Quotes About Plato

Aristotle decided that Reality with a capital R is not (for the most part) something ultimately above or behind the world we see and hear and smell and touch. It is that world. What Plato had dismissed as the illusions of the cave, Aristotle set out to prove were the keys to ultimate understanding all along.

From the point of view of Plato—not to mention Socrates—this was a shocking downgrading of reason. But Bernard was only following Plato's hierarchy of knowledge as adopted and adapted by Saint Augustine. Just as reason is superior to opinion (doxa), so Saint Augustine taught that faith is superior to reason because it rests on the highest wisdom of all, the truth of God's revelation.9 Faith of this potent kind is more than belief.

Thanks to Plato, Socrates's notion of the individual rational soul would become an integral part of Western thinking for the next two thousand years.

the key to happiness is understanding how the real world works. This idea stood in contrast to Plato-inspired utopian dreams, including John Calvin's Geneva (a favorite target in the Enlightenment). Our highest ideals are not reflections of some transcendent reality, Enlightenment thinkers argued, or some higher truth. They are just that, ideals: insubstantial playthings of the mind that can deceive as often as they can inspire.

One could say that Aristotle had turned Plato on his head. Instead of the individual being a pale copy of a more real abstract form, the universal is less real (indeed only a copy) of the individual.15 This reversal left Aristotle's philosophy with a built-in bias in favor of the individual: in science, in metaphysics, in ethics, and later in politics.

Between you and me, Plato was a hack. All that crap about higher forms and caves? He was drunk when he wrote it. I know. I was there.

To the philosopher, infinity, knowledge, movement, empirical laws, etc., are things just as familiar {as family relations}. And as her dead brother and uncle are present to the peasant woman, thus Plato, Spinoza, etc. are present to the philosopher. The one has as much reality as the other, but the latter are immortal.

Plato's discussants and querents are not polite as students and teachers are polite. They are polite the way only fantasy discussants can be civil inside a fantasy. Were they real, they'd be at each other's throats before eight or nine pages were done.

Such, Echecrates, was the end of our comrade, who was, we may fairly say, of all those whom we knew in our time, the bravest and also the wisest and most upright man.

To Aristotle or to Plato the State is, above all, a large and powerful educative agency which gives the individual increased opportunities of self-development and greater capacities for the enjoyment of life.

Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas

Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.

There is also another defect in his laws worthy of censure, which Plato has given in his book of Laws; that the whole constitution was calculated only for the business of war: it is indeed excellent to make them conquerors; for which reason the preservation of the state depended thereon. The destruction of it commenced with their victories: for they knew not how to be idle, or engage in any other employment than war.

Ya sé, desde luego, que la Atlántida de Platón nunca existió en realidad. Por esta misma razón, nunca podrá morir. Siempre será un ideal, un sueño de perfección , una meta que inspirará a los hombres en la posteridad.

What else does psychoanalysis do here but confirm the old saying of Plato, that the good people are those who content themselves with dreaming what the others, the bad people, really do?

Is this because I think suicide can be justifiable? Plato thought so. Seneca thought so. But what do I think? Why do I think you did it? Because you were trapped upside down in a tankful of water. Because you were weak and in pain. Because you were tired of fighting.

A village idiot, in the literal sense, who really loves the truth, even when he only babbles, is in his thinking infinitely superior to Aristotle. He is infinitely nearer to Plato than Aristotle ever was.

Plato also knew clearly, and indicated by allusions in his works, the dogmas of the Trinity, mediation, the incarnation, the Passion and the notions of grace and salvation through love. He knew the essential truth. Namely, that God is good. He is only all-powerful in addition.

The sea was the true center of the Greek world: "we live round the sea," says Plato's Socrates, "like frogs . . . around a pond.

They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth. -Plato, philosopher (427-347 BCE)

The olive grove of Academe,Plato's retirement, where the Attic birdTrills her thick-warbled notes the summer long.

Ornate rhetoric taught out of the rule of Plato…. To which poetry would be made subsequent, or indeed rather precedent, as being less subtle and fine, but more simple, sensuous, and passionate.

Plato—"No thing more excellent nor more valuable than wine was ever granted mankind by God.

That a sublime genius like the divine Plato could have been absolutely convinced of the reality of the divine idea shows us how contagious, how omnipotent, is the tradition of the religious mania even on the greatest minds.