Plato quotes on happiness

Yet I think, he replied, that if you discard knowledge, you will hardly find the crown of happiness in anything else
Source: Plato, Charmides

This is the old, old song over again; and we are just as far as ever, if not farther,

POLUS: What! and does all happiness consist in this? SOCRATES: Yes, indeed, Polus, that is my doctrine; the men and women who are gentle and good are also happy, as I maintain, and the unjust and evil are miserable
Source: Plato, Gorgias

And if he replies 'The pleasant,' then I should say to him, 'O my father, did you not tell me that I should live as justly as possible'? and if to be just is to be happy, what is that principle of happiness or good which is superior to pleasure? Is the approval of gods and men to be deemed good and honourable, but unpleasant, and their disapproval the reverse? Or is the neither doing nor suffering evil good and honourable, although not pleasant? But you cannot make men like what is not pleasant, and therefore you must make them believe that the just is pleasant
Source: Plato, Laws

And if your father and mother love you, and desire that you should be happy, no one can doubt that they are very ready to promote your happiness
Source: Plato, Lysis

And all knowledge, when separated from justice and virtue, is seen to be cunning and not wisdom; wherefore make this your first and last and constant and all-absorbing aim, to exceed, if possible, not only us but all your ancestors in virtue; and know that to excel you in virtue only brings us shame, but that to be excelled by you is a source of happiness to us
Source: Plato, Menexenus

After this their happiness depends upon their self-control; if the better elements of the mind which lead to order and philosophy prevail, then they pass their life here in happiness and harmony--masters of themselves and orderly--enslaving the vicious and emancipating the virtuous elements of the soul; and when the end comes, they are light and winged for flight, having conquered

Now suppose happiness to consist in doing or choosing the greater, and in not doing or in avoiding the less, what would be the saving principle of human life? Would not the art of measuring be the saving principle; or would the power of appearance? Is not the latter that deceiving art which makes us wander up and down and take the things at one time of which we repent at another, both in our actions and in our choice of things great and small? But the art of measurement would do away with the effect of appearances, and, showing the truth, would fain teach the soul at last to find rest in the truth, and would thus save our life
Source: Plato, Protagoras

STRANGER: This then we declare to be the completion of the web of political action, which is created by a direct intertexture of the brave and temperate natures, whenever the royal science has drawn the two minds into communion with one another by unanimity and friendship, and having perfected the noblest and best of all the webs which political life admits, and enfolding therein all other inhabitants of cities, whether slaves or freemen, binds them in one fabric and governs and presides over them, and, in so far as to be happy is vouchsafed to a city, in no particular fails to secure their happiness
Source: Plato, Statesman

These are my reasons for affirming that Love is the eldest and noblest and mightiest of the gods; and the chiefest author and giver of virtue in life, and of happiness after death
Source: Plato, Symposium

But most extraordinary of all is their mode of speaking about virtue and the gods: they say that the gods apportion calamity and misery to many good men, and good and happiness to the wicked
Source: Plato, The Republic

SOCRATES: But, O my friend, when he draws the other into upper air, and gets him out of his pleas and rejoinders into the contemplation of justice and injustice in their own nature and in their difference from one another and from all other things; or from the commonplaces about the happiness of a king or of a rich man to the consideration of government, and of human happiness and misery in general--what they are, and how a man is to attain the one and avoid the other--when that narrow, keen, little legal mind is called to account about all this, he gives the philosopher his revenge; for dizzied by the height at which he is hanging, whence he looks down into space, which is a strange experience to him, he being dismayed, and lost, and stammering broken words, is laughed at, not by Thracian handmaidens or any other uneducated persons, for they have no eye for the situation, but by every man who has not been brought up a slave
Source: Plato, Theaetetus

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