Famous Quotes & Sayings

Plato

And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.

Plato

For neither does wealth bring honour to the owner, if he be a coward; of such a one the wealth belongs to another, and not to himself. Nor does beauty and strength of body, when dwelling in a base and cowardly man, appear comely, but the reverse of comely, making the possessor more conspicuous, and manifesting forth his cowardice.

Plato

Arithmetic has a very great and elevating effect, compelling the soul to reason about abstract number, and rebelling against the introduction of visible or tngible objects into the argument.

Plato

Attention to health is life greatest hindrance.

Plato

Ignorance of all things is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all; but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune.

Plato

And all knowledge, when separated from justice and virtue, is seen to be cunning and not wisdom; wherefore make this your first and last and constant and all-absorbing aim, to exceed, if possible, not only us but all your ancestors in virtue; and know that to excel you in virtue only brings us shame, but that to be excelled by you is a source of happiness to us.

Plato

A fit of laughter, which has been indulged to excess, almost always produces a violent reaction.

Plato

In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill... we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.

Plato

Self conquest is the greatest of victories.

Paula Cole

Walking is magic. Can't recommend it highly enough. I read that Plato and Aristotle did much of their brilliant thinking together while ambulating. The movement, the meditation, the health of the blood pumping, and the rhythm of footsteps...this is a primal way to connect with one's deeper self.

John Shelby Spong

What happened in the Western world was that Plato ceased to be the way people thought. Aristotle was rediscovered, and the modern, educated world moved toward Aristotelian thinking.

Laurence Sterne

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.

Libby Houston

The base emotions Plato banned have left a radio-active and not radiant land.

Sherrilyn Kenyon

You two go and have fun. I have plenty of stuff here to entertain me with. Plato rocks! (Tory)

Nick Flynn

The first book I could call mine, my first book, was a picture book, The Magic Monkey - it was adapted from an old Chinese legend by a thirteen-year-old prodigy named Plato Chan with the help of his sister.

Philip Sidney

Plato found fault that the poets of his time filled the world with wrong opinions of the gods, making light tales of that unspotted essence, and therefore would not have the youth depraved with such opinions.

This is not a platoon situation with Jeromy Burnitz. Jeromy Burnitz is our right fielder.

Plato

Ignorance, the root and the stem of every evil.

Plato

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

Plato

Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.

Plato

Love is a serious mental disease.

Plato

Better a little which is well done, than a great deal imperfectly.

Plato

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

Plato

Those who intend on becoming great should love neither themselves or their own things, but only what is just, whether it happens to be done by themselves or others.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The genius of the Platonists, is intoxicating to the student, yet how few particulars of it can I detach from all their books.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,--at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We may like well to know what is Plato’s and what is Montesquieu’s or Goethe’s part, and what thought was always dear to the writer himself; but the worth of the sentences consists in their radiancy and equal aptitude to all intelligence. They fit all our facts like a charm. We respect ourselves the more that we know them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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.

Marcus Aurelius

Do what nature now requires. Set thyself in motion, if it is in thy power, and do not look about thee to see if any one will observe it; nor yet expect Plato's Republic: but be content if the smallest thing goes on well, and consider such an event to be no small matter.

Marcus Aurelius

From Plato: the man who has an elevated mind and takes a view of all time and of all substance, dost thou suppose it possible for him to think that human life is anything great? It is not possible, he said. Such a man then will think that death also is no evil.

Marcus Aurelius

Do not expect Plato's ideal republic; be satisfied with even the smallest step forward, and consider this no small achievement.

Tom Stoppard

Before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself.