opposite is the case. A good soul by its excellence makes the body as good as it can be.
Page 82.
If a man’s mind is to be noble and good, and to judge just deeds in a sound way, he must from early years have been without experience of or part in evil dispositions.
Page 88.
A good judge must not be young, but old, one who has learned late in life the nature of wickedness, not from taking note of the wickedness dwelling in his own heart, but from having learned to understand wickedness in the hearts of others, so that he has knowledge, though not personal experience, of how evil it is.
Page 88.
I call it violence when pain or suffering makes men change their beliefs.
Page 93.
All things that deceive may be said to bewitch.
Page 93.
The first and weightiest command of God to the rulers is this - that more than aught else they be good guardians of and watch zealously over the offspring.
Page 95.
In the first place, no one shall have any private property, unless it is absolutely necessary. Secondly, no one shall have dwelling-place or storehouse which any one who pleases may not freely enter.
Page 96.
Our purpose in founding the city was not to make any one class in it surpassingly happy, but to make the city as a whole as happy as possible.
Page 98.
The city may go on increasing so long as it can grow without losing its unity, but no further.
Page 102.
Citizens as well as the guardians must be set each to the task for which nature has fitted him, one man one task, that so each citizen doing his own particular work may become one man and not many and thus the whole city may grow to be not many cities, but one.
Page 102.
When amusements re lawless the children are the same, and it is impossible that they should grow up law-abiding and good men.
Page 103.
The direction given by education will determine the course of all that follows.
Page 104.
‘Temperance,” I said, “is surely an ordering and a control of certain pleasures and desires, as is declared by the common but mysterious expression that a man is master of himself.’
Page 110.
There is in the man himself, that is, in his soul, a better and a worse, and when the better has by nature control of the worse, then, as we say, the man is master of himself.
Page 110.
The wisdom and the courage which make the city wise and courageous reside each in a particular part, but temperance is spread through the whole alike.
Page 112.
So far as the mere form of justice is concerned, the just man will in no way differ from the just city, but will be the same.
Page 115.
It is obvious that the same thing will not at one and the same time, in the same part of it, and in the same relation, do two opposite things or be in two opposite states.
Page 116.
The soul of him who desires seeks after that which he desires, whatever it may be, or attracts to himself that which he wishes to have.
Page 118.
All men, they say, desire things that are good. Therefore, since thirst is a desire, it will be a desire for something good - drink, or whatever it may be - and similarly with other desires.
Pages 118-119.
Justice, as it appears, is something of this kind. But it does not concern a man’s management of his own external affairs, but his internal management of his soul, his truest self and his truest possessions. The just man does not allow the different principles within him to do other work than their own, nor the distinct classes in his soul to interfere with one another.
Page 125.
Does not just action likewise produce justice, and unjust action injustice?
Page 126.
‘To produce justice,’ I said, ‘is to put the parts of the soul in their natural relations of authority or subservience, while to produce injustice is to disturb this natural relation.
Page 127.
Virtue, seemingly will be a kind of health and beauty and good condition of the soul, vice a disease and ugliness and weakness.
Page 127.
To speak with knowledge of the truth about matters dear to us and of the highest importance among men of understanding who are our friends is a thing that may be done with assurance and safety.
Page 131.
There is not one of those pursuits by which the city is ordered which belongs to women as women, or to men as men; but natural aptitudes are equally distributed in both kinds of creatures. Women naturally participate in all occupations, and so do men; but in all women are weaker than men.
Page 136.
The common saying will ever be the fairest saying, that the useful is beautiful and the harmful ugly.
Page 138.
That these men should be all of them wives in common of all these men, and that no woman should live with any man privately, and that their children too should be common, and the parent should not know his own offspring nor the child its parent.
Page 138.
Both sexes will live together, with common houses and common meals, no one possessing any private property; and associating with one another in the gymnasia and in the rest of their daily life, they will be led, I imagine, by an inherent necessity to form alliances.
Page 140.
Promiscuous unions or anything of that kind would be a profanation in a state of happy citizens, and the guardians will not allow it.
Page 140.
Our rulers will have to administer a great quantity of falsehood and deceit for the benefit of the ruled.
Page 141.
The best of both sexes ought to be brought together as often as possible, the worst as seldom as possible, and that we should rear the offspring of the first, but not the offspring of the second.
Page 141.
To our young men who acquit themselves well in war or other duties we may give, along with other rewards and prizes, a more unrestricted right of cohabitation in order that there may be a colourable excuse for such fathers having as many children as possible.
