Plato Philosopher Quotes

#1. They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth. -Plato, philosopher (427-347 BCE)

Plato

#2. For this feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy.

Plato

#3. Eventually you ascend the stairs to the street. You think of Plato's pilgrims climbing out of the cave, from the shadow world of appearances toward things as they really are, and you wonder if it is possible to change in this life. Being with a philosopher makes you think.

Jay McInerney

#4. Who are the true philosophers? Those whose passion is to love the truth.

Plato

#5. A dog has the soul of a philosopher.

Plato

#6. The philosopher whose dealings are with divine order himself acquires the characteristics of order and divinity.

Plato

#7. The philosopher is in love with truth, that is, not with the changing world of sensation, which is the object of opinion, but with the unchanging reality which is the object of knowledge.

Plato

#8. Since the time of Plato and Aristotle philosophers have had an interest in taking note of common fallacies in reasoning.

Randal Marlin

#9. So too Plato was, in my view, a very unreliable Platonist. He was too much of a philosopher to think that anything he had said was the last word.

Gilbert Ryle

#10. 'But the man who is ready to taste every form of knowledge, is glad to learn and never satisfied - he's the man who deserves to be called a philosopher, isn't he?'

Plato

#11. A State would be happy where philosophers were kings, or kings philosophers.

Plato

#12. And tell him it's quite true that the best of the philosophers are of no use to their fellows; but that he should blame, not the philosophers, but those who fail to make use of them.

Plato

#13. Wonder [said Socrates] is very much the affection of a philosopher; for there is no other beginning of philosophy than this.

Plato

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

Clement Of Alexandria

#15. I have a theory that you can make any sentence seem profound by writing the name of a dead philosopher at the end of it.

Plato

#16. Please tell me I'm not the only one who finds it endearing and encouraging that a legendary Roman philosopher had to reassure himself that it's okay not to be Plato.

Elizabeth Gilbert

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

Rebecca Goldstein

#18. The champion of justice [ ... ] would be as a man who has fallen among wild beasts, unwilling to share their misdeeds, and unable to hold out singly against the savagery of all.

Plato

#19. Wonder is the feeling of the philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.

Plato

#20. In PLATO AT THE GOOGLEPLEX, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein set out to showcase, in sometimes startling ways, the continuing relevance of a classic philosopher. But what's remarkable is that she actually brings off this tour de force with both madcap brilliance and commanding authority.

Michael Dirda

#21. Aristotle wore many rings and expensive clothes ... Plato found this off-putting and unsuited for a philosopher.

Claudius Aelianus

#22. 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

#23. Syracuse was again ruled by Dionysuis II,
the former young philosopher king was now an overbearing and unjust Tyrant.

Daniel Peter Buckley

#24. Plato used to say to Xenocrates the philosopher, who was rough and morose, Good Xenocrates, sacrifice to the Graces.

Plutarch

#25. Your dog is your only philosopher.

Plato

#26. Ideal goals are a menace in themselves, as much in more modern philosophers as in Plato.

Moses Finley

#27. A philosopher has the moderate love for wisdom and the courage to act according to wisdom. Wisdom is knowledge about the Good or the right relations between all that exists. Wherein

Plato

#28. Learning to live ought to mean learning to die - to acknowledge, to accept, an absolute mortality - without positive outcome,or resurrection, or redemption, for oneself or for anyone else. That has been the old philosophical injunction since Plato: to be a philosopher is to learn how to die.

Jacques Derrida

#29. Only a philosopher's mind grows wings, since its memory always keeps it as close as possible to those realities by being close to which the gods are divine.

Plato

#30. The whole life of the philosopher is a preparation for death.

Plato

#31. It was modesty that invented the word "philosopher" in Greece and left the magnificent overweening presumption in calling oneselfwise to the actors of the spirit
the modesty of such monsters of pride and sovereignty as Pythagoras, as Plato.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#32. Your friend Plato holds that commonwealths will only be happy when either philosophers rule or rulers philosophize: how remote happiness must appear when philosophers won't even deign to share their thoughts with kings.

Thomas More