Quotes & Sayings About Education Plato

Manlius ... took care in his invitations, actively sought to exclude from his circle crude and vulgar men like Caius Valerius. But they were all around; it was Manlius who lived in a dream world, and his bubble of civility was becoming smaller and smaller. Caius Valerius, powerful member of a powerful family, had never even heard of Plato. A hundred, even fifty years before, such an absurdity would have been inconceivable. Now it was surprising if such a man did know anything of philosophy, and even if it was explained, he would not wish to understand. — Iain Pears

The breakdown of his(Plato's) philosophy is made apparent in the fact that he could not trust to gradual improvements in education to bring about a better society which should then improve education, and so on indefinitely. Correct education could not come into existence until an ideal state existed, and after that education would be devoted simply to its conservation. For the existence of this state he was obliged to trust to some happy accident by which philosophic wisdom should happen to coincide with possession of ruling power in the state. — John Dewey

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions. "In the morning, - solitude;" said Pythagoras; that Nature may speak to the imagination, as she does never in company, and that her favorite may make acquaintance with those divine strengths which disclose themselves to serious and abstracted thought. 'Tis very certain that Plato, Plotinus, Archimedes, Hermes, Newton, Milton, Wordsworth, did not live in a crowd, but descended into it from time to time as benefactors: and the wise instructor will press this point of securing to the young soul in the disposition of time and the arrangements of living, periods and habits of solitude. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the world of knowledge, the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with effort. — Plato

The good repent on knowing their sin; the evil become angry when discovered. Ignorance is not the cause of evil, as Plato held; neither is education the answer to the removal of evil. These men had an intellect as well as a will; knowledge as well as intention. Truth can be known and hated; Goodness can be known and crucified. The Hour was approaching, and for the moment the fear of the people deterred the Pharisees. Violence could not be triggered against Him until He would say, 'This is your Hour. — Fulton J. Sheen

Education is teaching our children to desire the right things. — Plato

Education isn't what some people declare it to be, namely, putting knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting sight into blind eyes ... The power to learn is present in everyone's soul and ... the instrument with which each learns is like an eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light without turning the whole body ... Then education is the craft concerned with doing this very thing, this turning around, and with how the soul can most easily and effectively be made to do it. it isn't the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education take for granted that sight is there but that it isn't turned the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries to redirect it appropriately. — Plato

The soul of him who has education is whole and perfect and escapes the worst disease, but, if a man's education be neglected, he walks lamely through life and returns good for nothing to the world below. — Plato

For no man is voluntarily bad; but the bad become bad by reason of an ill disposition of the body and bad education, things which are hateful to every man and happen to him against his will. — Plato

For good nurture and education implant good constitutions. — Plato

If I were again beginning my studies, I would follow the advice of Plato and start with mathematics. — Galileo Galilei

The great enemy of Plato is the world, not exactly in the theological sense, yet in one not wholly different
the world as the hater of truth and lover of appearance, occupied in the pursuit of gain and pleasure rather than of knowledge, banded together against the few good and wise men, and devoid of true education. — Plato

And once we have given our community a good start,' I pointed out, ' the process will be cumulative. By maintaining a sound system of education you produce citizens of good character, and citizens of sound character, with the advantage of a good education, produce in turn children better than themselves and better able to produce still better children in their turn, as can be seen with animals. — Plato

If you ask: What is the good of education? The answer is easy: Education makes good men and good men act nobly. — Plato

This classmate told me that Plato drove this idea home in his dialogue Euthydemus, in which Socrates puts down the Sophists, claiming that a man learns more by "playing" with ideas in his leisure time that by sitting in a classroom. And Plato's successor, that world champion of pleasure, Epicurus, believed in a simple yet elegant connection between learning and happiness: the entire purpose of education was to attune the mind and sense to the pleasures of life. — Daniel Klein

There can be no nobler training than that, he replied. And therefore, I said, Glaucon, musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful; and also because he who has received this true education of the inner being will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the good, and becomes noble and good, he will justly blame and hate the bad, now in the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the reason why; and when reason comes he will recognise and salute the friend with whom his education has made him long familiar. Yes, — Plato

