Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly conflict.
Do not expect Plato's ideal republic; be satisfied with even the smallest step forward, and consider this no small achievement.
Socrates had a student named Plato, Plato had a student named Aristotle, and Aristotle had a student named Alexander the Great.
Plato once wanted to punish one of his slaves and asked his nephew to do the actual whipping for he himself did not own his anger.
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
As Plato insisted two thousand years ago, it is not by means of the image that moral, ethical, or political knowledge is produced.
Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.
It is true, indeed, that the account Plato gives in 'Timaeus' is different from what he says in his so-called 'unwritten teachings.'
Plato feels that ethical abstinences and austerities are essential preconditions for the cleansing and opening of the eye of the soul.
Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.
No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.
Music does affect your opinions. Plato is supposed to have said "It's very dangerous to allow the wrong kind of music into the republic."
Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.
There is a certain way of searching for the truth in mathematics that Plato is said first to have discovered. Theon called this analysis.
I can show you that the art of calculation has to do with odd and even numbers in their numerical relations to themselves and to each other.
Had there been no Plato, the Christians would have had a harder time selling the idea that all God really wanted from us was fraternal love.
The atomists , unlike Socrates , Plato , and Aristotle , sought to explain the world without introducing the notion of purpose or final cause.
Philosophy is an elegant thing, if anyone modestly meddles with it; but if they are conversant with it more than is becoming, it corrupts them.
In 'The Republic' he [Plato] states that the enjoyment of food is not a true pleasure because the purpose of eating is to relieve pain - hunger.
Though Diogenes lived in a tub, there might be, for aught I know, as much pride under his rags, as in the fine-spun garments of the divine Plato.
So too Plato was, in my view, a very unreliable Platonist. He was too much of a philosopher to think that anything he had said was the last word.
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.
At an early age I sucked up the milk of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Terence, Anacreon, Plato and Euripides, diluted with that of Moses and the prophets.
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.
Excess generally causes reaction, and produces a change in the opposite direction, whether it be in the seasons, or in individuals, or in governments.
The great spiritual geniuses, whether it was Moses, Buddha, Plato, Socrates, Jesus, or Emerson..... have taught man to look within himself to find God.
I will admit, like Socrates and Aristotle and Plato and some other philosophers, that there are instances where the death penalty would seem appropriate.
What impressed me about Plato and Sartre was their conviction that we should live our lives in the light of big truths about reality and human existence.
[Plato] was the first to envisage the idea of timeless existence and to emphasize it-against reason-as a reality, more [real] than our actual experience.
Aristotle and Plato considered Greeks so innately superior to barbarians that slavery is justified so long as the master is Greek and the slave barbarian.
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.
The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid, of Plato & Cicero, which all men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible
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."
It is by no means certain that we advance our philosophical quest by reading Plato or Aristotle. It may increase our knowledge of history but not of the world.
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.
Plato compared the intellect to a charioteer guiding the powerful horses of the passions, i.e., he gave it both the power of perception and the power of control.
Many modern scholars have found the asceticism expressed in Plato unacceptable; it does not sound like the advice of a reasonable man in the Cartesian tradition.
So their combinations with themselves and with each other give rise to endless complexities, which anyone who is to give a likely account of reality must survey.
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.
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.
All men are by nature equal, made all of the same earth by one Workman; and however we deceive ourselves, as dear unto God is the poor peasant as the mighty prince.
Those who intend on becoming great should love neither themselves or their own things, but only what is just, whether it happens to be done by themselves or others.
Nor at all can tell Whether I mean this day to end myself, Or lend an ear to Plato where he says, That men like soldiers may not quit the post Allotted by the Gods.
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.
We ought to esteem it of the greatest importance that the fictions which children first hear should be adapted in the most perfect manner to the promotion of virtue.
Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,--at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories.
Plato conceived of philosophy as necessarily gregarious rather than solitary. The exposure of presumptions is best done in company, the more argumentative the better.
Plato defines melody to consist of harmony, number and words: harmony naked of itself, words the ornament of harmony, number the common friend and uniter of them both.
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!