Quotes About Symposium

But, my dearest Agathon, it is truth which you cannot contradict; you can without any difficulty contradict Socrates.

The fault for these disastrous developments is increasingly laid on religious cults and their leaders, and the book culminates in a grand symposium at which the conflicting and irreconcilable claims of the great religions are argued at length. The Muslims claim to have the true faith, only to have it come out that they themselves have bitter internal disagreements. The inability of the Catholics to agree with the Lutherans demonstrates that the same is true with the Christians.

Plato's Symposium shows that flirtation and philosophy can further one another.

One does not hold a conversation with him. One holds a symposium. – Elizabeth Drew

The generation is unceasing. Beauty, as both Plato's Symposium and everyday life confirm, prompts the begetting of children: when the eye sees someone beautiful, the whole body wants to reproduce the person.

and when Mrs Thatcher came to the college for a scientific symposium Tyson was deputed to take her round the Common Room. This is hung with portraits and photographs of dead fellows, including one of the economist G. D. H. Cole. Tyson planned to take Mrs Thatcher up to it saying, 'And this, Prime Minister, is a former fellow, G. D. H. Dole.' Whereupon, with luck, Mrs Thatcher would have had to say, 'Cole not Dole.' In the event he did take her round but lost his nerve.

Prayer cannot truly be taught by principles and seminars and symposiums. It has to be born out of a whole environment of felt need. If I say, "I ought to pray," I will soon run out of motivation and quit; the flesh is too strong. I have to be driven to pray.

The Republic isn't as much fun as The Symposium. It's all long speeches, and nobody bursting in drunk to woo Socrates in the middle.

I knew you read the Symposium in the vac," he said in a low voice. Maurice felt uneasy. "Then you understand - without me saying more - " "How do you mean?" Durham could not wait. People were all around them, but with eyes that had gone intensely blue he whispered, "I love you.

Wine was served during the meal (rich and heavy, it was usually diluted with water), but the real drinking began once the food had been cleared away. This was the commissatio—a ceremonial drinking competition at which goblets had to be drained in a single gulp. Healths were drunk. This was the time for conversation and debate, which might last well into the evening, and was the Roman equivalent to the Greek symposium.

I came across a NATO symposium on Human Performance Optimization that included a roundup of medical technologies that might be repurposed to optimize warfighters. In among the prosthetic limbs "to provide superhuman strength" and the infrared and ultraviolet vision–bestowing eye implants was this: corpus callosotomy to "allow unihemispheric sleep and continuous alertness.

All right, all right. There's a copy of Plato's Symposium there. In it he wrote that his old mentor Socrates was taught philosophy by a woman. Her name was Diotima.

He suddenly recalled the famous myth from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

Socrates described his philosophical inspiration as the work of a personal, benign demon. His teacher, Diotima of Mantineia, tells him (in Plato's Symposium) that "Everything demonic is intermediate between God and mortal. God has no contact with man," she continues; "only through the demonic is there intercourse and conversation between man and gods, whether in the waking state or during sleep.

conferences. The table

I attended a symposium, an event named after a fifth century (B.C.) Athenian drinking party in which nonnerds talked about love; alas, there was no drinking, and mercifully, nobody talked about love.

I think love, both kinds of love, which you remember Plato defines in his "Symposium" - both kinds of love serve a touchstone for men. Some men understand only the one, some only the other. Those who understand only the non-platonic love need not speak of tragedy. For such love there can be no tragedy. "Thank you kindly for the pleasure, good bye," and that's the whole tragedy. And for the platonic love there can be no tragedy either, because there everything is clear and pure.

I remember seeing a stage version of Plato's 'Symposium' and being really moved because it was written by a man rather than a culture.

The boundaries between us had been breached for good, we gave a new meaning t the notion that man and wife were one flesh. You could track back this kind of alchemy in books: '...intimately to mix and melt and to be melted together with his beloved, so that one should be made out of two.' This is Shelley translating Plato, who was putting words into the mouth of Aristophanes, who's the only defender of heterosexual sex in the Symposium, although he makes it sound perverse.