Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

John Milton

Ornate rhetorick taught out of the rule of Plato.... To which poetry would be made subsequent, or indeed rather precedent, as being less suttle and fine, but more simple, sensuous, and passionate.

John Dewey

The breakdown of his(Plato's) philosophy is made apparent in the fact that he could not trust to gradual improvements in education to bring about a better society which should then improve education, and so on indefinitely. Correct education could not come into existence until an ideal state existed, and after that education would be devoted simply to its conservation. For the existence of this state he was obliged to trust to some happy accident by which philosophic wisdom should happen to coincide with possession of ruling power in the state.

John Dewey

Plato defined a slave as one who accepts from another the purposes which control his conduct. This condition obtains even where there is no slavery in the legal sense. It is found wherever men are engaged in activity which is socially serviceable, but whose service they do not understand and have no personal interest in.

John Dewey

While [Plato] affirmed with emphasis that the place of the individual in society should not be determined by birth or wealth or any conventional status, but by his own nature as discovered in the process of education, he had no perception of the uniqueness of individuals. For him they fall by nature into classes, and into a very small number of classes at that.

John Dewey

But progress in knowledge has made us aware of the superficiality of Plato's lumping of individuals and their original powers into a few sharply marked-off classes; it has taught us that original capacities are indefinitely numerous and variable. It is but the other side of this fact to say that in the degree in which society has become democratic, social organization means utilization of the specific and variable qualities of individuals, not stratification by classes.

John Crowe Ransom

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

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

Karl Popper

The influence (for good or ill) of Plato's work is immeasurable. Western thought, one might say, has been Platonic or anti-Platonic, but hardly ever non-Platonic.

Karl Popper

With regards to political enemies Plato had a kill-and-banish principle. ... In interpreting it , modern-day Platonists are clearly disturbed by it, even as they make elaborate attempts to defend Plato.

Karl Popper

Plato felt that a complete reconstruction of society's political program was needed.

Julianne Moore

I was a bookworm, and very skinny with big, thick glasses. I never went on dates and guys were afraid of me because I was smart. So I got contact lenses, started to dress a little better and tried not to talk about Plato with boys. It worked!

Oswald Mosley

the old axiom that 'all power corrupts' has doubtful validity, because it derives from our neglect of Plato 's advice to find men carefully and train them by methods which make them fit for heroes.

Paul Tillich

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 .

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Plato was right, but not quite right.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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.

John Archibald Wheeler

No space, no time, no gravity, no electromagnetism, no particles. Nothing. We are back where Plato, Aristotle and Parmenides struggled with the great questions: How Come the Universe, How Come Us, How Come Anything? But happily also we have around the answer to these questions. That's us.

Edith Hamilton

Through Plato, Aristotle came to believe in God; but Plato never attempted to prove His reality. Aristotle had to do so. Plato contemplated Him; Aristotle produced arguments to demonstrate Him. Plato never defined Him; but Aristotle thought God through logically, and concluded with entire satisfaction to himself that He was the Unmoved Mover.

John F. Kennedy

Aeschylus and Plato are remembered today long after the triumphs of Imperial Athens are gone. Dante outlived the ambitions of thirteenth century Florence. Goethe stands serenely above the politics of Germany, and I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over cities, we too will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit.

Paul Vixie

The error which underlies the very existence of this debate is that there is some kind of perfect Platonic form of the computer language, which some real languages reflect more perfectly than others. Plato was brilliant for his time but reality is not expressable in terms of arbitrary visions of perfection, and furthermore, one programmer's ideal is often another's hell.

Peter Ackroyd

In 'The Plato Papers' I wanted to get another perspective on the present moment by extrapolating into the distant future. So in that sense, there's a definite similarity of purpose between a book set in the future and a book set in the past.

Pete Seeger

Music does affect your opinions. Plato is supposed to have said "It's very dangerous to allow the wrong kind of music into the republic."

Quentin Crisp

When I was young, we thought that Oscar Wilde was a great nobleman who had thrown his life away for love. Nothing could be less true. He slept with East Enders who were procured for him by Lord Alfred Douglas. He knew them only 'in Braille' - the curtains were never drawn back in the rooms in Oxford where he met those boys. It was the most sordid life you can imagine. And he was bleating about love and dragging the fair name of Mr. Plato into the trial - after a life like that?

Plutarch

Cicero called Aristotle a river of flowing gold, and said of Plato's Dialogues, that if Jupiter were to speak, it would be in language like theirs.

Plutarch

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

Plutarch

Most people do not understand until old age what Plato tells them when they are young.

Robert McKee

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

Richard Rorty

You read the pragmatists and all you know is: not Descartes, not Kant, not Plato. It's like aspirin. You can't use aspirin to give yourself power, you take it to get rid of headaches. In that way, pragmatism is a philosophical therapy. It helps you stop asking the unhelpful questions.