314 things from this book went into her brain. Here are the first 6.
Plato's Republic tries to connect everyday life with deep speculation, linking politics with philosophy in a way few other books of his do.
Plato holds that justice is hard to see in one person, so he searches for it first in the larger picture of an ideal city.
In The Republic, Plato treats justice and the ideal state as two faces of one truth: justice is the order of the state, and the state is its visible form.
Plato's ideal city is best read as a vision. Whether it could ever be built has nothing to do with whether its ideas are true.
Plato's Cephalus is an old man at peace with a well-spent life, and he admits that wealth helps a person stay clear of dishonesty.
Plato's Polemarchus lives by rules of thumb rather than principles, and is left bewildered once Socrates starts to test them.
Plato's Thrasymachus shows how bluster and insolence can cover confusion, and how someone who cannot defend a claim often falls silent.
Plato shows morality as a climb: from inherited rules of thumb, to clever generalising, to young thinkers who want to understand the nature of things more deeply.
In the Republic, Plato turns simple examples into allegory, such as the cave, so that an idea already argued in the abstract can be seen in concrete form.
Plato's Socrates meets people in error with patience rather than anger, treating them with pity or a wry kind of affection.
Plato's Socrates tests a simple rule, to tell the truth and pay your debts, by asking whether it has exceptions, such as returning a borrowed sword to a madman.
Plato's Socrates tests the rule of helping friends and harming enemies until it breaks, which shows why careful definitions matter.
Plato's Socrates argues that returning evil for evil only makes people more evil, so a just person should not do it.
Plato's Thrasymachus says justice is the interest of the stronger, then escapes a quick defeat by quietly changing interest to what the ruler thinks is his interest.
Plato's Socrates argues that every craft serves the good of those it works on rather than the private gain of the craftsman, and that justice is best judged the same way.
Plato suggests most rulers take office for reward or out of fear of being ruled by someone worse, not for love of the work itself.
Plato's Socrates compares justice to skill: the skilled work to a standard and do not seek more than is right, while the unskilled make random excess.
Plato's Socrates argues that a house divided against itself cannot stand, so even wrongdoers need a remnant of good to act together.
Plato's Glaucon asks whether justice is valued for itself or only for its rewards, a question that still separates integrity from reputation.
In The Republic, Glaucon imagines a ring of invisibility to test whether a person would stay just if no one could ever see them.
Plato's Glaucon says a truly just person may be mistaken for the worst, so the real test is whether we value being just over seeming just.
Plato's Adeimantus points out that people are often taught to be good for rewards and reputation, which leaves virtue resting on the wrong foundation.
Plato's Adeimantus warns that people who sell quick fixes for wrongdoing can win over whole cities, so easy promises deserve a second look.
Plato's Adeimantus says people taught early that justice lives in the soul would guard themselves, rather than need outside guardians to keep them honest.
In The Republic, a little experience may make a person cynical, but more experience tends to bring them back to a kinder view of the mixed nature of people.
In The Republic, the ideal of justice always looks like a paradox beside ordinary life, yet it still serves as a basis for education and an ennobling influence.
In The Republic, Socrates holds that a person should do their duty first, without asking whether it will bring happiness, since happiness tends to follow as an accident.
In The Republic, goodness is shaped more by education from within than by laws imposed from without, because a good person and a good citizen only fully match in a well-ordered city.
Plato's Socrates shows a city growing from simple wants, with people dividing labour because one person does one thing better than many.
Plato's Socrates shows how luxury multiplies wants, and how those wants can push a city to take its neighbours' land and go to war.
In The Republic, Plato treats a falsehood believed inside the soul as worse than a lie told to others, because the person deceived cannot easily free themselves.
Plato warns that the mask an actor wears can become his face, so what we keep pretending to be can slowly shape what we become.
Plato compares learning virtue to learning to read: first the letters, then the words, and only later the patterns in real life.
Plato argues that too much of one thing hardens the spirit and too much of another softens it, so the aim is balance between reason and passion.
Plato says people trusted with power must be tested again and again over time, since pleasure, pressure and persuasion can each lead a person off course.
Plato warns that luxury and greed can turn protectors into wolves, so people who guard others should not be tempted to profit from their office.
Plato's rule that style should suit the subject still helps today. A writer is often the worst judge of whether others can follow their meaning.
The Republic proposes that a person's place should rest on their qualities rather than the family they were born into, a bold idea for Plato's age.
Plato treats reason and desire as a higher and a lower part of us that often pull apart, and the work of a good life is to bring them into harmony.
Plato's Socrates argues that a well-ordered city should be judged as a whole, not by whether each part is as comfortable as it could be.
Plato holds that education is the great matter, since small changes in what people learn at play can spread over time into customs, trade and laws.
Plato suggests that what people call expediency is really right limited by the conditions of human society, so ideals still matter even when they cannot be enforced.
Plato's Socrates defines wisdom as the skill of advising about the interests of the whole, not the skill of any single trade.
Plato says courage is steady belief about what to fear, laid down by good upbringing, so that the pressures of pleasure or pain cannot wash it out.
Plato points out that being master of yourself sounds absurd, since the master is also the servant, and means the better part of a person ruling the worse.
Plato's Socrates finds justice in each person doing their own work, since trouble starts when someone leaves their trade to meddle in what is not theirs.
Plato's story of Leontius, who wanted to look at corpses and was disgusted by them, suggests a third force in us, spirit, that can side with reason against desire.
Plato says good actions form good habits in the soul, so virtue is the health of the soul and vice is its disease.
Plato holds that injustice is like a mortal disease that makes life not worth having, so asking whether wrongdoing pays is a ridiculous question.
Plato describes spirit as the lion heart with which reason makes a treaty, the source of courage to endure pain and face hard thinking.
In The Republic, Socrates says that whoever kills the truth is a murderer, so he insists on speaking honestly even when his friends would rather he did not.
Plato's Socrates observes that much of custom is simply habit, so what once seemed shocking and later became ordinary is not always worth laughing at.
Plato argues that a difference in one respect does not settle what a person may do, just as a bald man may still be a cobbler and a hairy one may not.
Plato says a quarrel between people of one family should aim at reconciliation rather than ruin, since fighting among kin is unnatural.
Plato argues that an ideal is not worse for being impractical, just as a picture of a perfectly beautiful man is not diminished because no such man has lived.
Plato holds that opinion is shaky ground, because things look different from different points of view, while knowledge rests on what is steady and true.
Plato has Adeimantus argue that people who devote their lives to philosophy usually end up rogues if bad and fools if good, so a fine ideal can be hard to trust in practice.
In Plato's parable of the ship, a skilled pilot is ignored by a crew who think navigation cannot be learned, so the fault lies with those who refuse expert help.
Plato argues that the strongest natures need the right soil, and that public opinion shapes young people more than any single teacher does.
Plato criticises a patchy education, where someone dabbles in learning in youth and never masters its hardest part, and urges steady training from the start.
