Quotes About Plato

The mixture of the oral and the written traditions in the writings of Plato enabled him to dominate the history of the West.

I often think . . . that the bookstores that will save civilization are not online, nor on campuses, nor named Borders, Barnes & Noble, Dalton, or Crown. They are the used bookstores, in which, for a couple of hundred dollars, one can still find, with some diligence, the essential books of our culture, from the Bible and Shakespeare to Plato, Augustine, and Pascal.

This idea the Greeks had of him is best summed up not by a poet, but by a philosopher, Plato: "Love—Eros—makes his home in men's hearts, but not in every heart, for where there is hardness he departs. His greatest glory is that he cannot do wrong nor allow it; force never comes near him. For all men serve him of their own free will. And he whom Love touches not walks in darkness.

Fairest of the deathless gods. This idea the Greeks had of him is best summed up not by a poet, but by a philosopher, Plato: Love—Eros—makes his home in men's hearts, but not in every heart, for where there is hardness he departs. His greatest glory is that he cannot do wrong nor allow it; force never comes near him. For all men serve of him their own free will. And he whom Love touches not walks in darkness.

Plato: "Love—Eros—makes his home in men's hearts, but not in every heart, for where there is hardness he departs. His greatest glory is that he cannot do wrong nor allow it; force never comes near him. For all men serve him of their own free will. And he whom Love touches not walks in darkness.

The sentences which Plato says were inscribed in the shrine at Delphi are singularly unlike those to be found in holy places outside of Greece. Know thyself was the first, and Nothing in excess the second, both marked by a total absence of the idiom of priestly formulas all the world over. Something new was moving in the world, the

Human beings have shone a light on numbers, and we've picked out a logical system," she said. "You can't bring God into this. It's unnecessary." After that I shut up around her about Plato. She also said, "I have to admit I was kind of alarmed when I realized how bad your arithmetic skills were." "How did you know that?" "From the things you would ask.

No doubt Plato's notion that poets should chant nothing but hymns to the Gods and praises of virtue is a little narrow and exacting, but if they are to sing songs worthy of themselves, and of mankind, they must be on the side of virtue and of the Gods.

And even though we have read all the arguments of Plato and Aristotle, we shall never become philosophers if we are unable to make a sound judgement on matters which come up for discussion; in this case what we would seem to have learnt would not be science but history.

It is a mistake to suppose that he rejected poetry for aesthetic reasons. What is overlooked in all of this is that Plato came between an older tradition of philosophy and Christianity. He saw the danger of violence much more clearly because of his proximity to the pre-Socratics. The understanding of the danger is essential, vital in Plato.

Probably no man will ever corral truth, but Protagoras came closer to it than Plato.

Church practice has been more influenced by Plato than by Jesus. We invariably prefer the universal synthesis, the answer that settles all the dust and resolves every question even when it is not entirely true over the mercy and grace of God.

But just remember, there is a symbiosis between immature groups and immature leaders, I am afraid, which is why both Plato and Jefferson said democracy was not really the best form of government. It is just the safest. A truly wise monarch would probably be the most effective at getting things done. (Don't send hate letters, please!)

Nico had once read a story from Plato, who claimed that in the ancient times, all humans had been a combination of male and female. Each person had two heads, four arms, four legs. Supposedly, these combo-humans had been so powerful they made the gods uneasy, so Zeus split them in half—man and woman. Ever since, humans had felt incomplete. They spent their lives searching for their other halves.

Plato compared the intellect to a charioteer guiding the powerful horses of the passions, i.e., he gave it both the power of perception and the power of control.

In 529, as part of an imperial ban against pagan education,17 the Academy was shut down, and while the members of its faculty were offered pensions and resettlement, seven of them—Damascius, the Academy's head; Simplicius; Eulamius; Priscian; Hermeias; Diogenes; and Isidore—were recruited by Khusro to re-create the Academy at the Sassanid capital city of Ctesiphon, there to translate the works of Plato and his successors into Persian.

Eventually you ascend the stairs to the street. You think of Plato's pilgrims climbing out of the cave, from the shadow world of appearances toward things as they really are, and you wonder if it is possible to change in this life. Being with a philosopher makes you think.

think the Princess should read the New Testament both night and morning, and also certain selected portions of the Old Testament. She must become fully conversant with the gospels. She should, I believe also study Plutarch's Enchiridion, Seneca's Maxims, and of course Plato and Cicero." He glanced at his friend. "I suggest that Sir Thomas More's Utopia would provide good reading.

The generation is unceasing. Beauty, as both Plato's Symposium and everyday life confirm, prompts the begetting of children: when the eye sees someone beautiful, the whole body wants to reproduce the person.

Please tell me I'm not the only one who finds it endearing and encouraging that a legendary Roman philosopher had to reassure himself that it's okay not to be Plato.

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

Human reasoning, she said—referring now explicitly to Socrates and Plato—human reasoning is imperfect. Human bias keeps us from perfect vision of what is happening around us. But the quest for truth—the quest to understand the world around us—must ultimately be how you enact the good.

Utopianism is, as Plato taught us at the outset, the fire with which we must play because it is the only way we can find out what we are. We need to criticize false understandings of Utopia, but the easy way out provided by realism is deadly.

Plato says a multitude can never philosophize and hence can never recognize the seriousness of philosophy or who really philosophizes. Attempted to influence the multitude results in forced prostitution.