Top 100 Plato's Quotes
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.
C.S. Lewis
#5. Do what nature now requires. Set thyself in motion, if it is in thy power, and do not look about thee to see if any one will observe it; nor yet expect Plato's Republic: but be content if the smallest thing goes on well, and consider such an event to be no small matter.
Marcus Aurelius
#6. He who advises a sick man, whose manner of life is prejudicial to health, is clearly bound first of all to change his patient's manner of life.
Plato
#7. For me music is central, so when one's talking about poetry, for the most part Plato's talking primarily about words, where I talk about notes, I talk about tone, I talk about timbre, I talk about rhythms.
Cornel West
#8. To begin with the wine jar in learning the potter's art.
Plato
#9. Thus rhetoric, it seems, is a producer of persuasion for belief, not for instruction in the matter of right and wrong ... And so the rhetorician's business is not to instruct a law court or a public meeting in matters of right and wrong, but only to make them believe.
Plato
#10. It's not from money that excellence comes, but from excellence money and the other things, all of them, come to be good for human beings, whether in private or in public life.
Plato
#11. The problem is simply finding the right person. Ask Plato. Just make sure she finishes your thoughts and you finish hers. That's all you need.
Elizabeth Kostova
#12. Plato felt that a complete reconstruction of society's political program was needed.
Karl Popper
#13. With copious evidence ranging from Plato's haughtiness to Beethoven's tirades, we may conclude that the most brilliant people of history tend to be a prickly lot.
Stephen Jay Gould
#14. I stare out at the real world projected on the windows
Johnny Rich
#15. In Plato's opinion, man was made for philosophy; in Bacon's opinion, philosophy was made for man.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#16. There is no such thing as a lover's oath.
Plato
#17. There is something very sublime, though very fanciful, in Plato's description of the Supreme Being,
that truth is His body and light His shadow. According to this definition there is nothing so contradictory to his nature as error and falsehood.
Joseph Addison
#18. ... it's better in fact to be guilty of manslaughter than of fraud about what is fair and just.
Plato
#19. I owe what is best in my own development to the impression made by Kant's works, the sacred writings of the Hindus, and Plato.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#20. That Plato's Republic should have been admired, on its political side, by decent people, is perhaps the most astonishing example of literary snobbery in all history.
Bertrand Russell
#21. I am the owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain,
Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakespeare's strain.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#22. In 'The Plato Papers' I wanted to get another perspective on the present moment by extrapolating into the distant future. So in that sense, there's a definite similarity of purpose between a book set in the future and a book set in the past.
Peter Ackroyd
#23. The madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings
Plato
#24. I have this tattooed on my left side! I love the saying and it's a perfect description of Karma, don't judge/discriminate and don't do to someone what you wouldn't want done to you.
Plato
#25. Attention to health is life's greatest hindrance.
Plato
#26. No civilization, including Plato's, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much.
Robert McKee
#27. Is it not also true that no physician, in so far as he is a physician, considers or enjoins what is for the physician's interest, but that all seek the good of their patients? For we have agreed that a physician strictly so called, is a ruler of bodies, and not a maker of money, have we not?
Plato
#28. And then, at this stage, every dictator comes up with the notorious and typical demand: he asks the people for bodyguards to protect him, the people's champion.
Plato
#29. Welcome out of the cave, my friend. It's a bit colder out here, but the stars are just beautiful.
Plato
#30. Plato's Symposium shows that flirtation and philosophy can further one another.
Mason Cooley
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. we don't live in Plato's Commonwealth, and when we can't have perfection we ought to comply with the measure that is least remote from it.
Bernard Bailyn
#34. It is a common saying, and in everybody's mouth, that life is but a sojourn.
Plato
#35. Plato's world of ideas is beautiful.
Carl Jung
#36. Xenophon wrote with a swan's quill, Plato with a pen of gold, and Thucydides with a brazen stylus.
Joseph Joubert
#37. There is thus a certain plausibility to Nietzsche's doctrine, though it is dynamite. He maintains in effect that the gulf separating Plato from the average man is greater than the cleft between the average man and a chimpanzee.
