Plato Quotes

It seems that I must bid the Muse to pack, / Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend / Until imagination, ear and eye, / Can be content with argument and deal / In abstract things; or be derided by / A sort of battered kettle at the heel.

Wordsworth’s particular grace, his charisma, as theologians say, has been granted in equal measure to so very few men since time was–to Plato and who else?
The crucial thing is never what we do, but always what we do right after that. What matters is always the next step!

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?

Plato, quite decadently, wore an earring while young.

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.

Plato was only a Bernard Shaw who unfortunately made his jokes in Greek.

Let no one ignorant of Mathematics enter here.

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

You read the pragmatists and all you know is: not Descartes, not Kant, not Plato. It’s like aspirin. You can’t use aspirin to give yourself power, you take it to get rid of headaches. In that way, pragmatism is a philosophical therapy. It helps you stop asking the unhelpful questions.

It’s all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at those schools!

The democratic youth lives along day by day, gratifying the desire that occurs to him, at one time drinking and listening to the flute, at another downing water and reducing, now practicing gymnastic, and again idling and neglecting everything; and sometimes spending his time as though he were occupied in philosophy.

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

Plato says that the punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is, to live under the government of worse men; and the like regret is suggested to all the auditors, as the penalty of abstaining to speak,–that they shall hear worse orators than themselves.

No one ever teaches well who wants to teach, or governs well who wants to govern.