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.
It's like this, I think: the excellence of a good body doesn't make the soul good, but the other way around: the excellence of a good soul makes the body as good as it can be.
Until philosophers rule as kings or those who are now called kings and leading men genuinely and adequately philosophise, that is, until political power and philosophy entirely coincide, while the many natures who at present pursue either one exclusively are forcibly prevented from doing so, cities will have no rest from evils,... nor, I think, will the human race.
The good man is the only excellent musician, because he gives forth a perfect harmony not with a lyre or other instrument but with the whole of his life.
When a beautiful soul harmonizes with a beautiful form, and the two are cast in one mould, that will be the fairest of sights to him who has the eye to contemplate the vision.
The Paphian Queen to Cnidos made repair Across the tide to see her image there: Then looking up and round the prospect wide, When did Praxiteles see me thus? she cried.
The orators and the despots have the least power in their cities ... since they do nothing that they wish to do, practically speaking, though they do whatever they think to be best.
At the Egyptian city of Naucratis there was a famous old god whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis was sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters.
The mortal nature is seeking as far as is possible to be everlasting and immortal: and this is only to be attained by generation, because the new is always left in the place of the old.