Walter Kaufmann
#38. All of [the] activities here have a surreptitious end-of-the-world feel to them: ... these joggers sleepwalking in the mist like shadow's who have escaped from Plato's cave
Jean Baudrillard
#39. Diogenes, filthily attired, paced across the splendid carpets in Plato's dwelling. Thus, said he, do I trample on the pride of Plato. Yes, Plato replied, but only with another kind of pride.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
#40. The disposition of noble dogs is to be gentle with people they know and the opposite with those they don't know ... How, then, can the dog be anything other than a lover of learning since it defines what's its own and what's alien.
Plato
#41. Our love for our children springs from the soul's greatest yearning for immortality.
Plato
#42. The power to learn is present in everyone's soul, and the instrument with which each learns is like an eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light without turning the whole body.
Plato
#43. Christians do not avail ourselves of Plato's safety-hatch and say that the real world is not a thing of space, time, and matter, but another world into which we can escape. We say that the present world is the real one, and that it's in bad shape, but expecting to be repaired.
N. T. Wright
#44. If you think about it, Jesus was this religious genius who grows up on the Silk Road, and so He's getting from the West all these Greek ideas from Plato about body and soul.
Jay Parini
#45. Plato's concern is not just an intellectual issue, but it is knitted with emotional life as well.
Rebecca Goldstein
#46. I remember something Mrs. Harbor once said on one of her crazy tangents in English: that Plato believed that the whole world - everything we can see - was just like shadows on a cave wall. We can't actually see the real thing, the thing that's casting the shadow in the first place.
Lauren Oliver
#47. The field is the sole governing agency of the particle
Albert Einstein
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. ..they all emulated and admired and were students of Spartan education, could tell their wisdom was of this sort by the brief but memorable remarks they each uttered when they met, writing what is on every man's lips: Know thyself, and Nothing too much.
Plato
#51. Reading only a bit of a great book (e.g., Plato's Republic) is like getting engaged but never marrying. The initial experience is pleasurable but can become frustrating if prolonged.
John Reynolds
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. I know nothing more worthy of a man's ambition than that his son be the best of men.
Plato
#55. 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
#56. not to care for any of his belongings before caring that he himself should be as good and as wise as possible, not to care for the city's possessions more than for the city itself, and to care for other things in the same way.
Plato
#58. The very essence of leadership is you have a vision. It's got to be a vision you articulate clearly and forcefully on every occasion.
Whatever you value, be committed to it and let nothing distract you from this goal. The uncommitted life, like Plato's unexamined life, is not worth living.
Theodore M. Hesburgh
#59. It's like this, I think: the excellence of a good body doesn't make the soul good, but the other way around: the excellence of a good soul makes the body as good as it can be.
Plato
#60. What of his beard? Are you not of Homer's opinion, who says Youth is most charming when the beard first appears?
Plato
#61. Nowadays we would perhaps call Plato's state totalitarian.
Jostein Gaarder
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. My metaphysical thinking is more in alignment with Plato rather than Aristotle's."
~R. Alan Woods [2013]
R. Alan Woods
#65. Someday, in the distant future, our grand-children' s grand-children will develop a new equivalent of our classrooms. They will spend many hours in front of boxes with fires glowing within. May they have the wisdom to know the difference between light and knowledge.
Plato
#66. Plato's dialogues bear at least some similarities to the classical plays.
Benjamin Jowett
#68. Then a sentimental passion of a vegetable fashion must excite your
languid spleen,
An attachment a la Plato for a bashful young potato, or a
not-too-French French bean!
W.S. Gilbert
#69. I have been sober for the longest time. Oh, it's over a decade now. No joke.
Dana Plato
#70. Wordsworth's particular grace, his charisma, as theologians say, has been granted in equal measure to so very few men since time was
to Plato and who else?
The crucial thing is never what we do, but always what we do right after that. What matters is always the next step!
Robert Musil
#71. 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
#72. It is Plato's portrait of Socrates that has inspired thinkers in the Western world for nearly 2.500 years.
Jostein Gaarder
#73. It's all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at those schools!
