Truth Plato Quotes

#1. They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth. -Plato, philosopher (427-347 BCE)

Plato

#2. Ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crises with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth.

William Faulkner

#3. In every man there is an eye of the soul, which ... is more precious far than ten thousand bodily eyes, for by it alone is truth seen.

Plato

#4. Plato is my friend; Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.

Isaac Newton

#5. Men of Athens, I honor and I love you, but I will obey the god rather than you and as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to practice philosophy, to exhort you and in my usual way to point out to any one of you whom I happen to meet.

Plato

#6. God is truth and light his shadow.

Plato

#7. Of course, he said, he who is of a certain nature, is like those who are
of a certain nature; he who is not, not.

Plato

#8. But he who has been earnest in the love of knowledge and of true wisdom, and has exercised his intellect more than any other part of him, must have thoughts immortal and divine. If he attain truth, and in so far as human nature is capable of sharing in immortality, he must altogether be immortal.

Plato

#9. What is at issue is the conversion of the mind from the twilight of error to the truth, that climb up into the real world which we shall call true philosophy.

Plato

#10. The ancient Greeks, as Plato reports, believed that we discover truth through "reminiscence," that is by "remembering," by intuitively searching into our own experience.

Rollo May

#11. The philosopher is in love with truth, that is, not with the changing world of sensation, which is the object of opinion, but with the unchanging reality which is the object of knowledge.

Plato

#12. He's garbage, he cares about nothing but the truth.

Plato

#13. There is truth in wine and children

Plato

#14. To speak knowing the truth, among prudent and dear men, about what is greatest and dear, is a thing that is safe and encouraging. But to present arguments at a time when one is in doubt and seeking... is a thing both frightening and slippery.

Plato

#15. No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.

Plato

#16. Who are the true philosophers? Those whose passion is to love the truth.

Plato

#17. When then any man assents to that which is false, be assured that he did not intend to assent to it as false, for every soul is unwillingly deprived of the truth, as Plato says; but the falsity seemed to him to be true.

Epictetus

#18. And isn't it a bad thing to be deceived about the truth, and a good thing to know what the truth is? For I assume that by knowing the truth you mean knowing things as they really are.

Plato

#19. I fantasize that our politicians have been moved by the dialogues of Plato, and thus contemplate the ancient conflict of the sophists versus the lovers of truth.

Daniel S. Loeb

#20. What is spoken of the unchanging or intelligible must be certain and true; but what is spoken of the created image can only be probable; being is to becoming what truth is to belief.

Plato

#21. Again, truth should be highly valued; if, as we were saying, a lie is useless to the gods, and useful only as a medicine to men, then the use of such medicines should be restricted to physicians; private individuals have no business with them.

Plato

#22. There is a certain way of searching for the truth in mathematics that Plato is said first to have discovered. Theon called this analysis.

Francois Viete

#23. All I would ask you to be thinking of is the truth and not Socrates.

Plato

#24. Knowledge of the soul is the only universal truth and the only wisdom - all other knowledge is transient.

Plato

#25. You should not honor men more than truth.

Plato

#26. Beauty is the splendour of truth

Plato

#27. Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man.

Plato

#28. I am speaking like a book, but I believe that what I am saying is true.

Plato

#29. Plato is my friend, but truth is a better friend.

Aristotle.

#30. Whereas the truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst.

Plato

#31. My opinion is: Truth must be absolute and that you Mr. Protagoras, are absolutely in error. Since this is indeed my opinion, then you must concede that it is true according to your philosophy.

Plato

#32. Philosophy is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.

Raheel Farooq

#33. Plato, by the way, wanted to banish all poets from his proposed Utopia because they were liars. The truth was that Plato knew philosophers couldn't compete successfully with poets.

Kurt Vonnegut

#34. What essence is to generation, that truth is to belief.

Plato

#35. A library of wisdom, is more precious than all wealth, and all things that are desirable cannot be compared to it. Whoever therefore claims to be zealous of truth, of happiness, of wisdom or knowledge, must become a lover of books.

Plato

#36. A measure of such things which in any degree falls short of the whole truth is not fair measure; for nothing imperfect is the measure of anything, although persons are too apt to be contented and think that they need search no further.

Plato

#37. How you, O Athenians, have been affected by my accusers, I cannot tell; but I know that they almost made me forget who I was - so persuasively did they speak; and yet they have hardly uttered a word of truth.

Plato

#38. Truthfulness. He will never willingly tolerate an untruth, but will hate it as much as he loves truth ... And is there anything more closely connected with wisdom than truth?

Plato

#39. 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

#40. Seven years of silent inquiry are needful for a man to learn the truth, but fourteen in order to learn how to make it known to his fellow-men.

