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. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. In Plato's opinion, man was made for philosophy; in Bacon's opinion, philosophy was made for man.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. No civilization, including Plato's, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much.
Robert McKee
#11. Plato's Symposium shows that flirtation and philosophy can further one another.
Mason Cooley
#12. 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
#13. Plato's world of ideas is beautiful.
Carl Jung
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. Plato's concern is not just an intellectual issue, but it is knitted with emotional life as well.
Rebecca Goldstein
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#23. 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
#24. Nowadays we would perhaps call Plato's state totalitarian.
Jostein Gaarder
#25. Plato's dialogues bear at least some similarities to the classical plays.
Benjamin Jowett
#27. It is Plato's portrait of Socrates that has inspired thinkers in the Western world for nearly 2.500 years.
Jostein Gaarder
#28. I read Plato's 'Republic.' I read it through about five times until I could actually understand it.
Huey Newton
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. Again what city ever received Plato's or Aristotle's laws, or Socrates' precepts? But,
Erasmus
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. The olive grove of Academe, Plato's retirement, where the Attic bird Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long.
John Milton
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. She's lived in Plato's cave, staring at the shadows on the wall. Now she's been turned around to face the fire.
M.R. Carey
#39. watch out for schools that promise your kids will "experience success." I'm teaching Plato's Dialogues these days, and I noticed that Socrates never let his students experience success. Socrates won the argument every time.
David Kahn
#40. For he (Cato) gives his opinion as if he were in Plato's Republic, not in Romulus' cesspool.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#41. People have Plato's form in their mind of what a leader is, or what a C.E.O. is, and it is a bunch of elements that I really don't conform to at all. I've given this a lot of thought, and I came to the conclusion that I don't care.
Dick Costolo
#42. 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
#43. The Establishment Won't Be Satisfied Until They Have Turned Us All Into Plato's Cavemen
Dean Cavanagh
#44. The old axiom that 'all power corrupts' has doubtful validity, because it derives from our neglect of Plato 's advice to find men carefully and train them by methods which make them fit for heroes.
Oswald Mosley
#45. Do not expect Plato's ideal republic; be satisfied with even the smallest step forward, and consider this no small achievement.
Marcus Aurelius
#46. Cicero called Aristotle a river of flowing gold, and said of Plato's Dialogues, that if Jupiter were to speak, it would be in language like theirs.
Plutarch
#47. On Plato's door, it says let no one enter who does not know geometry. On Love's door, it says let no one enter who does not know cry!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#48. I was reading Plato's 'The Republic' at age 18, and I can't account fully the electricity that had for me.
Raymond Moody
#49. Let no-one ignorant of geometry enter. Said to have been inscribed above the door of Plato's Academy.
Plato
#51. I feel I could kill. I feel that I might like it. And I know that this should scare me. But it doesn't. It excites me. I am in Plato's cave, watching the shadows and fraught with the desire to hunt what casts them.
Nenia Campbell
#52. If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the rooms and on the stair,
Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghost
Or Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.
Wallace Stevens
#53. The stage is a supplement to the pulpit, where virtue, according to Plato's sublime idea, moves our love and affection when made visible to the eye.
Benjamin Disraeli
#54. And now - Plato's words mock me in the shadows on the ledge behind the flames: ' ... the men of the cave would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes.
Daniel Keyes
#55. Immanuel Kant is credited with saying, "If the stars came out only once in a lifetime, we'd stay up all that night." Now we stay up late in Plato's cave just to watch the enervated stars on The Tonight Show.
William J. O'Malley
#56. In Plato's republic, poets were considered subversive, a danger to the republic. I kind of relish that role. So I see my present role as a gadfly, to use my soapbox to promote my various ideas and obsesions.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#57. Paraphrasing Plato's Republic: Only people who have allowed themselves to be reformed by reality have it in themselves to reform their polis for the better.
Rebecca Goldstein
#58. When reality becomes unbearable, the mind must withdraw from it and create a world of artificial perfection. Plato's world of pure Ideas and Forms, which alone is to be considered as real, whereas the world of nature which we perceive is merely its cheap Woolworth copy, is a flight into delusion.
Arthur Koestler
#59. Plato had defined Man as an animal, biped and featherless, and was applauded. Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it into the lecture-room with the words, Here is Plato's man.
Diogenes
#60. When I was 15 years old, or 16, I carried around on the streets of Brooklyn a paperback copy of Plato's Republic, front cover facing outward. I had read only some of it and understood less, but I was excited by it and knew it was something wonderful.
Robert Nozick
#61. It seems to us unwise to have insisted on teaching geometry to the younger Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, in order to make him a good king, but from Plato's point of view it was essential. He was sufficiently Pythagorean to think that without mathematics no true wisdom is possible.
Bertrand Russell
#62. The clearest argument against Plato's authorship is probably that Plato never wrote a work whose interpretation was as simple and straightforward as that of Alcibiades.
Plato
#63. Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato's beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam's razor.
Willard Van Orman Quine
#64. Beneath the surface of repartee and mock seriousness, [Plato's Phaedrus] is asking whether we ought to prefer a neuter form of speech to the kind which is ever getting us aroused over things and provoking an expense of spirit.
Richard M. Weaver
#65. By reading a man does, as it were, antedate his life, and make himself contemporary with the ages past; and this way of running up beyond one's nativity is better than Plato's pre-existence.
Jeremy Collier
#66. My worldview aside from my Christian perspective is more aligned with Plato's thinking, conclusions, and philosophy
R. Alan Woods
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. To begin with the wine jar in learning the potter's art.
Plato
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. Plato felt that a complete reconstruction of society's political program was needed.
Karl Popper
#75. I stare out at the real world projected on the windows
Johnny Rich
#76. There is no such thing as a lover's oath.
Plato
#77. ... it's better in fact to be guilty of manslaughter than of fraud about what is fair and just.
Plato
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. The madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings
Plato
#81. 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
#82. Attention to health is life's greatest hindrance.
Plato
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. Welcome out of the cave, my friend. It's a bit colder out here, but the stars are just beautiful.
Plato
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. It is a common saying, and in everybody's mouth, that life is but a sojourn.
Plato
#89. Xenophon wrote with a swan's quill, Plato with a pen of gold, and Thucydides with a brazen stylus.
Joseph Joubert
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. Our love for our children springs from the soul's greatest yearning for immortality.
Plato
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. The field is the sole governing agency of the particle
Albert Einstein
#97. ..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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. I know nothing more worthy of a man's ambition than that his son be the best of men.
Plato
