Best quotes from The Republic

Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?

Variety in poetry breeds self-indulgence; in gymnastics, disease: simplicity there puts temperance in the soul; here it puts health in the body.

Wherefore each of you, when his turn comes, must go down to the general underground abode, and get the habit of seeing in the dark.

The result, then, is that more plentiful and better-quality goods are more easily produced if each person does one thing for which he is naturally suited, does it at the right time, and is released from having to do any of the others.

Justice is practiced only under compulsion, as someone else's good - not our own.

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

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

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

When he remembered his old habitation, and the wisdom of the den and his fellow-prisoners, do you not suppose that he would felicitate himself on the change, and pity them?

In practice people who study philosophy too long become very odd birds, not to say thoroughly vicious; while even those who are the best of them are reduced by...[philosophy] to complete uselessness as members of society.

The desires of the worthless many are controlled by the desires and knowledge of the decent few

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.

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

Under the tyranny of erotic love he has permanently become while awake what he used to become occasionally while asleep.

The beginning is the most important part of the work.