Quotes About Plato's Cave

#1. 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

#2. Plato's cave is full of freaks.

Jack Johnson

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. Plato said that we are trapped inside a cave and know the world only through the shadows it casts on the wall. The skull is our cave, and mental representations are the shadows.

Steven Pinker

#9. Plato described ordinary life as unthinking, lived in a dim cave of shadowy reflections, but said that it is possible to leave the cave and see things in sunlit clarity as they actually are.

Huston Smith

#10. 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

#11. According to Plato, Socrates believed all knowledge came from a divine state, but humans had forgotten it. Most lived in a cave of ignorance, but one could become enlightened by climbing out of the darkness and understanding the divide between the spiritual and material planes.

Gwendolyn Womack

#12. Listen more; talk less."
An executive once gave me this advice. I think it's a good thing for us all to keep in mind.

Mary Turner Heimstead

#13. 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

#14. I love his penis. I want to give it a sponge bath and dress it up like a super hero.

Anonymous

#15. Bonnie and her mum are both members of Amnesty International," said Abigail.
"Of course they are," murmured Madeline. This must be how Jennifer Aniston feels, thought Madeline, whenever she hears about Angelina and Brad adopting another orphan or two.

Liane Moriarty

#16. I must go beyond the dark world of sense information to the clear brilliance of the sunlight of the outside world. Once done, it becomes my duty to go back to the cave in order to illuminate the minds of those imprisoned in the 'darkness' of sensory knowledge.

Plato

#17. 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

#18. Not all political prisoners are innocents.

David Remnick

#19. Welcome out of the cave, my friend. It's a bit colder out here, but the stars are just beautiful.

Plato

#20. I think I never passed so sad an hour, Dear friend, as that one at the church to-night. The edifice from basement to the tower Was one resplendent blaze of coloured light ...

Ella Wheeler Wilcox