Plato

#41. Plato also knew clearly, and indicated by allusions in his works, the dogmas of the Trinity, mediation, the incarnation, the Passion and the notions of grace and salvation through love. He knew the essential truth. Namely, that God is good. He is only all-powerful in addition.

Simone Weil

#42. The truth is that we isolate a particular kind of love and appropriate it for the name of love, which really belongs to a wider whole.

Plato

#43. The rhetorician need not know the truth about things; he has only to discover some way of persuading the ignorant that he has more knowledge than those who know.

Plato

#44. Appearance tyrannizes over truth.

Plato

#45. Men say that we ought not to enquire into the supreme God and the nature of the universe, nor busy ourselves in searching out the causes of things, and that such enquiries are impious; whereas the very opposite is the truth.

Plato

#46. Creation is the production of order. What a simple, but, at the same time, comprehensive and pregnant principle is here! Plato could tell his disciples no ultimate truth of more pervading significance. Order is the law of all intelligible existence.

John Stuart Blackie

#47. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before.

G.K. Chesterton

#48. Art- speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day and that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. The truth lives from day to day, and the marvelous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.

D.H. Lawrence

#49. But then, I said, speaking the truth and paying your debts is not a correct definition of justice. Quite correct, Socrates, if Simonides is to be believed, said Polemarchus interposing. I

Plato

#50. In the Phaedrus, Plato argued that the new arrival of writing would revolutionize culture for the worst. He suggested that it would substitute reminiscence for thought and mechanical learning for the true dialect of the living quest for truth by discourse and conversation.

Marshall McLuhan

#51. Laws of nature have no physical properties of mass /energy. They are platonic truths in transcendent realm that create & govern the Universe.

Deepak Chopra

#52. The qualities of number appear to lead to the apprehension of truth.

Plato

#53. [M]ere knowledge of the truth will not give you the art of persuasion.

Plato

#54. Renouncing the honors at which the world aims, I desire only to know the truth ... and to the maximum of power, I exhort all other men to do the same.

Plato

#55. Let us affirm what seems to be the truth, that, whether one is or is not, one and the others in relation to themselves and one another, all of them, in every way, are and are not, and appear to be and appear not to be.

Plato

#56. Geometry will draw the soul toward truth and create the spirit of philosophy.

Plato

#57. If a man says that it is right to give every one his due, and therefore thinks within his own mind that injury is due from a just man to his enemies but kindness to his friends, he was not wise who said so, for he spoke not the truth, for in no case has it appeared to be just to injure any one.

Plato

#58. Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

Plato

#59. Since then, as philosophers prove, appearance tyrannizes over truth and is lord of happiness, to appearance I must devote myself.

Plato

#60. But Above all things truth beareth away the victory

Plato

#61. No man will survive who genuinely opposes you or any other crowd and prevents the occurrence of many unjust and illegal happenings in the city. A man who really fights for justice must lead a private, not a public, life if he is to survive for even a short time

Plato

#62. 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

#63. If you think that a man who is any good at all should take into account the risk of life or death; he should look to this only in his action, whether what he does is right or wrong, whether he is acting life a good or a bad man.

Plato

#64. There is nothing so delightful as the hearing, or the speaking of truth. For this reason, there is no conversation so agreeable as that of the man of integrity, who hears without any intention to betray, and speaks without any intention to deceive.

Plato

#65. Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught falsehoods in school. And the person that dares to tell the truth is called at once a lunatic and fool

Plato

#66. Plato stands for the union of truth and goodness in the supreme idea of God.

James Mark Baldwin

#67. Truth is its own reward.

Plato

#68. If the upper realm is, as Plato suggested, the sphere of perfect love, truth, justice, and beauty, then the artist seeks to call down the magic of this world and to create, by dint of labor and luck, the closest-to-sublime simulacra of those qualities that he or she can.

Steven Pressfield

#69. Geometry draws the soul towards truth.

Plato

#70. Seek truth while you are young, for if you do not, it will later escape your grasp

Plato

#71. Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead.

G.K. Chesterton

#72. He said: Who then are the true philosophers? Those, I said, who are lovers of the vision of truth. That is also good, he said; but I should like to know what you mean? To

Plato

#73. The true lover of knowledge naturally strives for truth, and is not content with common opinion, but soars with undimmed and unwearied passion till he grasps the essential nature of things.

Plato

#74. Love is a madness produced by an unsatisfiable rational desire to understand the ultimate truth about the world.

Plato

#75. A village idiot, in the literal sense, who really loves the truth, even when he only babbles, is in his thinking infinitely superior to Aristotle. He is infinitely nearer to Plato than Aristotle ever was.

Simone Weil