Quotes About Plato

Even those modern secularists and liberals who hate the metaphysics illustrated by Plato's allegory of the cave thrill to the idea that the common man is in the grip of illusion and ought to be ruled by philosopher-kings, even if their idea of a philosopher-king would have filled Plato with abject horror.

Overall, then, Aristotle just isn't as "sexy" as Plato. His only advantage is being right.

The good man," says Plato, "is the only excellent musician, because he gives forth a perfect harmony not with a lyre or other instrument but with the whole of his life.

To appreciate art, the observer must adopt a special attitude of mind; the same attitude required by Plato, of detachment from personal concerns, so that the work of art can be appreciated in contemplative fashion uncontaminated by personal needs or preoccupations.

The base emotions Plato banned have left a radio-active and not radiant land.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Broad daylight; breakfast; return of cheerfulness and bons sens; Plato blushes for shame; all free spirits run riot.)

It is still a metaphysical faith that underlies our faith in science—and we men seekers after knowledge today, we godless ones and anti-metaphysicians, we, too, derive our flame from the fire ignited by a faith millennia old, the Christian faith, which was also Plato's, that God is truth, that truth is divine.

It is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests—that even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by the thousand-year-old faith, the Christian faith which was also Plato's faith, that God is truth; that truth is divine.

Seriousness in play. At sunset in Genoa, I heard from a tower a long chiming of bells; it kept on and on, and over the noise of the backstreets, as if insatiable for itself, it rang out into the evening sky and the sea air, so terrible and so childish at the same time, so melancholy. then I thoughts of Platos's words and felt them suddenly in my heart: all in all, nothing human is worth taking very seriously; nevertheless ...

Plato's objection to the older art--that it is the imitation of a phantom and hence belongs to a sphere even lower than the empirical world--could certainly not be directed against the new art; and so we find Plato endeavoring to transcend reality and to represent the idea which underlies this pseudo-reality.

Plato has given to all posterity the model of a new art form, the model of the novel --which may be described as an infinitely enhanced Aesopian fable, in which poetry holds the same rank in relation to dialectical philosophy as this same philosophy held for many centuries in relation to theology: namely the rank of ancilla .

And, believe me, if I were again beginning my studies, I should follow the advice of Plato and start with mathematics.

The differences between Plato and Aristotle had already been much debated. The argument stretched back to ancient Greece, where Aristotle had criticized and corrected Plato, the teacher with whom he began to study in 367 BC, when he was seventeen and Plato around sixty.

The natural world we perceive through our senses is, for Plato, a defective and incomplete version of this more perfect and timeless realm in the same way that (in the famous metaphor from Book 7 of The Republic) the images seen by the prisoners shackled in their cave are the shadows of the real objects for which the prisoners, in their ignorance, mistake them.

Soon after Plato's death, Aristotle attacked the theory in On Philosophy, later expanding his criticism in his Metaphysics. He denied that a form could exist without matter, and the realm of Forms possessed, he believed, no objective validity. Plato put forth nothing but words—what Aristotle disparaged as "empty phrases and poetical metaphors.

M]odern physics has definitely decided for Plato. For the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense of the word: they are forms, structures, or – in Plato's sense – Ideas, which can be unambiguously spoken of only in the language of mathematics.

Like Solon, Plato intended to write a long fable about legendary Atlantis; like Solon, he never did write it. Yet there existed beyond the Atlantic an unvisited land, after all, and it is more strange than any of Plato's myths that Plato's apprehension of order and justice should be a living influence among the people of that land, twenty-four centuries after the mystical philosopher's soul departed from Athens.

The Stoic system of physics was materialism with an infusion of pantheism. In contradiction to Plato's view that the Ideas, or Prototypes, of phenomena alone really exist, the Stoics held that material objects alone existed; but immanent in the material universe was a spiritual force which acted through them, manifesting itself under many forms, as fire, aether, spirit, soul, reason, the ruling principle.

how worthless are all these poor people who are engaged in matters political, and, as they suppose, are playing the philosopher. All drivelers. Well then, man: do what Nature now requires. Set yourself in motion, if it is in your power, and do not look about to see if anyone will observe it, nor expect Plato's Republic: but be content if the smallest thing goes on well, and consider such an event to be no small matter.

For he (Cato) gives his opinion as if he were in Plato's Republic, not in Romulus' cesspool.

Plato feared the "false and braggart words" of the demagogue, and suspected democracy might be nothing more than a staging point on the road to tyranny.

Plato's justification of elite rule is set out in his famous Allegory of the Cave.11 It contrasts the unreality of the images by which the Many live and the true reality that only the Few can approximate.

Democracy was, of course, anathema to Plato, not least because it stands for the regime where those who rule tend to be guided by experience of the tangibles of everyday existence, by "common" sense.