Page 141.
Taking every precaution to prevent any woman knowing her own child.
Page 142.
The proper time is to begin at twenty years and bear children for the city until she is forty; for a man the proper time to begin is when he has seen “the swiftest prime of his running” go by, and to beget children for the state until fifty-five.
Page 142.
Will not lawsuits and prosecutions almost have disappeared if their own persons are their only private property and everything else is common? Will they not, therefore, be free from all those quarrels that arise among men from the possession of money, or children, or kinsmen?
Page 147.
We shall authorize the elder to rule over and chastise all the younger.
Page 147.
Both sexes will go to war together, and will take with them such of the children as are strong enough, that, like the children of other craftsmen, they may have a sight of what they will have to do when they are grown up. Besides looking on, they will have to give the general help and service required in war, and assist their fathers and mothers.
Page 149.
We must arrange, then, that the children should see war and contrive that they shall do so safely.
Page 150.
Sedition is the name given to the enmity of what is akin; war that given to the enmity of what is alien.
Page 153.
I declare the Greek race to be akin and related to themselves, but foreign and alien to the barbarians.
Page 153.
When Greeks and barbarians fight, we say that they are natural enemies, warring against one another, and this enmity is to be called war; but when Greeks fight with Greeks, we shall declare that naturally they are friends, and that when anything of this kind occurs, Greece is sick and attacked by sedition, and this kind of enmity is to be called sedition.
Pages 153-154.
It is a search after the nature of justice that has brought us to this point.
Page 156.
Only if we discover what justice is like, shall we expect that the just man must in no way differ from this conception, but be in every respect the same as justice is? or shall we be content if he comes very close to it, and partakes of it more than any one else?
Page 156.
Can anything be done as it is spoken, or is it nature that action should lay less hold of truth than speech?
Page 156.
The lover of wisdom or the philosopher has an appetite for wisdom, not for some to the exclusion of other wisdom, but for all.
Page 159.
Is not a man dreaming, whether he is asleep or awake, when he thinks a likeness of anything to be not a likeness, but the reality which it resembles?
Page 160.
Are we sure of this, in however many ways we look at it, that what is completely, is completely knowable, and what in no way is, is in every way unknowable?
Page 161.
Knowledge and belief are not the same.
Page 162.
It is not right to be angry at the truth.
Page 165.
Concerning philosophic natures we may surely agree to this, that they are lovers of whatever learning will reveal to them anything of that reality which always is, and is not driven to and fro by generation and decay.
Page 167.
He who is naturally amorous of anything should look with affection on all that is akin and related to the beloved object.
Page 167.
He that is really a lover of learning must from his earliest years strive with all his heart after all truth.
Page 167.
Let us seek for an understanding endowed also with natural measure and grace, whose innate disposition will bear it easily to the Form of every reality.
Page 169.
The best of the students of philosophy re useless to the world; but bid him blame for this uselessness not the good philosophers, but those who do not use them.
Page 171.
The truth established by nature is that he who is ill, whether he be rich or poor, ought to wait at the doctor’s door, and every man who needs to be ruled at the door of him who can rule.
Page 171.
The greatest and most serious scandal to philosophy arises from its professed followers, whom the accuser of philosophy describes when, as you say, he declares that most of those who woo philosophy are rascally knaves, and the best of them are useless.
Page 172.
All things which are called good destroy and pervert the soul - beauty, riches, strength of body, powerful connections in a city, and all similar things.
Page 174.
Evil is of course more contrary to good than to what is not good.
Page 174.
The best of natures deteriorates more seriously from uncongenial nutriment than an inferior nature.
Page 174.
There is not, and never has been, nor ever will be, a character produce by education whose virtue has prevailed and stood out against the instruction of the many.
Page 175.
He that keeps his understanding bent on the realities has no time to look down at the affairs of men, to light and become full of malice and hate.
Page 183.
The philosopher associating with what is divine and ordered becomes ordered and divine as far as mortal may.
Page 183.
We have no proper knowledge of the Form of the good.
Page 188.
Forms are thought but are not seen.
Page 190.
Picture men in an underground cave-dwelling, with a long entrance reaching up towards the light along the whole width of the cave; in this they lie from their childhood, their legs and necks in chains, so that they stay where they are and look only in front of them, as the chain prevents their turning their heads round. Some way off, and higher up, a fire is burning behind them, and between the fire and the prisoners is a road on the higher ground. Imagine a wall built along this road, like the screen which some showmen have in front of the audience, over which they show the puppets.
