Quotes About Plato

To sum up the whole, we should say that the aim of the Platonic philosophy was to exalt man into a god.

My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing.

Philosophy does not regard pedigree, she received Plato not as a noble, but she made him one.

Plato's Symposium shows that flirtation and philosophy can further one another.

Only a philosopher's mind grows wings, since its memory always keeps it as close as possible to those realities by being close to which the gods are divine.

In Plato's opinion, man was made for philosophy; in Bacon's opinion, philosophy was made for man.

Then the lover, who is true and no counterfeit, must of necessity be loved by his love.

Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,--at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories.

Socrates condemned art because he preferred philosophy and only after much internal struggle did Plato accept this judgment.

for a poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him.

The poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his sneses, and the mind is no longer in him.

the old axiom that 'all power corrupts' has doubtful validity, because it derives from our neglect of Plato's advice to find men carefully and train them by methods which make them fit for heroes.

Plato believed in metaphorical realm of pure form.. Aristotle, his pupil, rejected this, insisting that the only reality is that which we consent. We live in the world of things, he thought and each of those things have unique properties that can be defined and categorized and acts predictably according to certain laws.

The failure of this experiment of communal service, which was tried for several years, and by good and honest men proves the emptiness of the theory of Plato and other ancients, applauded by some of later times, — that the taking away of private property, and the possession of it in community, by a commonwealth, would make a state happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.

So to the wretched writer I should like to say that there's one body only whose request for your caresses is not vulgar, is not unchaste, untoward, or impolite: the body of your work itself; for you must remember that your attentions will not merely celebrate a beauty but create one; that yours is love that brings it own birth with it, just as Plato has declared, and that you should therefore give up the blue things of this world in favor of the words which say them

Immanuel Kant is credited with saying, "If the stars came out only once in a lifetime, we'd stay up all that night." Now we stay up late in Plato's cave just to watch the enervated stars on The Tonight Show.

Plato believed the soul was divided into three parts: reason, spirit, and appetite.

Each of us is a mere symbolon of a man, the result of bisection, like the flat fish, two out of one, and each of us is constantly searching for his corresponding symbolon. —Plato, The Symposium

A common view of knowledge, going back to Plato, is that knowledge is justified, true belief. To know something, you have to think it's true (that's belief), you have to be right about it (that's truth), and you have to have good reasons for believing it (that's justification).

Periodic revivals of Plato's and Aristotle's ideas made a great impact on the church and pagan societies in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and on much of today's culture. These ideas have been mass marketed. Many have eaten of these men's fruit, not realizing the roots of what they were taught. The ideas of these men have insidiously clouded the clear understanding of the Bible for many, setting us up to view women as an inferior, subordinate "other".

God is not the author of all things, but of good only.

Plato stands for the union of truth and goodness in the supreme idea of God.

All good and evil, whether in the body or in human nature, originates in the soul, and overflows from thence, as if from the head into the eyes.

Where it is a general rule that it is wrong to gratify lovers, this can be attributed to the defects of those who make that rule: the government's lust for rule and the subjects' cowardice.