Top 53 Plato Philosophy Quotes
#1. Above, in discussing the perceptive notions of Jesus, remarkable concepts of Plato or the highly introspective lessons of Gautama and Lao Tzu, it took considerable discussion to explore the meaning and relate it to How Life Works. Islam presents no such deep pool of thought to pierce.
Thomas Daniel Nehrer
#2. 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
#3. The idea of Plato that philosophers must be the rulers and directors of society is practiced in India.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
#4. One had to know Plato personally to appreciate the love he suppressed puritanically for the music, poetry, and drama he censured in his philosophy and censored in his model communities. They moved him too deeply.
Joseph Heller
#5. The philosopher whose dealings are with divine order himself acquires the characteristics of order and divinity.
Plato
#6. 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
#7. While wading through the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work [Plato's Republic], I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this?
Thomas Jefferson
#8. 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
#9. Keenness is dangerous but also rebirth of thought and mind. Complacency is the death of ideals. Always stay keen.
Ursula Tillmann
#10. Justice will be found, said Plato, when everyone does their own job, and minds their own business
Martin Cohen
#11. As Plato, the dangerous beguiler, said: the best philosophers in the world are boys with their beards new on their chins; I am a boy again.
Thornton Wilder
#12. Plato offers the amazing idea that contemplation of the way things really are is, in itself, a purifying process that can bring human beings into the only divinity there is.
Jennifer Michael Hecht
#13. 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
#14. Philosophy is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.
Raheel Farooq
#15. Plato and his objectivistic successors ... preserved the awareness of differences that pragmatism has been invented to deny the difference between thinking in the laboratory and in philosophy, and consequently the difference between the destination of mankind and its present course.
Max Horkheimer
#16. Socrates condemned art because he preferred philosophy and only after much internal struggle did Plato accept this judgment.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#17. As it is, the lover of inquiry must follow his beloved wherever it may lead him.
Plato
#18. 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
#19. Philosophy did not find Plato already a nobleman ; it made him one.
Seneca.
#20. And what is it, according to Plato, that philosophy is supposed to do? Nothing less than to render violence to our sense of ourselves and our world, our sense of ourselves in the world. (p. 40)
Rebecca Goldstein
#21. Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.
Rebecca Goldstein
#22. We've heard many people say and have often said ourselves that justice is doing one's own work and not meddling with what isn't one's own ... Then, it turns out that this doing one's own work-provided that it comes to be in a certain way-is justice.
Plato
#23. My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing.
Werner Heisenberg
#24. My worldview aside from my Christian perspective is more aligned with Plato's thinking, conclusions, and philosophy
R. Alan Woods
#25. 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
#26. Plato says the purpose of philosophy is to teach us how to die.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#27. Philosophy begins in wonder." -Plato
Plato
#28. Plato ... says a multitude can never philosophize and hence can never recognize the seriousness of philosophy or who really philosophizes. Attempting to influence the multitude results in forced prostitution.
Allan Bloom
#29. Like mythology, Greek philosophy has a tendency to personify ideas. And the Sophist is not merely a teacher of rhetoric for a fee of one or fifty drachmae (Crat.), but an ideal of Plato's in which the falsehood of all mankind is reflected.
Plato
#30. [O]ther thinkers have philosophised since the time of Plato, but that does not destroy the interest and beauty of his philosophy
Frederick Charles Copleston
#31. Plato and Aristotle are my teachers. Even Kant is my teacher, but my greatest teacher is my failures.
Debasish Mridha
#32. In Plato's opinion, man was made for philosophy; in Bacon's opinion, philosophy was made for man.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#33. In general, I distrust philosophy. Plato recommended chasing poets from the city; the 'great' Heidegger was a Nazi; Lukacs was a communist; and J. P. Sartre wrote: 'Any anti-communist is a dog.'
Claude Simon
#34. An over examination of life can deter you from life itself
Ilyas Kassam
#35. As Plato: We become more worthy the more we bend our minds to the impersonal. We become better as we take in the universe, thinking more about the largeness that it is and laugh about the smallness that is us.
Rebecca Goldstein
#36. It is extraordinary to think about. We still speak of Socratic or Platonic philosophy, but actually being Plato or Socrates is quite another matter.
Jostein Gaarder
#37. Plato's Symposium shows that flirtation and philosophy can further one another.
Mason Cooley
#38. 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
#40. It's exciting to hear them talking about poetry and science and philosophy - about Shakespeare and Milton; Newton and Einstein and Freud; about Plato and Hegel and Kant, and all the other names that echo like great church bells in my mind.
Daniel Keyes
#41. 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
#43. Philosophy is an elegant thing, if anyone modestly meddles with it; but if they are conversant with it more than is becoming, it corrupts them.
Plato
#45. 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
#46. My metaphysical thinking is more in alignment with Plato rather than Aristotle's."
~R. Alan Woods [2013]
R. Alan Woods
#48. From the cross-cultural hermeneutical point of view, there is just one philosophy, which has been practiced at various times and places around the world. From this perspective, comparing Nietzsche and Zen is not fundamentally different from comparing Nietzsche to Plato.
Andre Van Der Braak
#49. Philosophy does not regard pedigree, she received Plato not as a noble, but she made him one.
Seneca The Younger
#50. The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
Alfred North Whitehead
#51. When I left home after graduating high school, I left as a migrant agricultural worker with a Modern Library edition of Plato in my duffel bag. It sounds kind of crazy, but I loved it. I loved the stuff. Before I knew there was a subject called philosophy, I loved it.
Dallas Willard
#52. Plato claimed that we were all joined to someone else once, we were humans with four arms and four legs, and a head of two faces, but we were so powerful we threatened to topple the Gods. So they split us from our sole mates down the middle, and doomed us to live forever without our counterparts
Sarah Crossan
#53. Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.
Rebecca Goldstein
