Quotes About Philosophy

For, let me tell you that the more the pleasures of the body fade away, the greater to me are the pleasure and charm of conversation.

If a painter, then, paints a picture of an ideally beautiful man, complete to the last detail, is he any the worse painter because he cannot show that such a man could really exist?

I can't refute you, Socrates, Agathon said, so I dare say you're right. No, said Socrates, it's the truth you can't refute, my dear Agathon. Socrates is a pushover.

You must contrive for your future rulers another and a better life than that of a ruler, and then you may have a well-ordered State; for only in the State which offers this, will they rule who are truly rich, not in silver and gold, but in virtue and wisdom, which are the true blessings of life.

love,' she said, 'may be described generally as the love of the everlasting possession of the good?

Beauty is certainly a soft, smooth, slippery thing, and therefore of a nature which easily slips in and permeates our souls.

Then as for those who gaze upon many beautiful things but don't see the beautiful itself, and aren't even capable of following someone else who leads them to it, and upon many just things but not the just itself, and all the things like that, we'll claim that they accept the seeming of everything but discern nothing of what they have opinions about.

They say that to do injustice is, by nature, good; to suffer injustice, evil; but that the evil is greater than the good.

But I speak in this vehement manner, as I must frankly confess to you, because I want to hear from you the opposite side; and I would ask you to show not only the superiority which justice has over injustice, but what effect they have on the possessor of them which makes the one to be a good and the other an evil to him.

If it is pure when it leaves the body and drags nothing bodily with it, as it had no willing association with the body in life, but avoided it and gathered itself together by itself and always practiced this, which is no other than practicing philosophy in the right way, in fact, training to die easily. Or is this not training for death?

The physician of the soul is aware that his patient will receive no nourishment unless he has been cleaned out; and the soul of the Great King himself, if he has not undergone this purification, is unclean and impure.

Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety.

Behold, he said, the wisdom of Socrates; he refuses to teach himself, and goes about learning of others, to whom he never even says Thank you.

But whether the just have a better and happier life than the unjust is a further question which we also proposed to consider.

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them.

Yes, but do not persons often err about good and evil: many who are not good seem to be so, and conversely? That

There you have Socrates' wisdom; [b] he himself isn't willing to teach, but he goes around learning from others and isn't even grateful to them.

To go to the world below, having a soul which is like a vessel full of injustice, is the last and worst of all the evils

Old age has a great sense of calm and freedom when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are free from the grasp, not of one mad master only, but of many.

There is no greater evil one can suffer than to hate reasonable discourse.

In the knowledgeable realm, the form of the good is the last thing to be seen, and it is reached only with difficulty. Once one has seen it, however, one must conclude that it is the cause of all that is correct and beautiful in anything, that it produces both light and its source in the visible realm, and that in the intelligible realm it controls and provides truth and understanding, so that anyone who is to act sensibly in private or public must see it.

I am one of those who are very willing to be refuted if I say anything which is not true, and very willing to refute anyone else who says what is not true, and quite as ready to be refuted as to refute; for I hold that this is the greater gain of the two, just as the gain is greater of being cured of a very great evil than of curing another.

It is only those who practice philosophy in the right way, we say, who always most want to free the soul; and this release and separation of the soul from the body is the preoccupation of the philosophers? So it appears. Therefore, as I said at the beginning, it would be ridiculous for a man to train himself in life to live in a state as close to death as possible, and then to resent it when it comes? Ridiculous, of course.

Renouncing the honors at which the world aims, I desire only to know the truth, and to live as well as I can, and, when I die, to die as well as I can.