Named source · 4th century BCE

Laws Quotes by Plato: Context & Meanings

6 quotations linked to Laws by or associated with Plato, with source notes, explanations and related topics.

English wording

Translation

Benjamin Jowett — Translator · Ancient Greek → English

The wording shown here follows the represented English edition or translation.

Why the edition matters

Translations and editions can differ in wording, punctuation and emphasis, so the source attached to each quotation matters when exact phrasing is important.

Read the source

Open a public or archival text connected with these quotations

Use these links when you want to inspect the wording in its wider work or edition.

Primary / edition source · en.wikisource.org ↗ Primary / edition source · en.wikisource.org ↗ Primary / edition source · en.wikisource.org ↗ Primary / edition source · en.wikisource.org ↗

Represented passages

6 quotations with source context and meaning

Source identified1

The most important part of education is right training in the nursery.

Image design Lavender

Read & copy

“The most important part of education is right training in the nursery.”

Plato

Voice: Dialogue speaker · Athenian Stranger

Meaning & context

The dialogue stresses that education begins through early habits and guided play, well before formal lessons. Its claim belongs to the plan for raising citizens in an imagined polity.

Source details

Laws, Book I, Benjamin Jowett English translation. The Athenian Stranger says this while explaining why childhood play and practical imitation should prepare future capacities; it is a program of civic upbringing, not a present-day evidence-based educational standard.

↓ Download image (SVG)

Source identified2

no single instrument of youthful education has such mighty power ... as the study of arithmetic.

Image design Linen

Read & copy

“no single instrument of youthful education has such mighty power ... as the study of arithmetic.”

Plato

Voice: Dialogue speaker · Athenian Stranger

Meaning & context

The Athenian Stranger praises arithmetic as a tool for developing practical and civic judgment. The abbreviated extract presents a philosophical claim about training, not a measured comparison of school subjects.

Source details

Laws, Book V, Benjamin Jowett English translation. Explicit excerpt: an ellipsis omits the intervening phrase about domestic economy, politics and the arts; the surrounding passage praises arithmetic while warning against separating skill from moral aims.

↓ Download image (SVG)

Source identified3

Am I not right in maintaining that a good education is that which tends most to the improvement of mind and body?

Image design Lavender

Read & copy

“Am I not right in maintaining that a good education is that which tends most to the improvement of mind and body?”

Plato

Voice: Dialogue speaker · Athenian Stranger

Meaning & context

The speaker asks whether education should develop mental as well as bodily capacities. In the dialogue this opens a discussion of early nurture, training and the proposed legal order.

Source details

Laws, Book VII, Benjamin Jowett English translation. The Athenian Stranger asks Cleinias this question as they begin discussing how children should be raised; it is dialogue, not a detached modern prescription for health or schooling.

↓ Download image (SVG)

Source identified4

Now I mean by education that training which is given by suitable habits to the first instincts of virtue in children;

Image design Lavender

Read & copy

“Now I mean by education that training which is given by suitable habits to the first instincts of virtue in children;”

Plato

Voice: Dialogue speaker · Athenian Stranger

Meaning & context

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.

Source details

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.

↓ Download image (SVG)

Source identified5

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.

Image design Coastal

Read & copy

“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.”

Plato

Voice: Dialogue speaker · Athenian Stranger

Meaning & context

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.

Source details

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).

↓ Download image (SVG)

Source identified6

The best way of training the young is to train yourself at the same time; not to admonish them, but to be always carrying out your own admonitions in practice.

Image design Botanical Sage

Read & copy

“The best way of training the young is to train yourself at the same time; not to admonish them, but to be always carrying out your own admonitions in practice.”

Plato

Voice: Dialogue speaker · Athenian Stranger

Meaning & context

The Athenian Stranger argues that adults teach ethical habits through consistent conduct as much as through instruction. Within the proposed city’s civic code, self-discipline and example help to shape a life shared across generations; this is not a randomized modern study of parenting.

Source details

Plato, Laws, Book V, the Athenian Stranger giving an extended civic-ethical exhortation to Cleinias and Megillus; Benjamin Jowett English, Gutenberg #1750. This is dialogue speech, not commentary in Jowett’s introduction. The local dramatic voice is the Athenian Stranger, not Socrates or Plato personally.

↓ Download image (SVG)

Translation

Benjamin Jowett — Translator · Ancient Greek → English

Why the edition matters

Open a public or archival text connected with these quotations

Prominent ideas connected with the quotations represented here

6 quotations with source context and meaning

Continue through other sources by Plato