Plato And Socrates Quotes

#1. John Adams was a farmer, Abraham Lincoln a small town lawyer. Plato and Socrates were teachers. Jesus was a carpenter. To equate wisdom and judgement with occupation is at best insulting.

Mark Sheppard

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

Patti Smith

#3. But now the giant heads of Plato and Socrates, each with an expression of penetrating wisdom carved on his white features, surveyed the river and the melon beds beyond.

J.G. Farrell

#4. Socrates and Plato are right: whatever man does he always does well, that is, he does that which seems to him good (useful) according to the degree of his intellect, the particular standard of his reasonableness.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#5. All I would ask you to be thinking of is the truth and not Socrates.

Plato

#6. Plato, the first true pope of philosophy (sorry, Socrates), argued for a World of Forms above the reality-a transcendent plane of perfect essences, pure and lovely, where nothing ever gets muddy (including the essence of mud.)

N.D. Wilson

#7. I wonder if Socrates would have appreciated the flagrant irony: It's only because his pupils Plato and Xenophon put his disdain for the written word into written words that we have any knowledge of it today

Joshua Foer

#8. watch out for schools that promise your kids will "experience success." I'm teaching Plato's Dialogues these days, and I noticed that Socrates never let his students experience success. Socrates won the argument every time.

David Kahn

#9. Socrates became a trendsetter. Other philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle and Gus, quickly followed suit, dropping their last names too. And, for centuries after that there would be countless imitators including oltaire, Michelangelo, and, much later, Cher.

Demetri Martin

#10. Behold, he said, the wisdom of Socrates; he refuses to teach himself, and goes about learning of others, to whom he never even says Thank you.

Plato

#11. My world view is somewhat unique. I have learned from many great philosophers including Plato, Socrates, Buddha, Jesus, Darwin, Tagore, Emerson, and many more.

Debasish Mridha

#12. For philosophy, Socrates, if pursued in moderation and at the proper age, is an elegant accomplishment, but too much philosophy is the ruin of human life.

Plato

#13. Socrates isguilty of corrupting the minds of the young, and of believing indeities of his own invention instead of the gods recognized by the state.

Plato

#14. After reading the doctrines of Plato, Socrates or Aristotle, we feel the specific difference between their words and Christ's is the difference between an inquiry and a revelation.

Joseph Parker

#15. ...[T]he right way is to give one's attention first to the highest good of the young, just as you expect a good gardener to give his attention first to the young plants, and after that to the others. - Socrates

Plato

#16. Reading the Socratic dialogues one has the feeling: what a frightful waste of time! What's the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing?

Ludwig Wittgenstein

#17. Socrates condemned art because he preferred philosophy and only after much internal struggle did Plato accept this judgment.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#18. There you have Socrates' wisdom; [b] he himself isn't willing to teach, but he goes around learning from others and isn't even grateful to them.

Plato

#19. And so they grow richer and richer, and the more they think of making a fortune the less they think of virtue; for when riches and virtue are placed together in the scales of the balance, the one always rises as the other falls.

Socrates

#20. I will admit, like Socrates and Aristotle and Plato and some other philosophers, that there are instances where the death penalty would seem appropriate.

Jack Kevorkian

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

Bertrand Russell

#22. Socrates: I'm afraid that it might actually be sacrilegious to stand idly by while morality is being denigrated and not try to assist as long as one has breath in one's body and a voice to protest with.

Plato

#23. And Agathon said, It is probable, Socrates, that I knew nothing of what I had said.
And yet spoke you beautifully, Agathon, he said.

Plato

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

Old Tom Morris

#25. And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.

Plato

#26. The author's Socrates admonishes paramount awareness human limitations. If we do good to those we evaluate as good and evil to those we evaluate at the evil, and we are wrong, we have been made the world less just.

Plato

#27. 'Matisse and Picasso' is a little like Plato after Socrates. Socrates only taught in words. He didn't write. And after that, you had Plato and Aristotle to write about what he had said. I write about them because they didn't write about them.

Francoise Gilot

#28. 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.

Plato

#29. I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

Plato

#30. Tell me, Socrates, have you got a nurse? Why do you ask such a question, I said, when you ought rather to be answering? Because she leaves you to snivel, and never wipes your nose: she has not even taught you to know the shepherd from the sheep. What makes you say that? I replied.

Plato

#31. But then, I said, speaking the truth and paying your debts is not a correct definition of justice. Quite correct, Socrates, if Simonides is to be believed, said Polemarchus interposing. I

Plato

#32. The Republic isn't as much fun as The Symposium. It's all long speeches, and nobody bursting in drunk to woo Socrates in the middle.

Jo Walton

#33. Since Socrates and Plato first speculated on the nature of the human mind, serious thinkers through the ages - from Aristotle to Descartes, from Aeschylus to Strindberg and Ingmar Bergman - have thought it wise to understand oneself and one's behavior.

Eric Kandel

#34. You ask a question, I said, to which a reply can only be given in a parable. Yes, Socrates; and that is a way of speaking to which you are not at all accustomed, I suppose.

Plato

#35. I would believe any religion that could prove it had existed since the beginning of the world. But when I see Socrates, Plato, Moses, and Mohammed I do not think there is such a one. All religions owe their origin to man.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#36. I wonder if Socrates and Plato took a house on Crete during the summer.

Woody Allen

#37. For I am certain, O men of Athens, that if I had engaged in politics, I should have perished long ago and done no good either to you or to myself.

Plato

#38. According to Plato, Socrates believed all knowledge came from a divine state, but humans had forgotten it. Most lived in a cave of ignorance, but one could become enlightened by climbing out of the darkness and understanding the divide between the spiritual and material planes.

Gwendolyn Womack