Plato S Quotes

• He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

  Milan Kundera

  Plato, Philosophy, Love Is

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• What difference is there, do you think, between those in Plato's cave who can only marvel at the shadows and images of various objects, provided they are content and don't know what they miss, and the philosopher who has emerged from the cave and sees the real things?

  Desiderius Erasmus

  Missing You, Plato, Real

  Desiderius Erasmus (1986). “Literary and Educational Writings: Panegyricus and Philippum Austriaeducem. Moriae encomium. Dialogus Julius exclusus e coelis. Institutio principis christiani. Querela pacis”

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• There is nothing that has caused me to meditate more on Plato's secrecy and sphinx-like nature, than the happily preserved petit fait that under the pillow of his death-bed there was found no 'Bible,' nor anything Egyptian, Pythagorean, or Platonic - but a book of Aristophanes. How could even Plato have endured life - a Greek life which he repudiated - without an Aristophanes!

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Plato, Book, Greek

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2016). “BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL - Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future: The Critique of the Traditional Morality and the Philosophy of the Past”, p.24, e-artnow

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• Plato's dialogues bear at least some similarities to the classical plays.

  Benjamin Jowett

  Plato, Play, Bears

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• Ways of loving from a distance, mating without even touching-Amor platonicus! The ladder of love one is expected to climb higher and higher, elating the Self and the Other. Plato clearly regards any actual physical contact as corrupt and ignoble because he thinks the true goal of Eros is beauty. Is there no beauty in sex? Not according to Plato. He is after `more sublime pursuits.' But if you ask me, I think Plato's problem, like those of many others, was that he never got splendidly laid.

  Elif Safak

  Sex, Plato, Distance

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• 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.

  Elaine Scarry

  Beautiful, Children, Plato

  Elaine Scarry (2013). “On Beauty and Being Just”, p.4, Princeton University Press

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• Do not expect Plato's ideal republic; be satisfied with even the smallest step forward, and consider this no small achievement.

  Marcus Aurelius

  Plato, Achievement, Republic

  Marcus Aurelius (Emperor of Rome) (1963). “The Meditations”, Bobbs-Merrill Company

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• We may like well to know what is Plato’s and what is Montesquieu’s or Goethe’s part, and what thought was always dear to the writer himself; but the worth of the sentences consists in their radiancy and equal aptitude to all intelligence. They fit all our facts like a charm. We respect ourselves the more that we know them.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Plato, May, Aptitude

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.2614, Delphi Classics

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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

  Plato, Reality, People

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• Epicurus had rage and envy of Plato's superior style.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Plato, Envy, Style

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• With copious evidence ranging from Plato's haughtiness to Beethoven's tirades, we may conclude that the most brilliant people of history tend to be a prickly lot.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Plato, People, Haughtiness

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• An interlude of false innocence has passed. Today, as we enter the post-photographic era, we must face once again the ineradicable fragility of our ontological distinctions between the imaginary and the real, and the tragic elusiveness of the Cartesian dream. We have indeed learnt to fix the shadows, but not to secure their meanings or to stabilize their truth values; they still flicker on the walls of Plato's cave.

  William J. Mitchell

  Dream, Wall, Plato

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• We are finally living in Plato's cave, if we consider how those who were imprisoned within the cave - who could do nothing but watch those shadows passing on the back wall - were convinced that those shadows were their one and only reality. I see a profound similarity to all this in the epoch we're now living in. We no longer live simply through images: we live through images that don't even exist, which are the result not of physical projection but of pure virtuality.

  Jose Saramago

  Wall, Plato, Reality

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• For me music is central, so when one's talking about poetry, for the most part Plato's talking primarily about words, where I talk about notes, I talk about tone, I talk about timbre, I talk about rhythms.

  Cornel West

  Plato, Talking, Tone

  Source: genius.com

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• Plato's world of ideas is beautiful.

  Carl Jung

  Beautiful, Plato, Ideas

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• Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato's beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam's razor.

  Willard Van Orman Quine

  Plato, Tangled, Might

  Willard Van Orman Quine, Roger F. Gibson (2004). “Quintessence: Basic Readings from the Philosophy of W.V. Quine”, p.177, Harvard University Press

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• 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.

  Oswald Mosley

  Plato, Hero, Men

  "Rules of the Game/Beyond the Pale". Book by Nicholas Mosley, 1982.

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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

  Plato, Years, Brooklyn

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

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• Cicero called Aristotle a river of flowing gold, and said of Plato's Dialogues, that if Jupiter were to speak, it would be in language like theirs.

  Plutarch

  Plato, Rivers, Gold

  Plutarch, John Dryden (1859). “Plutarch's lives”, p.59

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• It has been a long road from Plato's Meno to the present, but it is perhaps encouraging that most of the progress along that road has been made since the turn of the twentieth century, and a large fraction of it since the midpoint of the century. Thought was still wholly intangible and ineffable until modern formal logic interpreted it as the manipulation of formal tokens. And it seemed still to inhabit mainly the heaven of Platonic ideals, or the equally obscure spaces of the human mind, until computers taught us how symbols could be processed by machines.

  Allen Newell

  Plato, Taught Us, Space

  "Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbols and Search". Communications of the ACM 19 (3), (p. 125), March 1976.

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• The stage is a supplement to the pulpit, where virtue, according to Plato's sublime idea, moves our love and affection when made visible to the eye.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Plato, Moving, Eye

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• Complaisance, though in itself it be scarce reckoned in the number of moral virtues, is that which gives a lustre to every talent a man can be possessed of. It was Plato's advice to an unpolished writer that he should sacrifice to the graces. In the same manner I would advise every man of learning, who would not appear in the world a mere scholar or philosopher, to make himself master of the social virtue which I have here mentioned.

  Joseph Addison

  Plato, Sacrifice, Men

  Sir Richard Steele, Joseph Addison (1829). “The Tatler and the Guardian: Complete in One Volume, with Notes, and a General Index”

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• There is something very sublime, though very fanciful, in Plato's description of the Supreme Being,--that truth is His body and light His shadow. According to this definition there is nothing so contradictory to his nature as error and falsehood.

  Joseph Addison

  Truth, Plato, Errors

  Joseph Addison (1857). “Essays, Moral and Humorous. Also Essays on Imagination and Taste”, p.144

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

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Plato, Emotional, Issues

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• It seems to us unwise to have insisted on teaching geometry to the younger Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, in order to make him a good king, but from Plato's point of view it was essential. He was sufficiently Pythagorean to think that without mathematics no true wisdom is possible.

  Bertrand Russell

  Kings, Plato, Teaching

  Bertrand Russell (2013). “History of Western Philosophy: Collectors Edition”, p.95, Routledge

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