Quotes About Plato

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

As Plato says: 'People cannot be good leaders, unless they have first been good servants.

When therefore we once begin so to love good men, as not only (according to Plato) to esteem the wise man himself happy, and him who hears his discourses sharer in his felicity, but also to admire and love his habit, gait, look, and very smile, so as to wish ourselves to be that very person, then we may be assured that we have made very good proficiency.

The great-eyed Plato proportioned the lights and shades after the genius of our life.

Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hem-lock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder.

Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock.

I am not such a fool as I look, quoth Plato to his disciples.

And ye have seen desiring without fruit, Those whose desire would have been quieted, Which evermore is given them for a grief. I speak of Aristotle and of Plato

One had to know Plato personally to appreciate the love he suppressed puritanically for the music, poetry, and drama he censured in his philosophy and censored in his model communities. They moved him too deeply.

The cruelty of Plato's thinking, the Rebbe emphasized that day, was not just in breaking up the family unit. It was in depriving children of parental love. For it is the parents, not the state and its functionaries, who have a genuine love for their children. And depriving children of this love, which is their due, was perhaps Plato's greatest cruelty.

some of Plato's most famous passages about the divided soul he represents the parts of the soul other than reason as non-human animals.

According to Plato, the wise man is the best ruler precisely because he doesn't care unduly about political honor and power, much less about bodily pleasures. He is too absorbed in the pleasures of learning to be tempted by the lesser pleasures of glory, wealth, and hedonism. His rule is therefore benevolent and unmarred by self-interest, because the passions which in lesser men would be absorbed in material goods and sensual pleasures are sluiced off into the pleasures of the mind. The

And when he [the author of the universe] had compounded the whole, he divided it up into as many souls as there are stars, and allotted each soul to a star. And mounting them on their stars, as if on chariots, he showed them the nature of the universe and told them the laws of their destiny. - "Timaeus" by Plato 427-347 B.C.

It is said culture requires slaves. I say that no cultured society can be built with slaves. This terrible Twentieth Century has made all cultural theories from Plato down seem ridiculous. Little man, there has never been a human culture.

When I asked if she read poetry anymore, she said no. she had lost her taste for it. That was how she said it, lost her taste. I asked how that could happen, and she said she agreed with Plato, or at least Plato as summarized for her: that there was something dishonest about it and that he was right to want to banish the poets. What she mean't, she told me, was that the only reality was life, real life, and that these beautiful versions were lies and she no longer had patience for it.

Plato suggested that some of the poets be driven out of the Republic because they had the power to weaken the guardians. Poets can make it impossible to have a war-unless they tell stories that agree with the "general line" established by the state. Poets who have no metaphysics, and therefore no political line, make war impossible because they have the irresistible ability to show the guardians that what seems necessary is only possible.

Infinite speakers are Plato's poietai taking their place in the historical. Storytellers enter the historical not when their speaking is full of anecdotes about actual persons, or when they appear as characters in their own tales, but when in their speaking we begin to see the narrative character of our lives. The stories they tell touch us. What we thought was an accidental sequence of experiences suddenly takes the dramatic shape of unresolved narrative.

Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes. —PLATO, Republic, BOOK II

Just as Plato wrote the Gorgias and Protagoras for the major sophists, we should write the Nietzsche and the Wittgenstein. And, for the minor sophists , the Vattimo and the Rorty. Neither more nor less polemical, neither more nor less respectful.

Plato wrote about one version of the concept of soulmates all the way back in the year 380 B.C. In his mythological text Symposium, he says that human beings originally had two faces, four arms, and four legs. They lived in joy because they were happy and complete. But then jealous Zeus came along and split them in two, and ever since, people have spent their lives searching for their other halves.

Sometimes I am glad I am not a philosopher - how would I ever complete a single chain of thought when someone is constantly asking me to do something? I don't think Plato would have been able to write his dialogues if he had a wife who kept bugging him to pass the pita bread.

Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.

And what is it, according to Plato, that philosophy is supposed to do? Nothing less than to render violence to our sense of ourselves and our world, our sense of ourselves in the world. (p. 40)

Surrender the vert platonic bond tying your soul to mine craft, the sky fades a pink shadow cast.