Browsing Topic Best Plato S Quotes

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.

The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. Paintings of Moreau are paintings of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our mind into contact with the eternal wisdom; Plato’s world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys.

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.

Plato’s dialogues bear at least some similarities to the classical plays.

It has been a long road from Plato’s Meno to the present, but it is perhaps encouraging that most of the progress along that road has been made since the turn of the twentieth century, and a large fraction of it since the midpoint of the century. Thought was still wholly intangible and ineffable until modern formal logic interpreted it as the manipulation of formal tokens. And it seemed still to inhabit mainly the heaven of Platonic ideals, or the equally obscure spaces of the human mind, until computers taught us how symbols could be processed by machines.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Plato’s world of ideas is beautiful.

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.

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.

Ways of loving from a distance, mating without even touching-Amor platonicus! The ladder of love one is expected to climb higher and higher, elating the Self and the Other. Plato clearly regards any actual physical contact as corrupt and ignoble because he thinks the true goal of Eros is beauty. Is there no beauty in sex? Not according to Plato. He is after `more sublime pursuits.’ But if you ask me, I think Plato’s problem, like those of many others, was that he never got splendidly laid.

There is nothing that has caused me to meditate more on Plato’s secrecy and sphinx-like nature, than the happily preserved petit fait that under the pillow of his death-bed there was found no ‘Bible,’ nor anything Egyptian, Pythagorean, or Platonic – but a book of Aristophanes. How could even Plato have endured life – a Greek life which he repudiated – without an Aristophanes!

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.

Epicurus had rage and envy of Plato’s superior style.

We are finally living in Plato’s cave, if we consider how those who were imprisoned within the cave – who could do nothing but watch those shadows passing on the back wall – were convinced that those shadows were their one and only reality. I see a profound similarity to all this in the epoch we’re now living in. We no longer live simply through images: we live through images that don’t even exist, which are the result not of physical projection but of pure virtuality.

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.

Complaisance, though in itself it be scarce reckoned in the number of moral virtues, is that which gives a lustre to every talent a man can be possessed of. It was Plato’s advice to an unpolished writer that he should sacrifice to the graces. In the same manner I would advise every man of learning, who would not appear in the world a mere scholar or philosopher, to make himself master of the social virtue which I have here mentioned.

The olive grove of Academe, Plato’s retirement, where the Attic bird Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long.

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

Plato’s cave is full of freaks.

Plato’s philosophy is a dignified preface to future religion.

Plato’s concern is not just an intellectual issue, but it is knitted with emotional life as well.

No civilization, including Plato’s, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much.

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.

We may like well to know what is Plato’s and what is Montesquieu’s or Goethe’s part, and what thought was always dear to the writer himself; but the worth of the sentences consists in their radiancy and equal aptitude to all intelligence. They fit all our facts like a charm. We respect ourselves the more that we know them.

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.

In the most general terms, the Enlightenment goes back to Plato’s belief that truth and beauty and goodness are connected; that truth and beauty, disseminated widely, will sooner or later lead to goodness. (While we’re making at effort at truth and goodness, beauty reminds us what we’re hold out for.)

In Plato’s opinion, man was made for philosophy; in Bacon’s opinion, philosophy was made for man.

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.

We know only what we do, what we make, what we construct; and all that we make, all that we construct, are realities. I call them images, not in Plato’s sense (namely that they are only reflections of reality), but I hold that these images are the reality itself and that there is no reality beyond this reality except when in our creative process we change the images: then we have created new realities.

I am Plato’s Republic. Mr. Simmons is Marcus. I want you to meet Jonathan Swift, the author of that evil political book, Gulliver’s Travels! And this other fellow is Charles Darwin, and-this one is Schopenhauer, and this one is Einstein, and this one here at my elbow is Mr. Albert Schweitzer, a very kind philosopher indeed. Here we all are, Montag. Aristophanes and Mahatma Gandhi and Gautama Buddha and Confucius and Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Jefferson and Mr. Lincoln, if you please. We are also Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Let no-one ignorant of geometry enter. Said to have been inscribed above the door of Plato’s Academy.