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

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

The first thing to consider is education. This is divided into two parts, music and gymnastics. Each has a wider meaning than at present: 'music' means everything that is in the province of the muses, and 'gymnastics' means everything concerned with physical training and fitness. 'Music' is almost as wide as what we should call 'culture', and 'gymnastics' is somewhat wider than what we call 'athletics'. Culture is to be devoted to making men gentlemen, in the sense which, largely owing to Plato, is familiar in England. The Athens of his day was, in one respect, analogous to England in the nineteenth century: there was in each an aristocracy enjoying wealth and social prestige, but having no monopoly of political power; and in each the aristocracy had to secure as much power as it could by means of impressive behaviour. — Anonymous

I shall try to persuade first the Rulers and soldiers, and then the rest of the community, that the upbringing and education we have given them was all something that happened to them only in a dream. In reality they were fashioned and reared, and their arms and equipment manufactured, in the depths of the earth, and Earth herself, their mother, brought them up, when they were complete, into the light of day; so now they must think of the land in which they live as their mother and protect her if she is attacked, while their fellow citizens they must regard as brothers born of the same mother earth ... . That is the story. Do you know of any way of making them believe it?"
"Not in the first generation," he said, "but you might succeed with the second, and later generations. — Plato

Let early education be a sort of amusement. You will then be better able to find out the natural bent. — Plato

Plato
who may have understood better what forms the mind of man than do some of our contemporaries who want their children exposed only to "real" people and everyday events
knew what intellectual experience made for true humanity. He suggested that the future citizens of his ideal republic begin their literary education with the telling of myths, rather than with mere facts or so-called rational teachings. — Bruno Bettelheim

Then, if women are to have the same duties as men, they must have the same nurture and education? Yes. The education which was assigned to the men was music and gymnastic. Yes. Then women must be taught music and gymnastic and also the art of war, which they must practise like the men? That is the inference, I suppose. I — Plato

What we can be positive about is what we have just said, namely that they must be given the right education, whatever that may be, as the surest way to make them behave humanely to each other and the subjects in their charge. — Plato

Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each. — Plato

Education and admonition commence in the first years of childhood, and last to the very end of life. — Plato

Do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement. — Plato

And therefore, I said, Glaucon, musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful; and also because he who has received this true education of the inner being will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the good, and becomes noble and good, he will justly blame and hate the bad, now in the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the reason why; and when reason comes he will recognize and salute the friend with whom his education has made him long familiar ...
... Thus much of music, which makes a fair ending; for what should be the end of music if not the love of beauty? — Plato

In order for man to succeed in life, God provided him with two means, education and physical activity. Not separately, one for the soul and the other for the body, but for the two together. With these means, man can attain perfection. — Plato

The only real ill-doing is the deprivation of knowledge. — Plato

According to Plato, we don't learn anything. Our soul has lived so many lives that we know everything. Teachers and education can only remind us of what we already know. — Chuck Palahniuk

Lessons, however, that enter the soul against its will never grow roots and will never be preserved inside it. — Plato

Do not train children to learning by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds. — Plato

Music is a more potent instrument than any other for education. — Plato

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. — Plato

Their military training will ensure success in war, but they must maintain unity by not allowing the state to grow to large, and by ensuring that the measures for promotion and demotion from one class to another are carried out. Above all they must maintain the educational system unchanged; for on education everything else depends, and it is an illusion to imagine that mere legislation without it can effect anything of consequence. — Plato

He who wishes to serve his country must have not only the power to think, but the will to act — Plato

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

A good education is that which prepares us for our future sphere of action and makes us contented with that situation in life in which God, in his infinite mercy, has seen fit to place us, to be perfectly resigned to our lot in life, whatever it may be. — Ann Plato

It is the task of the enlightened not only to ascend to learning and to see the good but to be willing to descend again to those prisoners and to share their troubles and their honors, whether they are worth having or not. And this they must do, even with the prospect of death. — Plato

Then you will make a law that they shall have such an education as will enable them to attain the greatest skill in asking and answering questions? Yes, he said, you and I together will make it. Dialectic, then, as you will agree, is the coping-stone of the sciences, and is set over them; no other science can be placed higher - the nature of knowledge can no further go? I agree, he said. But to whom we — Plato

