Plato Quotes - Page 18

• 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

  Ideas, Mind, World

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

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• I'm sure that if Plato hadn't been against music with a strong sexual beat, Bloom would have kept quiet about rock-and-roll.

  E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

  Strong, Rocks, Rock And Roll

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

  Robert McKee

  Civilization, Citizens, Too Much

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• Church practice has been more influenced by Plato than by Jesus. We invariably prefer the universal synthesis, the answer that settles all the dust and resolves every question even when it is not entirely true over the mercy and grace of God.

  Richard Rohr

  Jesus, Dust, Practice

  Richard Rohr (2011). “Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life”, p.56, John Wiley & Sons

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• 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

  Two, Preparation, Characteristics

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell”, p.150, Routledge

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• My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing.

  Werner Heisenberg

  Philosophy, Mind, Study

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• In all the good Greek of Plato
  I lack my roastbeef and potato.
  
  A better man was Aristotle,
  Pulling steady on the bottle.

  John Crowe Ransom

  Philosophical, Men, Greek

  John Crowe Ransom (1978). “Selected Poems”

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• Creation is the production of order. What a simple, but, at the same time, comprehensive and pregnant principle is here! Plato could tell his disciples no ultimate truth of more pervading significance. Order is the law of all intelligible existence.

  John Stuart Blackie

  Simple, Order, Law

  John Stuart Blackie (1881). “Lay Sermons”

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• Xenophon wrote with a swan's quill, Plato with a pen of gold, and Thucydides with a brazen stylus.

  Joseph Joubert

  Swans, Style, Gold

  Joseph Joubert (1896). “Pensées of Joubert”

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• Plato ... teaches the separation of the human soul from its " home " in the realm of pure essences. Man is estranged from what he essentially is. His existence in a transitory world contradicts his essential participation in the eternal world of ideas .

  Paul Tillich

  Home, Men, Essence

  Paul Tillich (1988). “Writings on religion”

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• 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

  Philosophy, Slumber, Fancy

  William James (2016). “William James: Essays and Lectures”, p.60, Routledge

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• [Aristotle] was the most eminent of all the pupils of Plato.... He seceded from Plato while he was still alive; so that they tell a story that [Plato] said, " Aristotle has kicked us off, just as chickens do their mother after they have been hatched.

  Plato

  Mother, Alive, Stories

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• Plato used to say to Xenocrates the philosopher, who was rough and morose, "Good Xenocrates, sacrifice to the Graces.

  Plutarch

  Sacrifice, Grace, Philosopher

  "Life of Marius", as quoted in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations, p. 689, 1922.

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• The ancient Greeks, as Plato reports, believed that we discover truth through "reminiscence," that is by "remembering," by intuitively searching into our own experience.

  Rollo May

  Greek, Remember, Ancient

  "Man's Search for Himself". Book by Rollo May, p. 214, 1953.

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• Prophecy is rash, but it may be that the publication of D.T. Suzuki's first Essays in Zen Buddhism in 1927 will seem to future generations as great an intellectual event as William of Moerbeke's Latin translations of Aristotle in the thirteenth century or Marsiglio Ficino's of Plato in the fifteenth.

  D.T. Suzuki

  Latin, Buddhism, Intellectual

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• The authority of Plato and Aristotle, of Zeno and Epicurus, still reigned in the schools; and their systems, transmitted with blind deference from one generation of disciples to another, precluded every generous attempt to exercise the powers, or enlarge the limits, of the human mind.

  Edward Gibbon

  School, Exercise, Mind

  Edward Gibbon (1840). “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1”, p.55

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• Plato and his objectivistic successors ... preserved the awareness of differences that pragmatism has been invented to deny the difference between thinking in the laboratory and in philosophy, and consequently the difference between the destination of mankind and its present course.

  Max Horkheimer

  Philosophy, Thinking, Differences

  Max Horkheimer (2013). “Eclipse of Reason”, p.36, A&C Black

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• The mixture of the oral and the written traditions in the writings of Plato enabled him to dominate the history of the West.

  Harold Innis

  Writing, Mixtures, West

  Harold Adams Innis (1948). “Minerva's owl: presidential address reprinted from the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Canada, 1947”

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• C. S. Lewis, Plato, Aristotle and many more names that I could add, including Einstein's, were individuals who were able to see the innate order in life, which others perceive as chaos.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhism, Science, Order

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• 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.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Moving, Eye, Ideas

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• 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.

  Jonathan Swift

  Pride, Might, Rags

  Jonathan Swift (1861). “The Works of Jonathan Swift ...: With Cop'ous Notes and Additions”, p.554

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• There have been many men who left behind them that which hundreds of years have not worn out. The earth has Socrates and Plato to this day. The world is richer yet by Moses and the old prophets than by the wisest statesmen. We are indebted to the past. We stand in the greatness of ages that are gone rather than in that of our own. But of how many of us shall it be said that, being dead, we yet speak?

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Greatness, Men, Past

  Henry Ward Beecher (1866). “Royal Truths”, p.87

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• The whole genius of an author consists in describing well, and delineating character well. Homer, Plato, Virgil, Horace only excel other writers by their expressions and images; we must indicate what is true if we mean to write naturally, forcibly and delicately.

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Writing, Character, Mean

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• Complaisance, though in itself it be scarce reckoned in the number of moral virtues, is that which gives a lustre to every talent a man can be possessed of. It was Plato's advice to an unpolished writer that he should sacrifice to the graces. In the same manner I would advise every man of learning, who would not appear in the world a mere scholar or philosopher, to make himself master of the social virtue which I have here mentioned.

  Joseph Addison

  Sacrifice, Men, Numbers

  Sir Richard Steele, Joseph Addison (1829). “The Tatler and the Guardian: Complete in One Volume, with Notes, and a General Index”

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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, Errors, Light

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

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