Quotes about Plato

290 Sourced Quotes

I too am not one to despise myths, and I am far from rejecting those that have the right tendency; indeed I am of the same opinion as you and your admired, or rather the universally admired, Plato. He also often conveyed a serious lesson in his myths.

Julian (emperor)

I am aware that the great Plato himself, and after him, a man posterior to him in date, though not in mind, I mean Iamblichus of Chalcis (who initiated us into other branches of philosophy, and also into this by means of his discourses), did both of them as far as hypothesis goes, take for granted the fact of a Creation and assumed the universe to have been, in a certain sense, the Work of Time, in order that the most important of the effects produced by this Power, may be reduced into a shape for examination.

Julian (emperor)

Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx.

Some words shall herein be capitalised when used, not as vernacular, but as terms defined. Thus an "idea" is the substance of an actual unitary thought or fancy; but "Idea," nearer Plato's idea of ἰδέα, denotes anything whose Being consists in its mere capacity for getting fully represented, regardless of any person's faculty or impotence to represent it.

Charles Sanders Peirce

Up until our own times men had only received two sorts of teaching in what concerns the relations between politics and morality. One was Plato's and it said: Morality decides politics ; and the other was Machiavelli's, and it said Politics have nothing to do with morality. Today we receive a third. M. Maurras teaches: Politics decide morality.

Often, when thinking about Socrates (or about Plato's depiction of Socrates), we need to remember that he is reacting to the Presocratics, but the reverse is never true.

Catherine Rowett

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

Parmenides did for science what Plato would later do for morality and aesthetics as well: he alerts us to the fact that opinions are just opinions, and they may differ widely. There may yet be a single truth, which need not be as anyone thought. To search for knowledge is to search for access to the truth, not to collect other people's opinions, and philosophy conducts its unrelenting search for truth in the steps of Parmenides, by respecting sound and rigorous logical argument rather than the variegated tapestry of unexamined opinions.

Catherine Rowett

The classical legacies of political thought, from Plato to Nietzsche, and the immediate tasks of running the world, at home and abroad, have been of most concern to the Right. Normative philosophical constructions have become a specialty of the Centre. Economic, social and cultural investigations – of past and present – dominate the output of the Left. Any attempt to come to grips with all three outlooks is thus obliged to traverse quite variegated ground.

Strauss' whole study indicates that noble nature as Nietzsche presents it—no, embodies it—replaces divine nature as Plato presents it.

Laurence Lampert

Death is the real inspiring genius or Musagetes of philosophy, and for this reason Socrates defined philosophy as thanatou mélétè (preparation for death; Plato, Phaedo, 81a). Indeed, without death there would hardly have been any philosophizing.

"None of the gods philosophizes," Plato has Diotima say in the Symposium: "nor do fools; for that is what is so bad about ignorance — that you think you know enough." "Who, then, O Diotima, I asked, are the philosophers, since they are neither those who know nor those who don't know?" Then she answered me: "It's so obvious, Socrates, that a child could understand: the philosophers are the ones in between." This "in-between" is the realm of the truly human. It is truly human, on the one hand, not to understand (as God), and on the other hand, not to become hardened; not to include oneself in the supposedly completely illuminated world of day-today life.

The volume of the cone was discovered by Democritus... He did not prove it, he guessed it... not a blind guess, rather it was reasoned conjecture. As Archimedes has remarked, great credit is due to Democritus for his conjecture since this made proof much easier. Eudoxes... a pupil of Plato, subsequently gave a rigorous proof. Surely the labor or writing limited his manuscript to a few copies; none has survived. In those days editions did not run to thousands or hundreds of thousands of copies as modern books—especially, bad books—do. However, the substance of what he wrote is nevertheless available to us.... Euclid's great achievement was the systematization of the works of his predecessors. The Elements preserve several of Eudoxes' proofs.

Adeimantus, in what amounts to an accusation of Socrates, asserts that the philosophers appear to be either useless or vicious. Plato, as I have suggested, teaches that ultimately this is an appearance that cannot be reversed, and this insures the philosophers' permanent marginality. They appear as useless because they are. They are neither artisans, nor statesmen, nor rhetoricians. They are idlers who contribute nothing to security or posterity. Their peculiar contemplative pleasures are not accessible to the majority of mankind, and they do not provide for the popular pleasures as do the poets.

