Quotes About Philosophy

The man who has no self-respect, on the contrary, will imitate anybody and anything; sounds of nature and cries of animals alike; his whole performance will be imitation of gesture and voice.

I am smart because I know I nothing.

I pity you who are my companions, because you think that you are doing something when in reality you are doing nothing.

Socrates: But why, my dear Crito, should we care about the opinion of the many?

First, I must distinguish between that which always is and never becomes and which is apprehended by reason and reflection, and that which always becomes and never is and is conceived by opinion with the help of sense.

My opinion is: Truth must be absolute and that you Mr. Protagoras, are absolutely in error. Since this is indeed my opinion, then you must concede that it is true according to your philosophy.

Since then, as philosophers prove, appearance tyrannizes over truth and is lord of happiness, to appearance I must devote myself.

I am speaking like a book, but I believe that what I am saying is true.

Beauty is the splendor of truth. (Die Schönheit ist der Glanz der Wahrheit)

For no man is voluntarily bad; but the bad become bad by reason of an ill disposition of the body and bad education, things which are hateful to every man and happen to him against his will.

Unless, said I, either philosophers become kings in our states or those whom we now call our kings and rulers take to the pursuit of philosophy seriously and adequately, and there is a conjunction of these two things, political power and philosophic intellgence, while the motley horde of the natures who at present pursue either apart from the other are compulsory excluded, there can be no cessation of troubles, dear Glaucon, for our states, nor, I fancy, for the human race either. (473d-e)

And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.

For he, Adeimantus, whose mind is fixed upon true being, has surely no time to look down upon the affairs of earth, or to be filled with malice and envy, contending against men

the creative soul creates not children, but conceptions of wisdom and virtue

For our discussion is about no ordinary matter, but on the right way to conduct our lives.

Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not. ~ Protagoras

For this, he said, is the great error of our day in the treatment of the human body, that physicians separate the soul from the body.

Even the best of writings are but a reminiscence of what we know...

as a breath of wind or some echo rebounds from smooth, hard surfaces and returns to the source from which it issued, so the stream of beauty passes back into its possessor through his eyes, which is its natural route to the soul; arriving there and setting him all aflutter, it waters the passages of the feathers and causes the wings to grow, and fills the soul of the loved one in his turn with love.

But I don't think we shall quarrel about a word - the subject of our inquiry is too important for that.

It's like this, I think: the excellence of a good body doesn't make the soul good, but the other way around: the excellence of a good soul makes the body as good as it can be.

this is the greatest good to man, to discourse daily on virtue, and other things which you have heard me discussing, examining both myself and others

Now I am a diviner, though not a very good one, but I have enough religion for my own use, as you might say of a bad writer—his writing is good enough for him; and

So if anyone is to declare how the all was in this way genuinely born, he must also mix in the form of the wandering cause-how it is its nature to sweep things around. In this way, then, we must retreat, and, by taking in turn another, new beginning suited to these very matters, just as in what was before us earlier, so too in what is before us now, we must begin again from the beginning.