Plato Quotes - Page 12

• My curiosity, alas, is not the kind that can be satisfied by objective knowledge. Plato said that opinion is worthless and that only knowledge counts, which is a neat formulation. ... But melancholy Danes from the northern mists understand that opinion is all there is. The great questions transcend fact, and discourse is a process of personality. Knowledge cannot respond to knowledge. And wisdom? Is it not opinion refined, opinion killed and resuscitated upward? Maybe Plato would have agreed with this.

  Hayden Carruth

  Men, Personality, Curiosity

  "Reluctantly: Autobiographical Essays".

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• When I left home after graduating high school, I left as a migrant agricultural worker with a Modern Library edition of Plato in my duffel bag. It sounds kind of crazy, but I loved it. I loved the stuff. Before I knew there was a subject called philosophy, I loved it.

  Dallas Willard

  Philosophy, Crazy, Home

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• 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

  Philosophy, Love Is, Two

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• Pleasure is the greatest incentive to evil.

  Plato

  Pleasure Love, Evil, Incentives

  Socrates, Plato, Aristotle (1967). “Wit and Wisdom of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle: Being a Treasury of Thousands of Glorious, Inspiring and Imperishable Thoughts, Views and Observations of the Three Great Greek Philosophers, Classified Under about Four Hundred Subjects for Comparative Study”

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• 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.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Stars, Heart, Hands

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1962). “The Portable Emerson”

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• 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.

  Hannah Arendt

  Believe, Teaching, Political

  Hannah Arendt, Jerome Kohn (2006). “Between Past and Future”, p.30, Penguin

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• Since Plato, we have been considering the nature of knowledge, the meaning of meaning and the status of the physical world.

  Julian Baggini

  World, Considering, Has Beens

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• 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.

  Plato

  War, Cities, Two

  Plato (1977). “The Portable Plato”, p.252, Penguin

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• It was modesty that invented the word "philosopher" in Greece and left the magnificent overweening presumption in calling oneselfwise to the actors of the spirit--the modesty of such monsters of pride and sovereignty as Pythagoras, as Plato.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Wisdom, Philosophical, Pride

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2010). “The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs”, p.294, Vintage

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• Man is a being in search of meaning.

  Plato

  Men, Vision

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• The great spiritual geniuses, whether it was Moses, Buddha, Plato, Socrates, Jesus, or Emerson..... have taught man to look within himself to find God.

  Ernest Holmes

  Spiritual, Jesus, Men

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• Reply to Plato: I seen horses I seen cows I haint never yet seen horsiness nor that there bovinity neither.

  Edward Abbey

  Horse, Philosophy, Cows

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.12, RosettaBooks

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• 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.

  George Henry Lewes

  Teacher, Disappointment, Simple

  George Henry Lewes (1864). “Aristotle: a chapter from the history of science including analyses of Aristotle's scientific writings”, p.102, London : Smith, Elder and Company

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• There are not in the world at any one time more than a dozen persons who read and understand Plato:-never enough to pay for an edition of his works; yet to every generation these come duly down, for the sake of those few persons, as if God brought them written in his hand.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Time, Hands, Understanding

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.1321, Delphi Classics

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• But now the giant heads of Plato and Socrates, each with an expression of penetrating wisdom carved on his white features, surveyed the river and the melon beds beyond.

  J. G. Farrell

  Expression, Rivers, White

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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

  Shadow, Caves, World

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

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Philosophy, Religion, Literature

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• The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare tomorrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Believe, Men, Catholic

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.117, Simon and Schuster

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• Socrates: Have you noticed on our journey how often the citizens of this new land remind each other it is a free country? Plato: I have, and think it odd they do this.Socrates: How so, Plato?Plato: It is like reminding a baker he is a baker, or a sculptor he is asculptor.Socrates: You mean to say if someone is convinced of their trade, they haveno need to be reminded.Plato: That is correct.Socrates: I agree. If these citizens were convinced of their freedom, they would not need reminders.

  E. A. Bucchianeri

  Country, Mean, Journey

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• The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ leveled to every understanding, and too plain to need explanation, saw, in the mysticism of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might, from it's indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power and pre-eminence.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Christian, Order, Giving

  Thomas Jefferson, Joyce Appleby, Terence Ball (1999). “Jefferson: Political Writings”, p.43, Cambridge University Press

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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

  Reflection, Reality, Creative

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

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• How is the soul profited by the strife of Hector, the arguments of Plato, the poems of Virgil, or the elegies of Ovid, who, with others like them, are now gnashing their teeth in the prison of the infernal Babylon, under the cruet tyranny of Pluto?

  Honorius Augustodunensis

  Scary, Soul, Teeth

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• So Socrates was a kind of gadfly. He was a sort of philosophical urban gorilla hanging around in the middle of Athens, asking these peculiar questions of everybody - important people, young men, slaves - questions that had to do with ultimately what's the life that's worth living. And Plato was one of the young men who hung around him, a very aristocratic young man, came from a very old, important family.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Philosophical, Men, People

  "What Do We Have To Teach Plato?". "Here And Now" with Jeremy Hobson, news.stlpublicradio.org. April 22, 2014.

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

  Plato

  Ignorance, Science, Doors

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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, Eye

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

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