Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Plato
Quotes about Plato
290 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
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?
Erasmus
Source
Report...
We come after. We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning. To say that he has read them without understanding or that his ear is gross, is cant. In what way does this knowledge bear on literature and society, on the hope, grown almost axiomatic from the time of Plato to that of Matthew Arnold, that culture is a humanizing force, that the energies of spirit are transferable to those of conduct?
George Steiner
Source
Report...
Every theory of love, from Plato down, teaches that each individual loves in the other sex what he lacks in himself.
G. Stanley Hall
Source
Report...
The base emotions Plato banned have left a radio-active and not radiant land.
Libby Houston
Source
Report...
Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.
William James
Source
Report...
Certain characteristics of the subject are clear. To begin with, we do not in this subject deal with particular things or particular properties: we deal formally with what can be said about any thing or any property. We are prepared to say that one and one are two, but not that Socrates and Plato are two.
Bertrand Russell
Source
Report...
When we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to which also Plato was debtor.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Source
Report...
More than any of his predecessors Plato appreciated the scientific possibilities of geometry... By his teaching he laid the foundations of the science, insisting upon accurate definitions, clear assumptions, and logical proof. His opposition to the materialists, who saw in geometry only what was immediately useful to the artisan and the mechanic is... clear....That Plato should hold the view... is not a cause for surprise. The world's thinkers have always held it. No man has ever created a mathematical theory for practical purposes alone. The applications of mathematics have generally been an afterthought.
David Eugene Smith
Source
Report...
Many receive a criticism and think it is fine; think they got their money's worth; think well of the teacher for it, and then go on with their work just the same as before. That is the reason much of the wisdom of Plato is still locked up in the pages of Plato.
Robert Henri
Source
Report...
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!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Source
Report...
Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
If the license to practice meant the completion of his education how sad it would be for the practitioner, how distressing to his patients! More clearly than any other the physician should illustrate the truth of Plato's saying that education is a life-long process.
William Osler
Source
Report...
The atomists, unlike Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, sought to explain the world without introducing the notion of purpose or final cause.
Bertrand Russell
Source
Report...
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.
Gilbert Ryle
Source
Report...
There is in the British Museum an enormous mind. Consider that Plato is there cheek by jowl with Aristotle; and Shakespeare with Marlowe. This great mind is hoarded beyond the power of any single mind to possess it.
Virginia Woolf
Source
Report...
As soon as we adventure on the paths of the physicist, we learn to weigh and to measure, to deal with time and space and mass and their related concepts, and to find more and more our knowledge expressed and our needs satisfied through the concept of number, as in the dreams and visions of Plato and Pythagoras...
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
Source
Report...
The trained nurse is a modern representative, not of the Roman Vestal, but of the female guardian in Plato's republic - a choice selection from the very best women of the community who know the laws of health, and whose sympathies have been deepened by contact with the best and worst of men.
William Osler
Source
Report...
What Plato was really asking was perhaps why a horse was a horse, and not, for example, a cross between a horse and a pig.
Jostein Gaarder
Source
Report...
Plato conceived of philosophy as necessarily gregarious rather than solitary. The exposure of presumptions is best done in company, the more argumentative the better.
Rebecca Goldstein
Source
Report...
And what is it, according to Plato, that philosophy is supposed to do? Nothing less than to render violence to our sense of ourselves and our world, our sense of ourselves in the world.
Rebecca Goldstein
Source
Report...
Plato is my friend — Aristotle is my friend — but my greatest friend is truth.
Isaac Newton
Source
Report...
Plato stands for the union of truth and goodness in the supreme idea of God.
James Mark Baldwin
Source
Report...
Our children have more correct notions of nature and natural phenomena than had Plato! they may treat with ridicule the errors!
Justus von Liebig
Source
Report...
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
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
...
12
Quote of the day
Be a sinner and sin strongly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ.
Martin Luther
Plato
Creative Commons
Born:
427 BC
Died:
347 BC
(aged 80)
Plato Quotes
Plato Short Quotes
Quotes about Plato
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes