Plato Philosophical Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Plato's Symposium shows that flirtation and philosophy can further one another.

Mason Cooley

#3. 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

#4. But, indeed, the science of logic and the whole framework of philosophical thought men have kept since the days of Plato and Aristotle, has no more essential permanence as a final expression of the human mind, than the Scottish Longer Catechism.

George Herbert

#5. 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

#6. You will all know that in the Middle Ages there were supposed to be various classes of angels. these hierarchized celsitudes are but the last traces in a less philosophical age of the ideas which Plato taught his disciples existed in the spiritual world.

Charles Williams

#7. You read the pragmatists and all you know is: not Descartes, not Kant, not Plato. It's like aspirin. You can't use aspirin to give yourself power, you take it to get rid of headaches. In that way, pragmatism is a philosophical therapy. It helps you stop asking the unhelpful questions.

Richard Rorty

#8. My metaphysical thinking is more in alignment with Plato rather than Aristotle's."


~R. Alan Woods [2013]

R. Alan Woods

#9. The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

Alfred North Whitehead

#10. Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.

Rebecca Goldstein

#11. Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,
at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#12. Aristotle and Plato are reckoned the respective heads of two schools. A wise man will see that Aristotle platonizes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#13. In all the good Greek of Plato
I lack my roastbeef and potato.

A better man was Aristotle,
Pulling steady on the bottle.

John Crowe Ransom

#14. 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

#15. The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the philosophical tradition that what we can see and measure in the world is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality.

Stephen Jay Gould