Famous Quotes & Sayings

Joseph Addison

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.

Jonathan Swift

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.

James Mark Baldwin

Plato stands for the union of truth and goodness in the supreme idea of God.

Henry Ward Beecher

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?

Mason Cooley

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

Eric Stoltz

If Plato is a fine red wine, then Aristotle is a dry martini.

John Stuart Blackie

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.

Michael Shermer

Plato wove historical fact into literary myth.

Ray Bradbury

I am Plato's Republic. Mr. Simmons is Marcus. I want you to meet Jonathan Swift, the author of that evil political book, Gulliver's Travels! And this other fellow is Charles Darwin, and-this one is Schopenhauer, and this one is Einstein, and this one here at my elbow is Mr. Albert Schweitzer, a very kind philosopher indeed. Here we all are, Montag. Aristophanes and Mahatma Gandhi and Gautama Buddha and Confucius and Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Jefferson and Mr. Lincoln, if you please. We are also Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Ray Bradbury

Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder.

James Anthony Froude

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.

Jacques Maritain

That is why I think, in defiance of Plato, that there is at once error and vulgarity in saying that poetry is a lie, except in the sense that Cocteau wrote one day: I am a lie who always tells the truth. The only poetry which lies purely and simply is academic, pseudo-classical, conceptually repetitive poetry, and it is not poetry.

Plato

Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.

Plato

No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.

Plato

There still remain three studies suitable for free man. Arithmetic is one of them.

Plato

So their combinations with themselves and with each other give rise to endless complexities, which anyone who is to give a likely account of reality must survey.

Plato

Too much attention to health is a hindrance to learning, to invention, and to studies of any kind, for we are always feeling suspicious shootings and swimmings in our heads, and we are prone to blame studies from them.

Plato

The ludicrous state of solid geometry made me pass over this branch.

Plato

He is unworthy of the name of man who is ignorant of the fact that the diagonal of a square is incommensurable with its side.

Plato

Let no one ignorant of Mathematics enter here.

Plato

I have good hope that there is something after death.

Plato

They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth.

Plato

Let nobody speak mischief of anybody.

Plato

The Earth is like one of those balls made of twelve pieces of skin.

Plato

Arithmetic is a kind of knowledge in which the best natures should be trained, and which must not be given up.

Plato

No intelligent man will ever be so bold as to put into language those things which his reason has contemplated.

Plato

The greatest penalty of evil-doing is to grow into the likeness of a bad man.

Plato

The democratic youth lives along day by day, gratifying the desire that occurs to him, at one time drinking and listening to the flute, at another downing water and reducing, now practicing gymnastic, and again idling and neglecting everything; and sometimes spending his time as though he were occupied in philosophy.

Plato

It was Plato, according to Sosigenes, who set this as a problem for those concerned with these things, through what suppositions of uniform and ordered movements the appearances concerning the movements of the wandering heavenly bodies could be preserved.

Plato

Let early education be a sort of amusement. You will then be better able to find out the natural bent.

Plato

Honesty is for the most par less profitable than dishonesty.

Plato

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

Plato

That makes me think, my friend, as I have often done before, how natural it is that those who have spent a long time in the study of philosophy appear ridiculous when they enter the courts of law as speakers. Those who have knocked about in courts and the like from their youth up seem to me, when compared with those who have been brought up in philosophy and similar pursuits, to be as slaves in breeding compared with freemen.