Plato Quotes

The problem is simply finding the right person. Ask Plato. Just make sure she finishes your thoughts and you finish hers. That’s all you need.

The generation is unceasing. Beauty, as both Plato’s Symposium and everyday life confirm, prompts the begetting of children: when the eye sees someone beautiful, the whole body wants to reproduce the person.

First and foremost, note that Plato always wrote dialogues, and never attempted to produce a theoretical or scientific treatise. This is a big clue for me. From beginning to end, Plato was aware of the limits of theoretical and technical reasoning, and his dialogues are a massive exploration.

A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.

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

For just as poets love their own works, and fathers their own children, in the same way those who have created a fortune value their money, not merely for its uses, like other persons, but because it is their own production. This makes them moreover disagreeable companions, because they will praise nothing but riches.

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

It is true, indeed, that the account Plato gives in ‘Timaeus’ is different from what he says in his so-called ‘unwritten teachings.’

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

A wise man speaks because he has something to say; a fool because he has to say something.

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.

Aristotle was by far a less able thinker than Plato … he was completely overwhelmed by Plato.

Thus rhetoric, it seems, is a producer of persuasion for belief, not for instruction in the matter of right and wrong … And so the rhetorician’s business is not to instruct a law court or a public meeting in matters of right and wrong, but only to make them believe.

Knowledge is true opinion.

Since the time of Plato and Aristotle philosophers have had an interest in taking note of common fallacies in reasoning.

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

Too many christians have been chargeable with… confounding the Logos of Plato with that of John , and making of it a second person in the trinity, than which no two things can be more different.