Plato Knowledge Quotes

#1. 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

#2. The matter is as it is in all other cases: if it is naturally in you to be a good orator, a notable orator you will be when you have acquired knowledge and practice ...

Plato

#3. Since Plato, we have been considering the nature of knowledge, the meaning of meaning and the status of the physical world.

Julian Baggini

#4. Plato believed that insanity was essential to our nature and assumed that it held esoteric knowledge about who we are.

Michael Greenberg

#5. Plato says that as one learns to love, the image of any specific beloved can be left behind for knowledge of the Good.

William T. Vollmann

#6. As Plato insisted two thousand years ago, it is not by means of the image that moral, ethical, or political knowledge is produced.

Abigail Solomon-Godeau

#7. It is by no means certain that we advance our philosophical quest by reading Plato or Aristotle. It may increase our knowledge of history but not of the world.

Jostein Gaarder

#8. Plato said that we are trapped inside a cave and know the world only through the shadows it casts on the wall. The skull is our cave, and mental representations are the shadows.

Steven Pinker

#9. The knowledge of which geometry aims is the knowledge of the eternal.

Plato

#10. The reason is that they utter these words of theirs not by virtue of a skill, but by a divine power - otherwise, if they knew how to speak well on one topic thanks to a skill, they would know how to speak about every other topic too.

Plato

#11. No civilization, including Plato's, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much.

Robert McKee

#12. Those who have a natural talent for calculation are generally quick-witted at every other kind of knowledge; and even the dull, if they have had an arithmetical training, although they may derive no other advantage from it, always become much quicker than they would have been.

Plato

#13. 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

#14. Solomon saith: There is no new thing upon
the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination,
that all knowledge was but remembrance; so
Solomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is
but oblivion.
Francis Bacon: Essays, LVIII

Jorge Luis Borges

#15. Salomon saith, There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Salomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.

Francis Bacon

#16. Plato's point is that we can never have true knowledge of anything that is in a constant state of change. We can only have opinions about things that belong to the world of the senses, tangible things. We can only have true knowledge if things that can be understood with our reason.

Jostein Gaarder

#17. Arithmetic is a kind of knowledge in which the best natures should be trained, and which must not be given up.

Plato

#18. They asked for Plato's assistance. He told them: "You hated wisdom and ran away from geometry, therefore God has afflicted you a punishment, for wisdom and philosophical knowledge have a high rank with God." ... The plague was lifted and they ceased to defame the branches of theoretical knowledge.

Mulla Sadra

#19. I thought to myself: I am wiser than this man; neither of us probably knows anything that is really good, but he thinks he has knowledge, when he has not, while I, having no knowledge, do not think I have.

Plato

#20. Plato was suspicious of writing which seems to remove knowledge from the present moment of the individual and lodge it elsewhere, in books, which are inert and cannot defend themselves against fools.

Iris Murdoch