Plato Quotes - Page 16

• People are mostly sane enough, of course, in the affairs of common life: the getting of food, shelter, and so on. But the moment they attempt any depth or generality of thought, they go mad almost infallibly. The vast majority, of course, adopt the local religious madness, as naturally as they adopt the local dress. But the more powerful minds will, equally infallibly, fall into the worship of some intelligent and dangerous lunatic, such as Plato, or Augustine, or Comte, or Hegel, or Marx.

  David Stove

  Religious, Powerful, Fall

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• The atomists , unlike Socrates , Plato , and Aristotle , sought to explain the world without introducing the notion of purpose or final cause.

  Bertrand Russell

  Finals, Purpose, World

  Bertrand Russell (2013). “History of Western Philosophy: Collectors Edition”, p.64, Routledge

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• One can't help thinking, Daddy, what a colourless life a man is forced to lead, when one reflects that chiffon and Venetian point and hand embroidery and Irish crochet are to him mere empty words. Whereas a woman- whether she is interested in babies or microbes or husbands or poetry or servants or parallelograms or gardens or Plato or bridge- is fundamentally and always interested in clothes.

  Jean Webster

  Baby, Husband, Men

  Jean Webster (2002). “Daddy-Long-Legs”, p.97, Courier Corporation

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• But progress in knowledge has made us aware of the superficiality of Plato's lumping of individuals and their original powers into a few sharply marked-off classes; it has taught us that original capacities are indefinitely numerous and variable. It is but the other side of this fact to say that in the degree in which society has become democratic, social organization means utilization of the specific and variable qualities of individuals, not stratification by classes.

  John Dewey

  Mean, Taught Us, Class

  John Dewey (2012). “Democracy and Education”, p.87, Courier Corporation

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• In the Phaedrus, Plato argued that the new arrival of writing would revolutionize culture for the worst. He suggested that it would substitute reminiscence for thought and mechanical learning for the true dialect of the living quest for truth by discourse and conversation.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Writing, Media, Culture

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• Plato's concern is not just an intellectual issue, but it is knitted with emotional life as well.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Emotional, Issues, Intellectual

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• Socrates had a student named Plato, Plato had a student named Aristotle, and Aristotle had a student named Alexander the Great.

  Old Tom Morris

  Leadership, Students, Influence

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• The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid, of Plato & Cicero, which all men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible

  William Blake

  Writing, Men, Sublime

  William Blake, W. H. Stevenson (2007). “Blake: The Complete Poems”, p.501, Pearson Education

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• The knowledge that is suited to our situation and powers, the whole compass of moral, natural, and mathematical science, was neglected by the new Platonists; whilst they exhausted their strength in the verbal disputes of metaphysics, attempted to explore the secrets of the invisible world, and studied to reconcile Aristotle with Plato, on subjects of which both these philosophers were as ignorant as the rest of mankind.

  Edward Gibbon

  History, Secret, Ignorant

  Edward Gibbon, Henry Hart Milman (1854). “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.449

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• While [Plato] affirmed with emphasis that the place of the individual in society should not be determined by birth or wealth or any conventional status, but by his own nature as discovered in the process of education, he had no perception of the uniqueness of individuals. For him they fall by nature into classes, and into a very small number of classes at that.

  John Dewey

  Fall, Small Numbers, Class

  John Dewey (2015). “Democracy and Education: Top American Authors”, p.68, 谷月社

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• It is the teaching of the Bible and of sound Political ethics that the education of children belongs to the sphere of the family and is the duty of the parents. The theory that the children of the Commonwealth are the charge of the Commonwealth is a pagan one, derived from heathen Sparta and Platoís heathen republic, and connected by regular, logical sequence with legalized prostitution and the dissolution of the conjugal tie.

  Robert Dabney

  Education, Children, Teaching

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• By Hercules! I prefer to err with Plato, whom I know how much you value, than to be right in the company of such men.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Men, Errors, Company

  "Tusculanarum Disputationum", I, 17, as quoted in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 236-37,

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• Plato divinely calls pleasure the bait of evil, inasmuch as men are caught by it as fish by a hook.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Men, Sea, Fishing

  "De Senectute", XIII. 44, as quoted in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 600-02,

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• When I was 15 years old, or 16, I carried around on the streets of Brooklyn a paperback copy of Plato's Republic, front cover facing outward. I had read only some of it and understood less, but I was excited by it and knew it was something wonderful.

  Robert Nozick

  Years, Brooklyn, Republic

  "The Examined Life". Book by Robert Nozick, 1989.

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• Paraphrasing Plato's Republic: "Only people who have allowed themselves to be reformed by reality have it in themselves to reform their polis for the better."

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Reality, People, Reform

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• The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the philosophical tradition that what we can see and measure in the world is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Reality

  Stephen Jay Gould (2006). “The Mismeasure of Man (Revised & Expanded)”, p.177, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Plotinus is a neo-Platonist, so he would encourage us to go back to Plato.

  Peter Adamson

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• Plato in his dialogue The Phaedo says that whereas sticks and stones are both equal and unequal, (so maybe what that means is that each stick is going to be equal to some other sticks and unequal to some other sticks, so equal to the stick on the left maybe but shorter than the stick on its right) the form of equal is going to be just equal, and it won't partake of inequality at all. And it will be the cause of equality in things that are equal, for example, equal sticks and stones.

  Peter Adamson

  Mean, Example, Stones

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• In 'The Plato Papers' I wanted to get another perspective on the present moment by extrapolating into the distant future. So in that sense, there's a definite similarity of purpose between a book set in the future and a book set in the past.

  Peter Ackroyd

  Book, Past, Perspective

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• People have Plato's form in their mind of what a leader is, or what a C.E.O. is, and it is a bunch of elements that I really don't conform to at all. I've given this a lot of thought, and I came to the conclusion that I don't care.

  Dick Costolo

  People, Leader, Mind

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• If Christianity cannot present evidence that the soul is immortal, then they have nothing to offer the masses, eternity in heaven with God or hold over their heads suffering forever in hell. They need the immortality of the soul. I did my research, it's not in the Bible, so what do they do? They relied on Judaism, which has always believed in the immortality of the soul. I start checking on that and I look in the Judaica Encyclopedia and what do I find? Their remark that Judaism probably got the immortality of the soul from the Greeks, so I go back further, where it all started with Plato.

  Vincent Bugliosi

  Forever, Heaven, Greek

  Source: www.cyinterview.com

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• Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Way, Philosopher, Detachment

  Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (2014). “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away”, p.17, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Writing

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• What impressed me about Plato and Sartre was their conviction that we should live our lives in the light of big truths about reality and human existence.

  David E. Cooper

  Reality, Light, Conviction

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Even before Plato, techne was conceived as knowledge of a determinate field that could be mastered by "the expert". Such a person becomes an authority to whom laypersons should, in their dealings with that field, defer. Techne typically results in a useful result.

  David Roochnik

  Authority

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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