Page 195.
The only truth that such men would conceive would be the shadows of those manufactured articles.
Page 198.
In the world of knowledge the Form of the good is perceived last and with difficulty, but when it is seen it must be inferred that it is the cause of all that is right and beautiful in all things, producing in the visible world light and the lord of light.
Page 200.
Education is not what certain of its professors declare it to be.
Page 201.
It will be our task as founders … to compel the best natures to proceed to that study which we declared a little while ago to be the highest, to perceive the good, and to make that ascent we spoke of.
Page 202.
It is not the law’s concern that any one class in a state should live surpassingly well. Rather it contrives a good life for the whole state, harmonizing the citizens by persuasion and compulsion, and making them share with one another the advantage which each class can contribute to the community.
Page 202.
The proper wealth of the happy man, a good and wise life.
Page 203.
Office must not be wooed by those who love her, or you will have rival lovers fighting.
Page 204.
Those who have a natural capacity for calculation are, generally speaking, naturally quick at all kinds of study; while men of slow intellect, if they are trained and exercised in arithmetic, if they get nothing else from it, at least all improve and become sharper than they were before.
Page 209.
Astronomy … compels the soul to look on high, and from things here leads it yonder
Page 212.
If any one attempts to learn anything which is perceivable - his open mouth may yawn upwards or his closed mouth purse downwards, it makes no difference He, I declare, will never learn. For such things do not admit of knowledge, and is soul is looking downwards and not up, though you may stretch him on his back on the ground or float him in the sea for his studies.
Page 213.
Belief deals with becoming as intelligence with being.
Page 218.
Unless a man can abstract the Form of the good from all else and distinguish it by analysis, unless he makes it run the gauntlet of every proof, and is eager to try it by the test not of seeming, but of reality, and finally, unless he emerges from it all with his principle not overthrown, then will you not say that he does not know the real good or any other good, and if by any chance he grasps any image of it, he does so in belief but not by knowledge?
Page 218.
We must give preference to the steadiest, the bravest, and, as far as possible, the best looking.
Page 219.
He that is to study philosophy must not be lame in his love of work - zealous in the one half of it, and lazy in the other.
Page 219.
In reference to truth, shall we not class as deformed a soul which, though it hates the lied told on purpose, and cannot endure it in itself, and is very angry when other people are deceitful, nevertheless is quite complacent to involuntary falsehood, and is not angry when it is found in ta state of ignorance, but wallows in its like a bestial hog.
Page 220.
The free man should learn no study under bondage. And while enforced bodily labours do no harm to the body, study forced on the mind will not abide there.
Page 221.
Train your children in their studies not by compulsion but by games.
Page 221.
Weariness and sleep are foes to study.
Page 221.
The power of seeing things as a whole distinguishes the dialectician.
Page 221.
Don’t imagine that anything I have said applies any more to men than to women, so long as we have women of adequate natural gifts.
Page 225.
They must send into the country … all in the city who are more than ten years old, and so get the children out of the moral influences of their parents, and train them in their own customs nd laws.
Page 225.
The forms of government, of which I speak, and which have distinct names, are these. There is the one which most people praise, the well-known Cretan and Lacedaemonian constitution; second in the list, and second in esteem, is a constitution fraught with many evils, called oligarchy. Set over against it and next in order, comes democracy; then tyranny the glorious, the chiefest of them all, is the fourth and final disease of a city.
Page 227.
A change in any constitution originates in those who hold office when dissension arises actually within the governing power; while so long as they are of one mind, however few they may be, the city cannot be changed.
Page 228.
Decay is the lot of everything that has come into being.
Page 228.
Reason conjoined with music … that alone, when it has entered into a man, abides with him through life, and is the saviour of his virtue.
Page 231.
Any kind of excessive action is wont to lead to excessive reaction.
Page 248.
Excessive liberty, then, is likely to give place to nothing else than excessive slavery, both in individual and state.
Page 248.
It is not without reason … that tragedy in general is thought wise.
Page 253.
A terrible, fierce, and lawless class of desires exists in every main, even in those of us who have every appearance of being decent people.
Page 257.
True liberty and friendship the tyrannic nature never tastes.
Page 261.
There is no more wretched city than that governed by a tyrant, none happier than the royal city.
Page 262.
He who is really a tyrant is really a slave, the humblest cringer and servant, and a toady of the sorriest rascals.
