Quotes About Understanding

The comprehensive mind is always dialectical.

I really do not know, Socrates, how to express what I mean. For somehow or other our arguments, on whatever ground we rest them, seem to turn round and walk away from us.

Let no one destitute of Geometry enter my doors.

Haven't you noticed that opinion without knowledge is always a poor thing? At the best it is blind—isn't anyone who holds a true opinion without understanding like a blind man on the right road?

Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not. ~ Protagoras

But I don't think we shall quarrel about a word - the subject of our inquiry is too important for that.

no man should be angry at what is true. But those who love the truth in each thing are to be called lovers of wisdom and not lovers of opinion. Assuredly.

We are completely perplexed, then, and you must clear up the question for us, of what you intend to signify when you use the word being. Obviously you must be quite familiar with what you mean, whereas we, who formerly imagined we knew, are now at a loss.

I must go beyond the dark world of sense information to the clear brilliance of the sunlight of the outside world. Once done, it becomes my duty to go back to the cave in order to illuminate the minds of those imprisoned in the 'darkness' of sensory knowledge.

Oratory is the art of enchanting the soul, and therefore he who would be an orator has to learn the differences of human souls--they are so many and of such a nature, and from them come the differences between man and man.

May not 'the wolf,' as the proverb says, 'claim a hearing'?

You wouldn't know him if I told you the name. HIPPIAS: But I know right now he's an ignoramus.

Then as for those who gaze upon many beautiful things but don't see the beautiful itself, and aren't even capable of following someone else who leads them to it, and upon many just things but not the just itself, and all the things like that, we'll claim that they accept the seeming of everything but discern nothing of what they have opinions about.

You learn more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.

The tools that would teach men their own use would be beyond price.

In the knowledgeable realm, the form of the good is the last thing to be seen, and it is reached only with difficulty. Once one has seen it, however, one must conclude that it is the cause of all that is correct and beautiful in anything, that it produces both light and its source in the visible realm, and that in the intelligible realm it controls and provides truth and understanding, so that anyone who is to act sensibly in private or public must see it.

Yes, I said, that they should begin by reproaching us with our ignorance of the good, and then presume our knowledge of it—for the good they define to be knowledge of the good, just as if we understood them when they use the term 'good'—this is of course ridiculous. Most true, he said. And those who make pleasure their good are in equal perplexity; for they are compelled to admit that there are bad pleasures as well as good. Certainly. And

But it is not possible, Theodorus, that evil should be destroyed--for there must always be something opposed to the good; nor is it possible that it should have its seat in heaven. But it must inevitably haunt human life, and prowl about this earth. That is why a man should make all haste to escape from earth to heaven; and escape means becoming as like God as possible; and a man becomes like God when he becomes just and pious, with understanding.

Be kind. For everyone is fighting a hard battle.

Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.

The greatest of all logical truths, and the one of which writers on philosophy are most apt to lose sight, the difference between words and things, has been most strenuously insisted on by him (cp. Rep.; Polit.; Cratyl), although he has not always avoided the confusion of them in his own writings (e.g. Rep.).

Know thyself.

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

If a person does not attend to the meaning of terms as they are commonly used in argument, he may be involved even in greater paradoxes