Date: 380-360 B.C.

"Every seeker after wisdom knows that up to the time when philosophy takes it over his soul is a helpless prisoner, chained hand and foot in the body, compelled to view reality not directly but only through its prison bars, and wallowing in utter ignorance."

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

Date: 380-360 B.C.

"Because every pleasure or pain has a sort of rivet with which it fastens the soul to the body and pins it down and makes it corporeal, accepting as true whatever the body certifies."

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

Date: 380-360 B.C.

"The result of agreeing with the body and finding pleasure in the same things is, I imagine, that [the soul] cannot help becoming like it in character and training, so that it can never get entirely away to the unseen world, but it is always saturated with the body when it sets out, and so soon f...

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

Date: 380-360 B.C.

"But while we may admit that each soul wears out a number of bodies, especially if it lives a great many of years--because although the body is continually changing and disintegrating all through life, the soul never stops replacing what it worn away--still we must suppose that when the soul dies...

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

Date: 380-360 B.C.

"I was afraid that by observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my senses I might blind my soul altogether."

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

Date: 380-360 B.C.

The soul of a man who is unjust but has a reputation of being just is an image of a mixed monster: "the Chimaera, Scylla, Cerberus, and certain others, a throng of them, which are said to have been may ideas grown naturally together in one."

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

Date: 380-360 B.C.

"'All of you in the city are certainly brothers,' we shall say to them in telling the tale, 'but god, in fashioning those of you who are competent to rule, mixed gold in at their birth; this is why they are most honored; in auxiliaries, silver, and iron and bronze in the farmers and other craftsm...

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

Date: 380-360 B.C.

"[T]here is in every soul an organ or instrument of knowledge that is purified and kindled afresh by such studies when it has been destroyed and blinded by our ordinary pursuits, a faculty whose preservation outweighs ten thousand eyes, for by it only is reality beheld."

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

Date: 380-360 B.C.

"Hence the god commands the rulers first and foremost to be of nothing such good guardians and to keep over nothing so careful a watch as the children, seeing which of these metals is mixed in their souls."

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

Date: 380-360 B.C.

"The body is held together at a certain tension between the extremes of hot and cold, and dry and wet, and so on, and our soul is a temperament or adjustment of these same extremes, when they are combined in just the right proportion."

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)