Famous Quotes & Sayings

Plato

Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.

Robert Nozick

When I was 15 years old, or 16, I carried around on the streets of Brooklyn a paperback copy of Plato's Republic, front cover facing outward. I had read only some of it and understood less, but I was excited by it and knew it was something wonderful.

Virginia Woolf

The weight of the world is on our shoulders, its vision is through our eyes; if we blink or look aside, or turn back to finger what Plato said or remember Napoleon and his conquests, we inflict on the world the injury of some obliquity. This is life…

Walter Kaufmann

There is thus a certain plausibility to Nietzsche's doctrine, though it is dynamite. He maintains in effect that the gulf separating Plato from the average man is greater than the cleft between the average man and a chimpanzee.

Rebecca Solnit

How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?" (Plato) The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration- how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?

Joseph Joubert

Xenophon wrote with a swan's quill, Plato with a pen of gold, and Thucydides with a brazen stylus.

Koren Zailckas

Without a bottle to hold, I feel incomplete, the way Plato says we are each born only half a circle, and we spend out lives seeking out our other half. A drink is my beloved. Without it, I am wanting; I feel half finished.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Plato divinely calls pleasure the bait of evil, inasmuch as men are caught by it as fish by a hook.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

By Hercules! I prefer to err with Plato, whom I know how much you value, than to be right in the company of such men.

Rob Bell

One of the oldest aches in the bones of humanity is loneliness. I mean it's one of the things that goes way back; loneliness is not good for the world. And so, whoever you are, gay or straight, it is totally normal, natural, and healthy to want somebody to go through life with. It's central to our humanity.

Emile M. Cioran

The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by men, but the man who suffers in their midst, who drags his desert through the marketplace and deploys his talents as a smiling leper, a mountebank of the irreparable.

Epictetus

When you close your doors, and make darkness within, remember never to say that you are alone, for you are not alone; nay, God is within, and your genius is within. And what need have they of light to see what you are doing?

Emily Carr

You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.

Nhat Hanh

I hold my face in my two hands. No, I am not crying. I hold my face in my two hands to keep the loneliness warm - two hands protecting, two hands nourishing, two hands preventing my soul from leaving me in anger.

Jodi Picoult

Loneliness is a mirror, and recognizes itself.

Kenneth Williams

Fundamentally, diaries are about loneliness.

Patti Smith

I understood that in this small space of time we had mutually surrendered our loneliness and replaced it with trust.

Marya Mannes

The great omission in American life is solitude; not loneliness, for this is an alienation that thrives most in the midst of crowds, but that zone of time and space, free from the outside pressures, which is the incubator of the spirit.

Alice James

The gain isn't counted to the recluse and inactive that, having nothing to measure themselves by and never being tested by failure, they simmer and soak perpetually in conscious complacency.