Quotes About Plato

The superconscious mind is the God Mind within each man, and is the realm of perfect ideas. In it, is the " perfect pattern" spoken of by Plato, The Divine Design; for there is a Divine Design for each person. " There is a place that you are to fill and no one else can fill, something you are to do, which no one else can do.

Creation is the production of order. What a simple, but, at the same time, comprehensive and pregnant principle is here! Plato could tell his disciples no ultimate truth of more pervading significance.

Today Plato is nearly forgotten. His beliefs include the notion that people who govern should be intelligent, rational, self-controlled, and in love with wisdom, an idea that has long been discredited.

to be ignorant of "either letters or swimming," Plato declared, was to lack a proper education.

Was it Aristotle who said the human soul is composed of reason, will, and desire?" "No, that was Plato. Aristotle and Plato were as different as Mel Tormé and Bing Crosby. In any case, things were a lot simpler in the old days," Komatsu said. "Wouldn't it be fun to imagine reason, will, and desire engaged in a fierce debate around a table?

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx.

My hero Socrates trained Plato on a rock. How much did that cost? So the greatest minds in history became the greatest minds in history without spending a lot of money.

I have read in Plato and Cicero sayings that are very wise and very beautiful; but I never read in either of them, "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden."

The philosopher is in love with truth, that is, not with the changing world of sensation, which is the object of opinion, but with the unchanging reality which is the object of knowledge.

Plato is my friend, but truth is a better friend.

There is a certain way of searching for the truth in mathematics that Plato is said first to have discovered. Theon called this analysis.

The ancient Greeks, as Plato reports, believed that we discover truth through "reminiscence," that is by "remembering," by intuitively searching into our own experience.

Plato believed that insanity was essential to our nature and assumed that it held esoteric knowledge about who we are.

Amos approached intellectual life strategically, as if it were an oil field to be drilled, and after two years of sitting through philosophy classes he announced that philosophy was a dry well. "I remember his words," recalled Amnon. "He said, 'There is nothing we can do in philosophy. Plato solved too many of the problems. We can't have any impact in this area. There are too many smart guys and too few problems left, and the problems have no solutions.

I have found that fate is as liquid and elusive a word as love. Plato thought they were the same ... Novalis wrote that fate and soul are two names for the same principle.

The Golden Proportion, sometimes called the Divine Proportion, has come down to us from the beginning of creation. The harmony of this ancient proportion, built into the very structure of creation, can be unlocked with the 'key' ... 528, opening to us its marvelous beauty. Plato called it the most binding of all mathematical relations, and the key to the physics of the cosmos.

Up until our own times men had only received two sorts of teaching in what concerns the relations between politics and morality. One was Platos and it said: Morality decides politics; and the other was Machiavellis, and it said Politics have nothing to do with morality. Today we receive a third. M. Maurras teaches: Politics decide morality.

Socrates, Plato's teacher, had been condemned to death, as an incredulous corrupter of youth. Plato wrote several dialogues in his defense, and by the first century Socrates was considered one of the greatest sages of antiquity.

I came to philosophy first through Plato. I was very interested in Plato, the person and his works. [The] Republic is a much larger work. I was fascinated particularly by his Symposium. It is a beautiful work with Plato's signature dialogues and the speech on Socrates, Aristophanes and others. I read the history of western philosophy and eventually moved to Indian philosophy.

Salomon saith, There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Salomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.

Very great, in short, is the prerogative of constitutive instances; for they are of much use in the forming of definitions (especially particular definitions) and in the division and partition of natures; with regard to which it was not ill said by Plato, "That he is to be held as a god who knows well how to define and to divide.

Societies seek to enforce basic social rules universally, but a rule of law that protects citizens against arbitrary actions of the state itself is often initially applied only to a minority of privileged subjects. The law, in other words, protects the interests of the elites who are close to the state or who control the state, and in that sense law resembles what Socrates in Plato's Republic labels the "justice of a band of robbers.

O]ther thinkers have philosophised since the time of Plato, but that does not destroy the interest and beauty of his philosophy