Plato S Quotes

• He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

  Milan Kundera

  Plato, Philosophy, Love Is

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• 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.

  Bertrand Russell

  Kings, Plato, Teaching

  Bertrand Russell (2013). “History of Western Philosophy: Collectors Edition”, p.95, Routledge

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• 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?

  Desiderius Erasmus

  Missing You, Plato, Real

  Desiderius Erasmus (1986). “Literary and Educational Writings: Panegyricus and Philippum Austriaeducem. Moriae encomium. Dialogus Julius exclusus e coelis. Institutio principis christiani. Querela pacis”

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

  John Milton

  Summer, Retirement, Plato

  Paradise Regained bk. 4, l. 240 (1671)

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• Plato's philosophy is a dignified preface to future religion.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Plato, Philosophy, Religion

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• 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.

  Naum Gabo

  Plato, Reflection, Reality

  Eidos: A Journal of Painting, Sculpture, and Design, No. 1, p. 31, 1950.

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

  Benjamin Jowett

  Plato, Play, Bears

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• 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.

  Elif Safak

  Sex, Plato, Distance

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• 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.

  Elaine Scarry

  Beautiful, Children, Plato

  Elaine Scarry (2013). “On Beauty and Being Just”, p.4, Princeton University Press

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• I imagine that whenever the mind perceives a mathematical idea, it makes contact with Plato's world of mathematical concepts... When mathematicians communicate, this is made possible by each one having a direct route to truth, the consciousness of each being in a position to perceive mathematical truths directly, through the process of 'seeing'.

  Roger Penrose

  Plato, Ideas, Mind

  Roger Penrose (1999). “The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics”, p.554, OUP Oxford

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

  Robert McKee

  Plato, Civilization, Citizens

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• 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

  Jean Baudrillard

  Plato, Shadow, Caves

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

  Plato

  Plato, Ignorance, Science

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• 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.

  Karl Popper

  Plato, Hard Work, Science

  Karl Popper (2014). “After The Open Society: Selected Social and Political Writings”, p.190, Routledge

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• 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.

  James Joyce

  Art, Plato, Spring

  James Joyce (2016). “Ulysses”, p.188, First Avenue Editions

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• The breakdown of Plato's philosophy is made apparent in the fact that he could not trust to gradual improvements in education to bring about a better society which should then improve education, and so on indefinitely. Correct education could not come into existence until an ideal state existed, and after that education would be devoted simply to its conservation. For the existence of this state he was obliged to trust to some happy accident by which philosophic wisdom should happen to coincide with possession of ruling power in the state.

  John Dewey

  Plato, Philosophy, Would Be

  "Democracy and Education". Book by John Dewey, 1916.

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• To saya man is fallen in love,or that he is deeply in love,or up to the ears in love,and sometimes even over head and ears in it,carries an idiomatical kind of implication, that love is a thing below a man:this is recurring again to Plato's opinion, which, with all his divinityship,I hold to be damnable and heretical:and so much for that. Let love therefore be what it will,my uncleToby fell into it.

  Laurence Sterne

  Plato, Love Is, Men

  'Tristram Shandy' (1759-67) bk. 6, ch. 37

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• 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

  Truth, Plato, Errors

  Joseph Addison (1857). “Essays, Moral and Humorous. Also Essays on Imagination and Taste”, p.144

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• 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

  Running, Plato, Reading

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• An interlude of false innocence has passed. Today, as we enter the post-photographic era, we must face once again the ineradicable fragility of our ontological distinctions between the imaginary and the real, and the tragic elusiveness of the Cartesian dream. We have indeed learnt to fix the shadows, but not to secure their meanings or to stabilize their truth values; they still flicker on the walls of Plato's cave.

  William J. Mitchell

  Dream, Wall, Plato

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• Plato's Symposium shows that flirtation and philosophy can further one another.

  Mason Cooley

  Plato, Philosophy, Philosophical

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• Epicurus had rage and envy of Plato's superior style.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Plato, Envy, Style

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• In Plato's republic, poets were considered subversive, a danger to the republic. I kind of relish that role. So I see my present role as a gadfly, to use my soapbox to promote my various ideas and obsesions.

  Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  Plato, Ideas, Republic

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• 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.

  Cornel West

  Plato, Talking, Tone

  Source: genius.com

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• But progress in knowledge has made us aware of the superficiality of Plato's lumping of individuals and their original powers into a few sharply marked-off classes; it has taught us that original capacities are indefinitely numerous and variable. It is but the other side of this fact to say that in the degree in which society has become democratic, social organization means utilization of the specific and variable qualities of individuals, not stratification by classes.

  John Dewey

  Plato, Mean, Taught Us

  John Dewey (2012). “Democracy and Education”, p.87, Courier Corporation

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