Famous Quotes & Sayings

Amos Bronson Alcott

If the ancients left us ideas, to our credit be it spoken that we moderns are building houses for them -- structures which neither Plato nor Archimedes had dreamed possible.

Allan Bloom

Plato ... says a multitude can never philosophize and hence can never recognize the seriousness of philosophy or who really philosophizes. Attempting to influence the multitude results in forced prostitution.

Arthur Schopenhauer

I owe what is best in my own development to the impression made by Kant's works, the sacred writings of the Hindus, and Plato.

Edward Gibbon

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

The knowledge that is suited to our situation and powers, the whole compass of moral, natural, and mathematical science, was neglected by the new Platonists; whilst they exhausted their strength in the verbal disputes of metaphysics, attempted to explore the secrets of the invisible world, and studied to reconcile Aristotle with Plato, on subjects of which both these philosophers were as ignorant as the rest of mankind.

Demetri Martin

Socrates became a trendsetter. Other philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle and Gus, quickly followed suit, dropping their last names too. And, for centuries after that there would be countless imitators including oltaire, Michelangelo, and, much later, Cher.

Dick Costolo

People have Plato's form in their mind of what a leader is, or what a C.E.O. is, and it is a bunch of elements that I really don't conform to at all. I've given this a lot of thought, and I came to the conclusion that I don't care.

Elizabeth Kostova

The problem is simply finding the right person. Ask Plato. Just make sure she finishes your thoughts and you finish hers. That's all you need.

Julian Baggini

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

Bill Maher

I want you teabaggers out there to understand one thing: while you idolize the Founding Fathers and dress up like them, and smell like them, I think it's pretty clear that the Founding Fathers would have hated your guts. And what's more, you would've hated them. They were everything you despise. They studied science, read Plato, hung out in Paris and thought the Bible was mostly bulls**t.

Bjorn Lomborg

I found university a little dispiriting. I thought I would enter the great halls of Plato, but instead I entered the halls of an intellectual sausage factory. I wanted to do something not on the main course, and chose the environment.

Benjamin Jowett

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

C. S. Lewis

The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism.

Jack Kevorkian

I will admit, like Socrates and Aristotle and Plato and some other philosophers, that there are instances where the death penalty would seem appropriate.

Jack Johnson

Plato's cave is full of freaks.

Isaac Newton

Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.

If you read only the best, you will have no need of reading the other books, because the latter are nothing but a rehash of the best and the oldest. To read Shakespeare, Plato, Dante, Milton, Spenser, Chaucer, and their compeers in prose, is to read in condensed form what all others have diluted.

Stephen Jay Gould

With copious evidence ranging from Plato's haughtiness to Beethoven's tirades, we may conclude that the most brilliant people of history tend to be a prickly lot.

Stephen Jay Gould

The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the philosophical tradition that what we can see and measure in the world is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality.

Gilbert Ryle

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 K. Chesterton

Plato was only a Bernard Shaw who unfortunately made his jokes in Greek.

Jeffrey Eugenides

There have been hermaphrodites around forever, Cal. Forever. Plato said that the original human being was a hermaphrodite. Did you know that? The original person was two halves, one male, one female. Then these got separated. That's why everybody's always searching for their other half. Except for us. We've got both halves already.

James A. Michener

I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create reasonably decent societies. I think that young people who want to understand the world can profit from the works of Plato and Socrates, the behaviour of the three Thomases, Aquinas, More and Jefferson - the austere analyses of Immanuel Kant and the political leadership of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.

Franz Grillparzer

Plato calls complacency the companion of loneliness.

Herbert Marcuse

The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth.

Girolamo Savonarola

The only good thing that we owe to Plato and Aristotle is that they brought forward many arguments which we can use against the heretics. Yet they and other philosophers are now in hell.

Hannah Arendt

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.

Friedrich Nietzsche

As a human being Plato mingles regal, exclusive, and self-contained features with melancholy compassion.

Friedrich Nietzsche

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

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!

George Bernard Shaw

Plato long ago pointed out the importance of being governed by men with sufficient sense of responsibility and comprehension of public duties to be very reluctant to undertake the work of governing.

Frederick William Robertson

I read hard, or not at all; never skimming, never turning aside to merely inciting books; and Plato, Aristotle, Butler, Thucydides, Sterne, Jonathan Edwards, have passed like the iron atoms of the blood into my mental constitution.

Franz Liszt

My mind and fingers have worked like the damned. Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are all around me. I study them. I devour them with fury.