Plato Quotes - Page 15

And what is it, according to Plato, that philosophy is supposed to do? Nothing less than to render violence to our sense of ourselves and our world, our sense of ourselves in the world.

Plato's concern is not just an intellectual issue, but it is knitted with emotional life as well.

Plato conceived of philosophy as necessarily gregarious rather than solitary. The exposure of presumptions is best done in company, the more argumentative the better.

Paraphrasing Plato's Republic: "Only people who have allowed themselves to be reformed by reality have it in themselves to reform their polis for the better."

Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.

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

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

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

Aristotle and Plato are reckoned the respective heads of two schools. A wise man will see that Aristotle platonizes.

When we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to which also Plato was debtor.

I am the owner of the sphere, Of the seven stars and the solar year, of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain, Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakespeare's strain.

Nothing can be colder than his head, when the lightnings of his imagination are playing in the sky.

Is it not also true that no physician, in so far as he is a physician, considers or enjoins what is for the physician's interest, but that all seek the good of their patients? For we have agreed that a physician strictly so called, is a ruler of bodies, and not a maker of money, have we not?

Let early education be a sort of amusement. You will then be better able to find out the natural bent.

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.

I intend Deaths in Venice to contribute both to literary criticism and to philosophy. But it's not "strict philosophy" in the sense of arguing for specific theses. As I remark, there's a style of philosophy - present in writers from Plato to Rawls - that invites readers to consider a certain class of phenomena in a new way. In the book, I associate this, in particular, with my good friend, the eminent philosopher of science, Nancy Cartwright, who practices it extremely skilfully.

Plotinus is usually called the Founder of Neo Platonism and what that means is that in this philosophical circle, he was founding a kind of renewed attempt to understand the thought of Plato which however they were combining with the thought of other philosophers, including Aristotle, the Stoics and Pythagoreans and so on.

Plato in his dialogue The Phaedo says that whereas sticks and stones are both equal and unequal, (so maybe what that means is that each stick is going to be equal to some other sticks and unequal to some other sticks, so equal to the stick on the left maybe but shorter than the stick on its right) the form of equal is going to be just equal, and it won't partake of inequality at all. And it will be the cause of equality in things that are equal, for example, equal sticks and stones.

Plotinus is a neo-Platonist, so he would encourage us to go back to Plato.

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.

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."

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.

The tetrahedron was [ Buckminster Fuller's] big thing. He'd talk about it in the same way Plato talked about angles.

God knows; I won't be an Oxford don anyhow. I'll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, I'll be notorious. Or perhaps I'll lead the life of pleasure for a time and then—who knows?—rest and do nothing. What does Plato say is the highest end that man can attain here below? To sit down and contemplate the good. Perhaps that will be the end of me too.

Plato is never sullen, Cervantes is never petulant, Demosthenes never comes unseasonably, Dante never stays too long.