The purpose of education is to give to the body and to the soul all the beauty and all the perfection of which they are capable. — Plato

That's what education should be," I said, "the art of orientation. Educators should devise the simplest and most effective methods of turning minds around. It shouldn't be the art of implanting sight in the organ, but should proceed on the understanding that the organ already has the capacity, but is improperly aligned and isn't facing the right way. — Plato

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

For Plato, knowledge that is restricted to the material world is at best mere opinion and at worst ignorance. The task of education is to lead people out of darkness into light, out of the cave and its shadows and into the noonday sun. The Latin term educare describes this process. Its root meaning is "to lead out of," as the root ducere means "to lead." We — R.C. Sproul

No reproach for a person willing to give honorable service in the passion to become wise. — Plato

And if, I said, the male and female sex appear to differ in their fitness for any art or pursuit, we should say that such pursuit or art ought to be assigned to one or the other of them; but if the difference consists only in women bearing and men begetting children, this does not amount to a proof that a woman differs from a man in respect of the sort of education she should receive; and we shall therefore continue to maintain that our guardians and their wives ought to have the same pursuits. Very true, he said. Next, — Plato

I appear to be embarked on the turbid waters of poetry and scholarship. And a career in poetry and knowledge is as hard to guide as Plato's horses. On the one hand I must range about discovering the fundamentals of knowledge, dipping into science, politics and other arcana, forever seeking an education that is both profound and practical; on the other, I must keep spiritually alive and brilliantly alive, for poetry is, as the moral Milton conceded in practice and precept, a sensuous, passionate, brutal thing. I put in the last adjective because I am modern and angry and puritanical ... The relevance of such schedule to poetry is obvious. I cannot think it a pedantry that a man desiring to speak (or sing) something important should also desire to speak with certainty. Also if he lack scope, such as an acquaintance with science and an acquaintance with other languages, he will be romantic and an anachronism. — Robert Lowell

As Plato: What is play and delightful one kind of child is coercion and torture for another, and will not take no matter how much coercion is applied. — Rebecca Goldstein

Plato and Hitler were both the same kind of consistent socialists who planned also for the production of future socialists, the breeding and education of future members of society. — Ludwig Von Mises

Education in music is most sovereign because more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way to the innermost soul and take strongest hold upon it — Plato

And may we not say, Adeimantus, that the most gifted minds, when they are ill- educated, become the worst? — Plato

It was Plato who said: "The movement of sounds so as to reach the soul for the education of it in virtue we know not how, we call music — Zoe Kendrick Pyne

GUARD YOUR WEAK POINT. He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty: and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city. - Bible. The first and best of victories is for a man to conquer himself: to be conquered by himself is, of all things, the most shameful and vile. - Plato. The worst education which teaches self-denial is better than the best which teaches everything else and not that. - John Sterling. Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power. - Seneca. The energy which issues in growth, or assimilates knowledge, must originate in self and be self-directed. - Thomas J. Morgan. — Orison Swett Marden

Education, I said, and nurture: If our citizens are well educated, and grow into sensible men, they will easily see their way through all these, as well as other matters which I omit; such, for example, as marriage, the possession of women and the procreation of children, which will all follow the general principle that friends have all things in common, as the proverb says. That — Plato

From Hinduism to the monotheisms through to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the common message is that we are all, naturally and potentially, inclined to reject the other, and to be intolerant and racist. Left to our own devices and our own emotions, we can be deaf, blind, dogmatic, closed and xenophobic: we are not born open-minded, respectful and pluralist. We become so through personal effort, education, self-mastery and knowledge. — Tariq Ramadan

Paraphrasing Plato's Republic: Only people who have allowed themselves to be reformed by reality have it in themselves to reform their polis for the better. — Rebecca Goldstein

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

Education is cumulative, and it affects the breed. - Plato — Louis Cozolino

Today you can buy the Dialogues of Plato for less than you would spend on a fifth of whiskey, or Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the price of a cheap shirt. You can buy a fair beginning of an education in any bookstore with a good stock of paperback books for less than you would spend on a week's supply of gasoline. — Louis L'Amour

Avoid compulsion and let early education be a matter of amusement. Young children learn by games; compulsory education cannot remain in the soul. — Plato

These forays into the real world sharpened his view that scientists needed the widest possible education. He used to say, "How can you design for people if you don't know history and psychology? You can't. Because your mathematical formulas may be perfect, but the people will screw it up. And if that happens, it means you screwed it up." He peppered his lectures with quotations from Plato, Chaka Zulu, Emerson, and Chang-tzu.

