15 Plato Quotes on Philosophy

Plato quotes on philosophy

3. Then the case is the same in all the other arts for the orator and his rhetoric; there is no need to know the truth of the actual matters, but one merely needs to have discovered some device of persuasion which will make one appear to those who do not know to know better than those who know.

8. And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is.

13. The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways - I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.

24. God is not the author of all things, but of good only.

44. No human thing is of serious importance.

47. And first he will see the shadows best, next the reflections of men and other objects in the water, and then the objects themselves, then he will gaze upon the light of the moon and the stars and the spangled heaven...Last of all he will be able to see the sun.

49. Poetry and philosophy are always hostile to each other.

50. You cannot conceive the many without the one.

57. Aristotle has kicked us off, just as chickens do their mother after they have been hatched.

73. He was the first author who wrote treatises in the form of dialogues ... And as he argued against almost every one who had lived before his time, it is often asked why he has never mentioned Democritus.

74. Xenophon, too, does not appear to have been very friendlily disposed towards him: and accordingly they have, as if in rivalry of one another, both written books with the same title, the Banquet, the Defence of Socrates, Moral Reminiscences. Then, too, the one wrote the Cyropaedia and the other a book on Politics ; and Plato in his Laws says, that the Cyropaedia is a mere romance, for that Cyrus was not such a person as he is described in that book. And though they both speak so much of Socrates, neither of them ever mentions the other, except that Xenophon once speaks of Plato in the third book of his Reminiscences.

75. What is Plato, but Moses speaking in Attic Greek?

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

    Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

78. With regard to this question modern physics takes a definite stand against the materialism of Democritus and for Plato and the Pythagoreans. The elementary particles are certainly not eternal and indestructible units of matter, they can actually be transformed into each other. ... The elementary particles in Plato's Timaeus are finally not substance but mathematical forms.

79. Plato is the essential Buddha-seeker who appears again and again in each generation, moving onward and upward toward the 'one.' Aristotle is the eternal motorcycle mechanic who prefers the 'many.'