Quotes About Plato

Paraphrasing Plato's Republic: Only people who have allowed themselves to be reformed by reality have it in themselves to reform their polis for the better.

If we don't understand our tools, then there is a danger that we will become the tool of our tools, Plato said, which I thought was a very astute observation, especially considering how little it turned out that he actually knew about Google or really anything about the Internet. I

Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die. (Oddly, philosophy departments have forgone turning this into an enrollment-boosting slogan.)

That is Plato's great hope: that love of beauty can, when rightly cultivated and educated, battle immorality.

As Plato: What is play and delightful one kind of child is coercion and torture for another, and will not take no matter how much coercion is applied.

Of the twenty-six dialogues of Plato, the internal dramas of seven of them are set during the spring and summer of 399: Theaetetus, Euthyphro, Sophist, Statesman, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo.

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.

Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.

We achieve a life worth living by understanding how the cosmos achieved an existence worth existing. The impersonally sublime is internalized into personal virtue. Plato: For measure and proportion manifest themselves in all areas as beauty and virtue

Plato worries our thinking might become too reflexive and comfortable with itself.

So comfortable would Plato feel seated at philosophy's seminar table that Alfred North Whitehead could famously write, "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

People disappear into their stories all the time. We live in stories and images, as immersed in them as though they were Wu Daozi's inkpots; we breathe in presuppositions and exhale further stories. We in the West have been muddled by Plato's assertion that art is imitation and illusion; we believe that it is a realm apart, one whose impact on our world is limited, one in which we do not live.

The rationalism of Plato and Aristotle is also important because Jews, Christians and Muslims all drew upon their ideas and tried to adapt them to their own religious experience, even though the Greek God was very different from their own.

The Socratic dialogue was a spiritual exercise designed to produce a profound psychological change in the participants, and because its purpose was that each person should understand the depth of his ignorance, there was no way that anybody could win. Plato

By Hercules! I prefer to err with Plato, whom I know how much you value, than to be right in the company of such men.

You may be sure, dear Crito, that inaccurate language is not only in itself a mistake: it implants evil in men's souls.

. . . the triumph of my art is in thoroughly examining whether the thought which the mind of the young man brings forth is a false idol or a noble and true birth.

The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid, of Plato & Cicero, which all men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible

Nor at all can tell Whether I mean this day to end myself, Or lend an ear to Plato where he says, That men like soldiers may not quit the post Allotted by the Gods.

And now - Plato's words mock me in the shadows on the ledge behind the flames: '...the men of the cave would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes.

Music then is simply the result of the effects of Love on rhythm and harmony.

Man's music is seen as a means of restoring the soul, as well as confused and discordant bodily afflictions, to the harmonic proportions that it shares with the world soul of the cosmos.

Education in music is most sovereign because more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way to the innermost soul and take strongest hold upon it

Music is a more potent instrument than any other for education.