Digory Kirke
#74. I read Plato's 'Republic.' I read it through about five times until I could actually understand it.
Huey Newton
#75. The influence (for good or ill) of Plato's work is immeasurable. Western thought, one might say, has been Platonic or anti-Platonic, but hardly ever non-Platonic.
Karl Popper
#76. To his [ Plato's ] great disappointment, he found Anaxagoras adducing simple physical reasons, instead of the teleological reasons, which he had expected. Such a teacher could no longer allure him.
George Henry Lewes
#77. Church practice has been more influenced by Plato than by Jesus. We invariably prefer the universal synthesis, the answer that settles all the dust and resolves every question even when it is not entirely true over the mercy and grace of God.
Richard Rohr
#78. The god of love lives in a state of need. It is a need. It is an urge. It is a homeostatic imbalance. Like hunger and thirst, it's almost impossible to stamp out.
Plato
#79. A nation will prosper to the degree that it honors it's teachers.
Plato
#80. There should be no element of slavery in learning. Enforced exercise does no harm to the body, but enforced learning will not stay in the mind. So avoid compulsion, and let your children's lessons take the form of play.
Plato
#81. Speak for me, Nikeratos. Someone's soul is always listening. Someone's always is, I suppose, if one only knew. Plato never forgot it.
Mary Renault
#82. Democracy - or any improvement on it - will rest on the layman's right to criticize. His criticism will be often - very often - damn silly, but if, like Plato and the Fascists, we take away his right to criticize, we take away his right to appreciate.
Louis MacNeice
#83. Again what city ever received Plato's or Aristotle's laws, or Socrates' precepts? But,
Erasmus
#84. C. S. Lewis, Plato, Aristotle and many more names that I could add, including Einstein's, were individuals who were able to see the innate order in life, which others perceive as chaos.
Frederick Lenz
#85. And when one of them meets the other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy and one will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment ...
Plato
#86. As Deng Xiaoping once said, "I don't care if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice." The Stoics had their own reminder: "Don't go expecting Plato's Republic." Because
Ryan Holiday
#87. A man's duty is to find out where the truth is, or if he cannot, at least to take the best possible human doctrine and the hardest to disprove, and to ride on this like a raft over the waters of life.
Plato
#88. The generation is unceasing. Beauty, as both Plato's Symposium and everyday life confirm, prompts the begetting of children: when the eye sees someone beautiful, the whole body wants to reproduce the person.
Elaine Scarry
#89. The olive grove of Academe, Plato's retirement, where the Attic bird Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long.
John Milton
#90. It is vain for the sober man to knock at poesy's door.
Plato
#91. In my opinion it's not about gay or straight or bi, we're attracted to spirits, whatever body they're in. There are other reasons too, but that's how I see it.
Dana Plato
#92. Upon consideration of the central question of the moon's toughness there can be little doubt. It is hella tough.
Plato
#93. In order to seek one's own direction, one must simplify the mechanics of ordinary, everyday life.
Plato
#94. Heroin is a stand-in, a stop-gap, a mask, for what we believe is missing. Like the "objects" seen by Plato's man in a cave, dope is the shadow cast by cultural movements we can't see directly.
Ann Marlowe
#95. Aristotle's metaphysics, roughly speaking, may be described as Plato diluted by common sense. He is difficult because Plato and common sense do not mix easily.
Bertrand Russell
#96. The cause of all sins in every case lies in the person's excessive love of self.
Plato
#97. I don't want my kids growing up with the image of God that I had
Plato's white grandfatherly god
because that god is not a very good father. When it comes down to it, you can't trust him with your kids.
William P. Young
#98. With women and women, I think there's an understanding. Nobody knows what a woman feels or experiences but another woman. We are the nurturers, and there are times when we need to be nurtured.
Dana Plato
#99. Of all the things of a man's soul which he has within him, justice is the greatest good and injustice the greatest evil.
Plato
#100. There's a victory, and defeat; the first and best of victories, the lowest and worst of defeats which each man gains or sustains at the hands not of another, but of himself.
Plato