A Dialogue between two Infants in the womb concerning the state of this world, might handsomely illustrate our ignorance of the next, whereof methinks we yet discourse in Plato's Den, and are but Embryon Philosophers.

Islam is the first school of social thought that recognizes the masses as the basis, the fundamental and conscious factor in determining history and society not the elect as Nietzsche thought, not the aristocracy and nobility as Plato claimed, nor great personalities as Carlyle and Emerson believed, not those of pure blood as Alexis Carrel imagined, not the priests or the intellectuals, but the masses.

With the dead there is no rivalry. In the dead there is no change. Plato is never sullen. Cervantes is never petulant. Demosthenes never comes unseasonably. Dante never stays too long. No difference of political opinion can alienate Cicero. No heresy can excite the horror of Bossuet.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

Ornate rhetoric taught out of the rule of Plato.... To which poetry would be made subsequent, or indeed rather precedent, as being less subtle and fine, but more simple, sensuous, and passionate.

The way of Socrates had shown itself to be a limited way because it concerned itself only with the scientific investigation of justice and the virtues, and it had shown itself to be an intransigent way because it chose non-conformity and death. Plato corrected the way of Socrates—he removed the limitation and tempered its intransigence.

Laurence Lampert

I have found that fate is as liquid and elusive a word as love. Plato thought they were the same... Novalis wrote that fate and soul are two names for the same principle.

Plato finds it necessary to separate, for example, "horseness" from "horse" and say that horseness is real and fixed and true and unmoving, while the horse is a mere, unimportant, transitory phenomenon. Horseness is pure Idea. The horse that one sees is a collection of changing Appearances, a horse that can flux and move around all it wants to and even die on the spot without disturbing horseness, which is the Immortal Principle and can go on forever in the path of the Gods of old.

Robert M. Pirsig

Long after Plato's time the concept of the Ideas still represented the sphere of aloofness, independence, and in a certain sense even freedom, an objectivity that did not submit to 'our' interests.

Let us suppose, that the Old and New worlds were formerly but one continent, and that, by a violent earthquake, the ancient Atalantis [sic] of Plato was sunk...The sea would necessarily rush in from all quarters, and form what is now called the Atlantic ocean.

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

Plato not only permitted live philosophical enquiry to take place in the course of every reader's every reading of the dialogue, by putting tempting and plausible views on trial, in a situation as near as possible to the open-minded exploratory give and take of dialectical debate with a real interlocutor. He also created a most fitting memorial to the real Socrates – the man himself, who lived and died for the idea that philosophy is best done in open-ended dialogue, and with your whole way of life at stake should you be refuted.

Catherine Rowett

The mark of Platonic philosophy is a radical dualism. The Platonic world is not one of unity; and the abyss which in many ways results from this bifurcation appears in innumerable forms. It is not one, but two worlds, which Plato sees when with the eyes of his soul he envisages a transcendent, spaceless, and timeless realm of the Idea, the thing-in-itself, the true, absolute reality of tranquil being, and when to this transcendent realm he opposes the spacetime sphere of his sensuous perception-a sphere of becoming in motion, which he considers to be only a domain of illusory semblance, a realm which in reality is not-being.

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

Alfred North Whitehead

I am convinced with Plato, with St. Paul, with St. Augustine, with Calvin, and with Leibnitz, that this universe, and every smallest portion of it, exactly fulfils the purpose for which Almighty God designed it.

James Anthony Froude

Beneath the surface of repartee and mock seriousness, [Plato's Phaedrus] is asking whether we ought to prefer a neuter form of speech to the kind which is ever getting us aroused over things and provoking an expense of spirit.

Plato argued that in a good society the ratio of the richest to the poorest person's income should be at the most four to one.

Harvey S. Rosen

Plato is correct about democracy. It is essentially mob rule. And once the mob gets an idea into its collective head, it's almost impossible to get it out, or modify it in any way. In an era of mass communication and irresponsible media, it can be a deadly characteristic.