183 Quotes About Plato

Encontrar a Fedro guiando a Sócrates casi al mismo sitio, quizá lo era, le había impresionado profundamente. El árbol de amplia copa, la verde ladera en que recostarse, el agua fría al pie; sólo faltaban las ofrendas votivas y el santuario. «Concededme ser hermoso por dentro ―había suplicado Sócrates― y haced que las cosas exteriores e interiores se reconcilien».

The smart people who are too smart to vote, they are governed by the decisions of the idiots who do. - Plato, 380BC

There is a remarkable sentence of Pascal according to which we know too little to be dogmatists and too much to be skeptics, which expresses beautifully what Plato conveys through his dialogues.

Facts are delusion," he said. "They are a delusion of truth as a mirage is a delusion of sight. The real facts lie in people's minds and not in fingerprints and books and photographs and all the other physical things which are only the accidents that occur as a result of what lies in the mind. Truth is a matter of the mind and all else is only a blurred shadow to reconstruct the original image. Bit it is the image we are searching for.

Your friend Plato holds that commonwealths will only be happy when either philosophers rule or rulers philosophize: how remote happiness must appear when philosophers won't even deign to share their thoughts with kings.

However, he did say that a state that does not educate and train women is like a man who only trains his right arm.

In science there is and will remain a Platonic element which could not be taken away without ruining it. Among the infinite diversity of singular phenomena science can only look for invariants.

And now - Plato's words mock me in the shadows on the ledge behind the flames: '...the men of the cave would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes.

For he (Cato) gives his opinion as if he were in Plato's Republic, not in Romulus' cesspool.