Plato Quotes

Plato and Hitler were both the same kind of consistent socialists who planned also for the production of future socialists, the breeding and education of future members of society.

He who is not a good servant will not be a good master.

No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.

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

Remember our words, then, and whatever is your aim let virtue be the condition of the attainment of your aim, and know that without this all possessions and pursuits are dishonourable and evil.

I like people who like Plato.

Being in love, as both Plato and David Bowie have pointed out, is horrible.

Plato feels that ethical abstinences and austerities are essential preconditions for the cleansing and opening of the eye of the soul.

Laws of nature have no physical properties of mass /energy. They are platonic truths in transcendent realm that create & govern the Universe.

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

The power of Christianity lies in its revelation in act, of that which Plato divined in theory.

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.

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

I'm sure that if Plato hadn't been against music with a strong sexual beat, Bloom would have kept quiet about rock-and-roll.

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.

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.

Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order.

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

By reading a man does, as it were, antedate his life, and make himself contemporary with the ages past; and this way of running up beyond one's nativity is better than Plato's pre-existence.

The beauty of life is, therefore, geometrical beauty of a type that Plato would have much appreciated.

The olive grove of Academe, Plato's retirement, where the Attic bird Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long.

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.

During the 2300 years since Plato, very little opposition has been registered to his ideas.

Plato divinely calls pleasure the bait of evil, inasmuch as men are caught by it as fish by a hook.

By Hercules! I prefer to err with Plato, whom I know how much you value, than to be right in the company of such men.

Beauty ensnares hearts, captures minds, and stirs up emotional wildfires. From Plato to pinups, images of human beauty have catered to a limitless desire to see and imagine an ideal human form.

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

When the citizens of a society can see and hear their leaders, then that society should be seen as one.

We ought to esteem it of the greatest importance that the fictions which children first hear should be adapted in the most perfect manner to the promotion of virtue.

There are few people so stubborn in their atheism who, when danger is pressing in, will not acknowledge the divine power.

Can any man be courageous who has the fear of death in him?

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

Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?

The tools which would teach men their own use would be beyond price.

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

In Plato's opinion, man was made for philosophy; in Bacon's opinion, philosophy was made for man.

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

As Plato insisted two thousand years ago, it is not by means of the image that moral, ethical, or political knowledge is produced.

That Plato's Republic should have been admired, on its political side, by decent people, is perhaps the most astonishing example of literary snobbery in all history.

At an early age I sucked up the milk of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Terence, Anacreon, Plato and Euripides, diluted with that of Moses and the prophets.

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

In 'The Republic' he [Plato] states that the enjoyment of food is not a true pleasure because the purpose of eating is to relieve pain - hunger.

Ideal goals are a menace in themselves, as much in more modern philosophers as in Plato.

I have good hope that there is something after death.

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

I can show you that the art of calculation has to do with odd and even numbers in their numerical relations to themselves and to each other.

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

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.

Many students of dreams, from Plato to [Sigmund] Freud, hold that the sleeping person,deprived of contact with the outside world, regresses temporarily to an irrational primitive mental state.

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