Quotes About Plato

A delightful form of government, anarchic and motley, assigning a kind of equality indiscriminately to equals and unequals alike!

181. Pharmakon means drug, but as Jacques Derrida and others have pointed out, the word in Greek famously refuses to designate whether poison or cure. It holds both in the bowl. In the dialogues Plato uses the word to refer to everything from an illness, its cause, its cure, a recipe, a charm, a substance, a spell, artificial color, and paint.

The Greater Mysteries represented the felicity of the soul surrounded by light and truth. They symbolized that man had "raised" himself from the darkness of ignorance into the light of philosophy. Plato said that the body is the sarcophagus of the soul, for he realized that within the form was an immortal principle which could free itself from

Plato defined good as threefold in character: good in the soul, expressed through the virtues; good in the body, expressed through the symmetry and endurance of the parts; and good in the external world, expressed through social position and companionship.

We respond with joy to the call of beauty because in an instant it can awaken under the layers of the heart a forgotten brightness. Plato said: 'Beauty was ours in all its brightness...Whole were we who celebrated that festival' (Phaedrus).

My father was a dreamy fellow - he read Plato and Socrates and watched Phillies games.

The tyranny imposed on the soul by anger, or fear, or lust, or pain, or envy, or desire, I generally call 'injustice.'

I would rather be wrong with Plato than right with such men as these [the Pythagoreans].

Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being

Ideal goals are a menace in themselves, as much in more modern philosophers as in Plato.

He who is of calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden.

As Plato wrote long ago, the only people who will no longer see war are the dead. Which, of course, is precisely why we need to understand it as best we can.

Some love one, some love two. I love one, and that is you.

Plato, in his opinion, had committed too much to love.

Speak for me, Nikeratos. Someone's soul is always listening." Someone's always is, I suppose, if one only knew. Plato never forgot it.

The popularity of Einstein, believe it or not, is due to the influence of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato (died fourth century BCE). Plato argued that the best life for a human is one of theoretical contemplation. People who study things like pure mathematics, theoretical physics, and philosophy have transcended attachment to the mundane affairs of the everyday world. They are better than the rest of us: more pure, almost godlike.

of Plato's Republic and Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, which she did own in her root

Master Plato once said that Lux est umbra Dei; light is the shadow of God. I say this way: Light is the god of shadow!

Science was completely wrong to jettison the ideas of Plato and Aristotle and will have to return to them if it is ever to formulate the Grand Unified Theory of Everything.

Meritocracy – going back to Plato's Guardians – is about centralised authority. Meritocracy asserts that humanity can advance rapidly only under the guidance of geniuses, the smartest people in the world.

This would turn the American dream into what Plato described as a "noble lie," a belief that, though untrue, sustains civic harmony by inducing citizens to accept certain inequalities as legitimate.

He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

Those who listened to the teachings of Socrates became the best philosophers. But those who studied under Plato, relied more on the rhetorical path and therefore, the greatest opportunists.

From Plato to Hegel and beyond, some of the greatest philosophers have declared that what you think about death, and life beyond it, is the key to thinking seriously about everything else – and, indeed, that it provides one of the main reasons for thinking seriously about anything at all. This is something a Christian theologian should heartily endorse. So, without further delay, we plunge into