Date: c. 390 B.C.

"And if the soul too, my dear Alcibiades, is to know herself, she must surely look at a soul [like an eye looking into the pupil of another eye], and especially at that region of it in which occurs the virtue of a soul--wisdom, and at any other part of a soul which resembles this?"

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

Date: c. 387 B.C.

"[T]hat as you ought not to attempt to cure the eyes without the head, or the head without the body, so neither ought you attempt to cure the body without the soul."

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

Date: c. 387 B.C.

"And so some clever fellow, a Sicilian perhaps or Italian, writing in allegory, by a slight perversion of language named this part of the soul a jar, because it can be swayed and easily persuaded, and the foolish he called the uninitiate, and that part of the soul in foolish people where the desi...

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

Date: c. 387 B.C.

"And by the sieve, my informant told me, he means the soul, and the soul of the foolish he compared to a sieve, because it is perforated through lack of belief and forgetfulness is unable to hold anything."

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

Date: 387 B.C.?

"But what is it that nourishes the soul?"

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

Date: 380-360 B.C.

"So this journey which is now ordained for me carries a happy prospect for any other man also who believes that his mind has been prepared by purification."

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

Date: 380-360 B.C.

"And purification, as we saw some time ago in our discussion, consists in separating the soul as much as possible from the body, and accustoming it to withdraw from all contact with the body and concentrate itself by itself, and to have its dwelling, so far as it can, both now and in the future, ...

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

Date: 380-360 B.C.

"The rest of your statement, Socrates, he said, seems excellent to me, but what you said about the soul leaves the average person with grave misgivings that when it is released from the body it may no longer exist anywhere, but may be dispersed and destroyed on the very day that the man himself d...

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

Date: 380-360 B.C.

"When soul and body are both in the same place, nature teaches the one to serve and be subject, the other to rule and govern."

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

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)