Pages 265-266.
Of mean also there are three primary classes - the lovers of wisdom, the loves of victory, and the lovers of gain.
Page 267.
It is impossible for any one but the philosopher to taste the pleasure contained in the vision of being.
Page 269.
It is inevitable that the praise of the philosopher and lover of reason should be truest.
Page 269.
‘Do you conceive’, I said, ‘that the above, the below, and the middle exist in nature?’
Page 272.
A man who was being lifted from the below to the middle would not think that he was being carried above. And if he stood in the middle, and looked down to the place he came from, could he think that he was anywhere but in the above, if he had not seen the real above?
Page 272.
Those also who lack experience of truth have unsound doctrines on many subjects.
Page 272.
Are not hunger and thirst and so on what may be called emptinesses; they are empty conditions of the body? … And is not ignorance and folly likewise an emptiness - an empty condition of the soul?
Page 272.
What is connected with the unchanging and immortal and with truth and which takes form these its character and its origin, is more real than what is connected with the ever-changing and the mortal, and which takes from these its character and its origin.
Page 273.
Less participation in truth means less participation in being.
Page 273.
Those kinds of things which are concerned with the care of the body partake less of truth and being than those concerned with the care of the soul.
Page 273.
If to be filled with what nature demands is pleasant, that which is more really filled with more real tings will make a man rejoice more really and truly with true pleasure; while that which receives what is less real will be filled less really and certainly, and will receive more untrustworthy and less true pleasure.
Page 273.
That which is best for each thing is also most truly its own.
Page 274.
That farthest removed from reason which is farthest removed form law and order.
Page 275.
I imagine, the tyrant will be farthest from true and intimate pleasure, and the king nearest.
Page 275.
He who praises justice speaks with truth, but as for him who blames it, there is no soundness of knowledge in his blame.
Page 278.
The noble actions are those which put the wild beast parts of the soul under the control of the man, or perhaps we should say of the divine element, while those which enslave the human to the wold part are disgraceful.
Page 278.
We think that it is better for every man to be ruled by divinity and insight. It is best, of course, when he possesses that within him, but if he does not, it had better be put over him from without, and then all men, being guided by the same principle, will be equals and friends as far as may be.
Page 279.
Under what conditions … or for what reasons can we say that there is profit in injustice or licentiousness, or disgraceful conduct, when by them a man acquires more money or more power of any kind, and with it becomes a worse man?
Page 279.
If a man is not found out does he not become still more wicked, while if he is discovered and punished the beast in him is laid to rest and tamed: the humane part if liberated, and the whole soul is set in the direction of the best nature.
Pages 279-280.
I must not honour a man more than I honour the truth.
Page 282.
Dull eyes have often beaten sharp ones.
Page 282.
A good poet, they say, if he is to make a beautiful poem on his subject, must do so with knowledge of that subject.
Page 286.
All the poets are imitators of images of virtue and of all the other subjects on which they write, and do not lay hold of truth.
Page 288.
There are three arts concerned with each thing - one that uses, one that makes, and one that imitates.
Page 289.
The imitative man has no knowledge of any value on the subjects of his imitation; that imitation is a form of amusement and not a serious occupation; and that those who write tragic poetry in iambics and hexameters are all imitators in the highest degree.
Page 290.
Like one who gives a city over into the hands of villains, and destroys the better citizens, so we shall say that the imitative poet likewise implants an evil constitution in the soul of each individual.
Page 294.
Is it right to look at a man being what we ourselves should not wish to be without shame, and so far from feeling disgust, to enjoy and praise the performance?
Page 295.
Only such specimens of poetry as are hymns to the gods or praises of good men are to be received into a city. If you receive the pleasure-seasoned Muse of song and epic, pleasure and pain will be kings in your city instead of law and the principle which at all times has been decided by the community to be best.
Page 296.
Have you not perceived that our soul is immortal, and never perishes?
Page 297.
That which destroys and corrupts everything is the evil; that which preserves and benefits, the good.
Page 298.
Let us not allow any one to say that the soul, or anything else, can be destroyed by an alien evil occurring in something else while its own peculiar evil does not occur in it.
Page 299.
There will always be the same number of souls. For, of course, they could not become fewer by any being destroyed, nor, again, could they become more numerous. If anything immortal increased, that would involve, you know, the mortal becoming immortal, so that finally everything would be immortal.
Page 300.
The soul becomes different according as she chooses a different life.
Page 307.