Plato

Plato pictures prisoners chained in a cave, taking shadows on the wall for reality. One is freed, painfully turns toward the fire and then the sunlight, and finally sees things as they are. Education, he suggests, is not putting sight into blind eyes but turning the whole soul toward the light.

In the Republic, justice in a person is described as an inner order: reason guides, spirit supports reason, and appetite is kept in measure, so that the soul becomes one harmonious whole rather than a place of civil war.

The soul is pictured as a charioteer driving two winged horses, one noble and obedient, the other unruly; the struggle to steer them shapes whether the soul rises or falls.

Glaucon tells of a shepherd who finds a ring that makes him invisible, and challenges Socrates: would anyone stay just if they could never be caught?

Socrates tells Theaetetus that wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and that philosophy has no other beginning.

In the Philebus, neither a life of pleasure without thought nor a life of thought without any pleasure is judged sufficient; the better life is a well-measured mixture of both.

Socrates says that those who practise philosophy rightly are, in a sense, practising for dying and death.

The Good is compared to the sun: as the sun makes things visible and lets them grow, the Good makes things knowable and gives them their being.