#plato

"The philosopher whose dealings are with divine order himself acquires the characteristics of order and divinity."

"He was just a kid. He didn’t care. He was like, “I’m getting in my mom’s van and I’m going home.” I was just a kid, too. But I cared. With him gone, who was I going to play Plato and Socrates with?"

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

"Laws of nature have no physical properties of mass /energy. They are platonic truths in transcendent realm that create & govern the Universe."

"Plato and Aristotle are my teachers. Even Kant is my teacher, but my greatest teacher is my failures."

"Only a philosopher's mind grows wings, since its memory always keeps it as close as possible to those realities by being close to which the gods are divine."

"I thought to myself: I am wiser than this man; neither of us probably knows anything that is really good, but he thinks he has knowledge, when he has not, while I, having no knowledge, do not think I have."

"All of Western philosophy is but a footnote to Plato."

"[O]ther thinkers have philosophised since the time of Plato, but that does not destroy the interest and beauty of his philosophy"

"An over examination of life can deter you from life itself"

"A poet, you see, is a light thing, and winged and holy, and cannot compose before he gets inspiration and loses control of his senses and his reason has deserted him."

"No civilization, including Plato's, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much."

"Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?"

"The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things."

"The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life"

"I hope it is not necessary for me to stress the platonic nature of our relationship- not platonic in the purest sense, there was no philosophical discourse, but we certainly didn't fuck, which is usually what people mean by platonic; which I bet would really piss Plato off, that for all his thinking and chatting his name has become an adjective for describing sexless trysts."

"For to fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise without really being wise, for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For no one knows whether death may not be the greatest good that can happen to man."