Plato Quotes - Page 11

• Today you can buy the Dialogues of Plato for less than you would spend on a fifth of whiskey, or Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the price of a cheap shirt. You can buy a fair beginning of an education in any bookstore with a good stock of paperback books for less than you would spend on a week's supply of gasoline.

  Louis L'Amour

  Book, Fall, Gasoline

  Louis L'Amour (2008). “Education of a Wandering Man”, p.11, Bantam

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

  Libby Houston

  Land, Radio, Emotion

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• The Earth is like one of those balls made of twelve pieces of skin.

  Plato

  Skins, Twelve, Balls

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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, Distance, Thinking

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• 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.

  James V. Schall

  Couple, Book, Thinking

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• And Numenius, the Pythagorean philosopher, expressly writes: 'For what is Plato, but Moses speaking in Attic Greek.'

  Clement of Alexandria

  Writing, Greek, Philosopher

  Clement of Alexandria (2012). “The Sacred Writings of Clement of Alexandria (Annotated Edition)”, p.341, Jazzybee Verlag

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• All that is good in our history is gathered in libraries. At this moment, Plato is down there at the library waiting for us. So is Aristotle. Spinoza is there and so is Kats. Shelly and Byron adn Sam Johnson are there waiting to tell us their magnificent stories. All you have to do is walk in the library door and the great company open their arms to you. They are so happy to see you that they come out with you into the street and to your home. And they do what hardly any friend will-- they are silent when you wish to think.

  Will Durant

  Home, Thinking, Doors

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• Let no one ignorant of Mathematics enter here.

  Plato

  Ignorant, Mathematics

  c.380 BC Inscription over the door of theAcademy at Athens.

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• He who can properly define and divide is to be considered a god.

  Plato

  Math, Understanding, Language

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• Mathematics is like draughts in being suitable for the young, not too difficult, amusing, and without peril to the state.

  Plato

  Math, Amusing, States

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• The olive grove of Academe, Plato's retirement, where the Attic bird Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long.

  John Milton

  Summer, Retirement, Long

  Paradise Regained bk. 4, l. 240 (1671)

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• Our life is frittered away by detail Simplify, simplify.”  Or, as Plato wrote, “In order to seek one’s own direction, one must simplify the mechanics of ordinary, everyday life.

  Duane Elgin

  Order, Everyday, Ordinary

  Duane Elgin (2010). “Voluntary Simplicity Second Revised Edition: Toward a Way of Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich”, p.12, Harper Collins

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• So their combinations with themselves and with each other give rise to endless complexities, which anyone who is to give a likely account of reality must survey.

  Plato

  Reality, Giving, Combination

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• Aristotle compiled the first known comprehensive list of all winners of the Olympic Games. Which means that quite probably he was sat in a bar with Plato, muttering 'Go on then, give me any year you like and I'll tell you who won the four-man bobsleigh.'

  Mark Steel

  Mean, Men, Years

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• The greatest penalty of evil-doing is to grow into the likeness of a bad man.

  Plato

  Men, Evil, Penalties

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• My father was a dreamy fellow - he read Plato and Socrates and watched Phillies games.

  Patti Smith

  Father, Games, Dreamy

  "Patti Smith on Art". Interview with Anthony DeCurtis, www.pbs.org. December 30, 2009.

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• These, then, will be some of the features of democracy... it will be, in all likelihood, an agreeable, lawless, parti-colored commonwealth, dealing with all alike on a footing of equality, whether they be really equal or not.

  Plato

  Democracy, Equal, Commonwealth

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• Plato wove historical fact into literary myth.

  Michael Shermer

  Historical, Facts, Myth

  Michael Shermer (2016). “Skeptic: Viewing the World with a Rational Eye”, p.113, Henry Holt and Company

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• Plato was a bore.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Philosophy, Bores

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• Whenever a person strives, by the help of dialectic, to start in pursuit of every reality by a simple process of reason, independent of all sensuous information - never flinching, until by an act of the pure intelligence he has grasped the real nature of good - he arrives at the very end of the intellectual world.

  Plato

  Real, Independent, Simple

  Plato, John Llewelyn Davies (1996). “Republic”, p.246, Wordsworth Editions

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• Is it not also true that no physician, in so far as he is a physician, considers or enjoins what is for the physician's interest, but that all seek the good of their patients? For we have agreed that a physician strictly so called, is a ruler of bodies, and not a maker of money, have we not?

  Plato

  Physicians, Body, Patient

  Plato (1866). “The Republic of Plato, tr. with an analysis and notes, by J.L. Davies and D.J. Vaughan”, p.22

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• The heaviest penalty for deciding to engage in politics is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.

  Plato

  Politics, Penalties, Inferiors

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• A writer must always try to have a philosophy and he should also have a psychology and a philology and many other things. Without a philosophy and a psychology and all these various other things he is not really worthy of being called a writer. I agree with Kant and Schopenhauer and Plato and Spinoza and that is quite enough to be called a philosophy. But then of course a philosophy is not the same thing as a style.

  Gertrude Stein

  Philosophy, Psychology, Style

  "Voices: A Memoir". Book by Frederic Prokosch, 1983.

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• ...why did Plato say that poets should be chased out of the republic? Precisely because every poet and every artist is an antisocial being. He's not that way because he wants to be; he can't be any other way.... and if he really is an artist it is in his nature not to want to be admitted, because if he is admitted it can only mean he is doing something which is understood, approved, and therefore old hat - worthless. Anything new, anything worth doing, can't be recognized.

  Pablo Picasso

  Freedom, Mean, Artist

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• There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Party, Men, Thinking

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1981). “The Portable Emerson: New Edition”, p.102, Penguin

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