The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism.
The tetrahedron was [ Buckminster Fuller's] big thing. He'd talk about it in the same way Plato talked about angles.
Most people do not understand until old age what Plato tells them when they are young.
the old axiom that 'all power corrupts' has doubtful validity, because it derives from our neglect of Plato 's advice to find men carefully and train them by methods which make them fit for heroes.
No space, no time, no gravity, no electromagnetism, no particles. Nothing. We are back where Plato, Aristotle and Parmenides struggled with the great questions: How Come the Universe, How Come Us, How Come Anything? But happily also we have around the answer to these questions. That's us.
There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent
Today you can buy the Dialogues of Plato for less than you would spend on a fifth of whiskey, or Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the price of a cheap shirt. You can buy a fair beginning of an education in any bookstore with a good stock of paperback books for less than you would spend on a week's supply of gasoline.
Epicurus had rage and envy of Plato's superior style.
Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato’s Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature.
Reply to Plato: I seen horses I seen cows I haint never yet seen horsiness nor that there bovinity neither.
They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth.
The olive grove of Academe, Plato's retirement, where the Attic bird Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long.
When I left home after graduating high school, I left as a migrant agricultural worker with a Modern Library edition of Plato in my duffel bag. It sounds kind of crazy, but I loved it. I loved the stuff. Before I knew there was a subject called philosophy, I loved it.
I found university a little dispiriting. I thought I would enter the great halls of Plato, but instead I entered the halls of an intellectual sausage factory. I wanted to do something not on the main course, and chose the environment.
The honour of parents is a fair and noble treasure to their posterity, but to have the use of a treasure of wealth and honour, and to leave none to your successors, because you have neither money nor reputation of your own, is alike base and dishonourable.
Since Plato, we have been considering the nature of knowledge, the meaning of meaning and the status of the physical world.
That Plato's Republic should have been admired, on its political side, by decent people, is perhaps the most astonishing example of literary snobbery in all history.
Plotinus is a neo-Platonist, so he would encourage us to go back to Plato.
Trees are good for contemplation: Plato and Aristotle did their best thinking in the groves of olives and figs around Athens, and Buddha found enlightenment beneath a peepul tree.
If Plato is a fine red wine, then Aristotle is a dry martini.