Love Quote by Plato

Plato turns “love” from a private feeling into a public skill, and the move is almost provocatively antiseptic. “To love rightly” assumes love can be wrong in the first place: mis-aimed, excessive, too attached to the merely attractive. The sentence is a miniature blueprint of his whole project in the Symposium and the Republic, where eros is not denied but recruited. Desire becomes fuel for education, not a storm to be romanticized.

The key word is “orderly.” Plato is writing in a culture that prized beauty but also feared the chaos of appetites and faction. So he frames love as alignment with kosmos: proportion, harmony, intelligibility. “Beautiful” here isn’t a swipe-right aesthetic; it’s a moral category, a signal that the lovable is what participates in form and measure. When he adds “educated and disciplined,” he’s sketching the ladder of love: you start with a body, move to minds, laws, institutions, and finally to Beauty itself. It’s a curriculum for desire.

The subtext is political. A city can’t be stable if citizens “love” wealth, status, or novelty more than justice and order. Plato wants guardians who are trained to find pleasure in the right things, so their attachments don’t become corruption. That training is also elitist by design: the right kind of love belongs to the right kind of schooling.

Read today, it’s both bracing and suspect. Bracing because it insists our tastes are not innocent; suspect because it risks turning love into compliance. Plato’s ideal lover is, at bottom, a well-governed citizen.