Browse 6 quotations connecting Plato with Self-Control, with meanings, source notes and related themes.
These six passages explore different forms of restraint in five independent dialogues rather than offering interchangeable commands to suppress emotion. In Crito, Socrates asks whether one may commit an injustice in order to escape punishment, even when the decision costs him his life. In Laws, the Athenian Stranger discusses the early cultivation of habits in Book II and later the moral disorder of anger, fear, pleasure, jealousy and desire in Book IX; these remain one underlying work, not two independent dialogues. In Symposium, the physician Eryximachus describes temperate love as a principle of harmony in his own speech, not a settled medical fact. In The Republic, Socrates presents a tripartite model in which the rational part ought to guide spirited impulses; the model is philosophical, not modern brain science. The newly added Gorgias passage sets Socrates’s defense of self-mastery against Callicles’s explicit case for indulging desire. All passages come from Benjamin Jowett’s public-domain English, with their actual dramatic speakers and contexts recorded. The contrast between these positions is essential to reading the collection responsibly.
Sources represented here include Laws, Crito, Gorgias.
“Then we must do no wrong?”
The brief question tests whether the previously accepted principle against wrongdoing still holds when obedience to it becomes personally costly.
Crito, Benjamin Jowett translation; Socrates is testing the moral premises that will govern his decision about escaping prison.
“A simple thing enough; just what is commonly said, that a man should be temperate and master of himself, and ruler of his own pleasures and passions.”
Socrates describes moderation as governing one’s own appetite and impulses rather than merely exercising power over other people. Callicles immediately challenges this view and praises satisfying desires without restraint. The passage is an argument in a dispute about happiness and the good life, not modern evidence about psychology or a claim that feelings should be suppressed.
Plato, Gorgias, approximately Stephanus 491d–e, Socrates answering Callicles’s question about ruling oneself. Callicles promptly disputes the value of temperance. Full sentence in Benjamin Jowett’s English translation, Project Gutenberg #1672, within the Gorgias dialogue proper (not Jowett’s introductory essay). Socrates is the local dramatic speaker; the line is not Plato’s autobiographical speech. An ancient ethical argument, not experimental mental-health evidence.
“Now I mean by education that training which is given by suitable habits to the first instincts of virtue in children;”
In this account, education forms early habits of feeling and response so that they can later accord with reason. It is an account of moral formation within the dialogue, not an empirical generalization about childhood.
Laws, Book II, Benjamin Jowett English translation. The Athenian Stranger opens a longer definition linking early instincts and pleasure or pain with later rational understanding; this quotation preserves the opening clause and its original semicolon.
“When anger and fear, and pleasure and pain, and jealousies and desires, tyrannize over the soul, whether they do any harm or not—I call all this injustice.”
The Athenian Stranger defines injustice in terms of uncontrolled impulses ruling a person, even before judging the harmful consequences of a particular act. He is distinguishing a disordered character from the later task of classifying and punishing wrongdoing under civic law.
Laws, Book IX, the Athenian Stranger replying to Cleinias while designing criminal laws for an imagined city. Benjamin Jowett English translation, Project Gutenberg #1750. This is the concluding clause of a longer first-person definition that begins “And now I can define to you clearly”; preserving it as an extract does not make it a remark by Socrates (who is absent from Laws).
“And the love, more especially, which is concerned with the good, and which is perfected in company with temperance and justice, whether among gods or men, has the greatest power, and is the source of all our happiness and harmony, and makes us friends with the gods who are above us, and with one another.”
Eryximachus presents an expansive account in which well-ordered love creates harmony between people and even between humanity and the gods. His physician’s speech moves between medicine, music, the seasons and ritual, so friendship is part of an ancient analogy about the balance of opposing forces. It is his contribution to a gathering of competing speeches about love, not a single universally endorsed Platonic doctrine.
Plato, Symposium, Eryximachus speaking at approximately 188d–e near the end of his encomium of Eros; Benjamin Jowett English, Project Gutenberg #1600. The following exchange passes the speech to Aristophanes; speaker is physician Eryximachus, NOT Socrates. References to divine friendship and cosmology express ancient philosophical and religious views, not contemporary scientific findings.
“And ought not the rational principle, which is wise, and has the care of the whole soul, to rule, and the passionate or spirited principle to be the subject and ally?”
Socrates argues that self-government involves a rational faculty attending to the whole person while spirited impulses support its judgment. The passage is a question within his analogy between a well-ordered city and the three parts of the soul. It does not mean that all emotion should be suppressed or that Plato established a modern psychological theory.
Plato, The Republic, Book IV, approximately 441e–442a; Socrates addressing Glaucon while contrasting the rational, spirited and appetitive parts of the soul. Exact sentence from Benjamin Jowett English, Project Gutenberg #1497, Book IV main dialogue (not introductory editorial matter). The premise belongs to an ancient account of the soul and remains open to philosophical interpretation; not clinical or neuroscientific evidence.
