Quotes about plato
plato inspiration thinking
How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?" (Plato) The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration- how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else? Rebecca Solnit
plato eye vision
The weight of the world is on our shoulders, its vision is through our eyes; if we blink or look aside, or turn back to finger what Plato said or remember Napoleon and his conquests, we inflict on the world the injury of some obliquity. This is life… Virginia Woolf
plato writing men
The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid, of Plato & Cicero, which all men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible William Blake
plato philosophy mind
My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing. Werner Heisenberg
plato thinking ideas
I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.
plato philosophy science
In Plato's opinion, man was made for philosophy; in Bacon's opinion, philosophy was made for man. Thomas B. Macaulay
plato essence numbers
The study of the properties of numbers, Plato tells us, habituates the mind to the contemplation of pure truth, and raises us above the material universe. He would have his disciples apply themselves to this study, not that they may be able to buy or sell, not that they may qualify themselves to be shopkeepers or travelling merchants, but that they may learn to withdraw their minds from the ever-shifting spectacle of this visible and tangible world, and to fix them on the immutable essences of things.
plato ignorance roots
Ignorance, the root and the stem of every evil. Plato
plato war wounds-and-scars
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
plato democracies-have liberty
Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.
plato love-is serious
Love is a serious mental disease.
plato excellence littles
Better a little which is well done, than a great deal imperfectly.
plato school-education education-and-freedom
Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
plato greatness becoming-great
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.
plato book genius
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 philosophy philosophical
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.
plato may aptitude
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.
plato men stills
Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.
plato ideas roles
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. Lawrence Ferlinghetti
plato goes-on republic
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
plato men thinking
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.
plato achievement republic
Do not expect Plato's ideal republic; be satisfied with even the smallest step forward, and consider this no small achievement.
plato past mirrors
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. Tom Stoppard
plato greek remember
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
plato firsts blind
When something goes wrong, accuse yourself first. Even the wisdom of Plato or Solomon can wobble and go blind Rumi
plato oedipus claims
Plato did claim that the unexamined life was not worth living. Oedipus Rex was not so sure. Tom Robbins
plato believe book
Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime--and a cruelty, too. If you do not believe me, read the books of Havelock Ellis. Sigmund Freud
plato book self
Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato’s Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature. Susan Sontag
plato philosophical reading
It is by no means certain that we advance our philosophical quest by reading Plato or Aristotle. It may increase our knowledge of history but not of the world. Jostein Gaarder
plato sky imagination
Nothing can be colder than his head, when the lightnings of his imagination are playing in the sky.
plato ideas debtors
When we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to which also Plato was debtor.
plato people
I like people who like Plato.
plato ideas mind
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