But as a professor who was popular with his students - and who advocated general education - Thorne found himself swimming against the tide. The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon. In this climate, being liked by your students was a sign of shallowness; and interest in real-world problems was proof of intellectual poverty and a distressing indifference to theory. — Michael Crichton

A good education is another name for happiness. — Ann Plato

A good education consists in knowing how to sing and dance well. — Plato

The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future in life. — Plato

I know too well that these arguments from probabilities are imposters, and unless great caution is observed in the use of them, they are apt to be deceptive. — Plato

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. — Plato

Education is the constraining and directing of youth towards that right reason, which the law affirms, and which the experience of the best of our elders has agreed to be truly right. — Plato

Plato and Aristotle are my teachers. Even Kant is my teacher, but my greatest teacher is my failures. — Debasish Mridha

While [Plato] affirmed with emphasis that the place of the individual in society should not be determined by birth or wealth or any conventional status, but by his own nature as discovered in the process of education, he had no perception of the uniqueness of individuals. For him they fall by nature into classes, and into a very small number of classes at that. — John Dewey

For the object of education is to teach us to love beauty. — Plato

By education I mean that training in excellence from youth upward which makes a man passionately desire to be a perfect citizen, and teaches him to rule, and to obey, with justice. This is the only education which deserves the name. — Plato

The meaning is, I believe, that in the human soul there is a better and also a worse principle; and when the better has the worse under control, then a man is said to be master of himself; and this is a term of praise: but when, owing to evil education or association, the better principle, which is also the smaller, is overwhelmed by the greater mass of the worse - in this case he is blamed and is called the slave of self and unprincipled. Yes, — Plato

But a further question arises: Is passion different from reason also, or only a kind of reason; in which latter case, instead of three principles in the soul, there will only be two, the rational and the concupiscent; or rather, as the State was composed of three classes, traders, auxiliaries, counsellors, so may there not be in the individual soul a third element which is passion or spirit, and when not corrupted by bad education is the natural auxiliary of reason? Yes, he said, there must be a third. Yes, I replied, if passion, which has already been shown to be different from desire, turn out also to be different from reason. But that is easily proved: - We may observe even in young children that they are full of spirit almost as soon as they are born, whereas some of them never seem to attain to the use of reason, and most of them late enough. Excellent, — Plato

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

..they all emulated and admired and were students of Spartan education, could tell their wisdom was of this sort by the brief but memorable remarks they each uttered when they met, writing what is on every man's lips: Know thyself, and Nothing too much. — Plato

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

Seek truth while you are young, for if you do not, it will later escape your grasp — Plato

Let the tutor not merely require a verbal account of what the boy has been taught but the meaning and the substance of it: let him judge how the child has profited from it not from the evidence of his memory but from that of his life. Let him take what the boy has just learned and make him show him dozens of different aspects of it and then apply it to just as many different subjects, in order to find out whether he has really grasped it and make it part of himself, judging the boy's progress by what Plato taught about education. Spewing up food exactly as you have swallowed it is evidence of a failure to digest and assimilate it; the stomach has not done its job if, during concoction, it fails to change the substance and the form of what it is given. — Michel De Montaigne

The Republic of Plato is also the first treatise upon education, of which the writings of Milton and Locke, Rousseau, Jean Paul, and Goethe are the legitimate descendants. — Plato

The principles are important. First, the interest of the state or society counts for everything, that of the individual for nothing. Second, the only difference between men and women is one of physical function- one begets, the other bears children. Apart from that, they both can and should perform the same functions - though men on a whole, perform them better and should receive the same education to enable them to do so; for in this way society will get the best value from both. — Plato