Love Quote by Plato

Greatness, for Plato, is a brutal form of self-denial: a demand that you amputate the reflex to treat your own interests as the natural center of the moral universe. The line reads like ethical advice, but it’s also a diagnostic of why most people fail at “greatness” in public life. Loving “themselves or their own things” is shorthand for the private gravity that pulls every decision toward status, property, reputation, faction. Plato’s point is that justice can’t survive that gravitational field; it requires a loyalty that can withstand the humiliation of being outshone, corrected, or simply irrelevant.

The phrasing “whether it happens to be done by themselves or others” is the knife twist. Plato isn’t merely praising fairness; he’s attacking the most socially acceptable form of vanity: wanting the right outcome only if it comes with your name attached. In a culture obsessed with honor, and in a city-state where rhetoric often beat truth, this is a rebuke to the performative citizen who treats politics as self-branding.

Context matters: Plato is writing in the shadow of Athens’ civic volatility and the execution of Socrates, an emblem of what happens when a society confuses popularity for justice. The quote aligns with the Republic’s deeper project: only those trained to love the good itself, not the perks of power, are fit to lead. “Great” here doesn’t mean famous. It means dependable under pressure, the rare person who can applaud a just act even when it costs them credit.