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…

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.

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.

Paul Vixie

The error which underlies the very existence of this debate is that there is some kind of perfect Platonic form of the computer language, which some real languages reflect more perfectly than others. Plato was brilliant for his time but reality is not expressable in terms of arbitrary visions of perfection, and furthermore, one programmer's ideal is often another's hell.

Pete Seeger

Music does affect your opinions. Plato is supposed to have said "It's very dangerous to allow the wrong kind of music into the republic."

Albert Schweitzer

The purpose of human life is to serve and to show compassion and the will to help others.

Patrick Renn

He was facing a great number of years, regardless. But I think this does show some compassion on the part of the jury.

Richard Davidson

I committed to doing everything I could to put compassion on the scientific map.

Richard Rohr

The two Virtues of Equanimity and Compassion become more available to the person whose ego-shell has been smashed-either by great suffering or by great love-or by both.

Tracee Ellis Ross

I like to choose compassion over judgment and curiosity over fear.

Saul Alinsky

The fact that people are poor or discriminated against doesn't necessarily endow them with any special qualities of justice, nobility, charity or compassion.

William Sloane Coffin

To show compassion for an individual without showing concern for the structures of society that make him an object of compassion is to be sentimental rather than loving.

Walter Savage Landor

Immoderate power, like other intemperance, leaves the progeny weaker and weaker, until nature as in compassion covers it with her mantle and it is seen no more.

Rick Warren

I happen to agree with many of the liberal emphasis on compassion, justice and equality. I just disagree that it's the government's role to provide everything.

Peter Roebuck

It can be absurd, cantankerous, self-destructive and pompous, but it is never crass

Richard Paul Evans

In your hurry to keep Christmas, you have forgotten Christmas. The truest gift of Christmas is the gift of self.

Richard Dawkins

It often turns out on closer inspection that acts of apparent altruism are really selfishness in disguise.

Richard Dawkins

We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

Richard Dawkins

Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation forthe existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of the watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.

Ryan Hall

The question I try and ask myself when I consider whether or not to train more is what is my body craving and what is my body ready to absorb? Sometimes pushing harder is not the answer. It takes self control, confidence, and intuition to know when to train and when to rest, but when in question error on the side of being over rested.

Rose Macaulay

How far does one combine resistance to over-control with social justice, i.e. tolerable living for people in general? We are too selfish to be trusted, if left free, to give away enough to make people comfortable enough to give them a chance. Yet if all this is ordered for us, as to some extent it has to be, it so soon leads to tyranny. It is a very difficult problem. If only human beings had more pity, unselfishness, and justice and didn't need coercion to treat each other decently.

Tryon Edwards

Most of our censure of others is only oblique praise of self, uttered to show the wisdom and superiority of the speaker. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the ill-desert of falsehood.

Reinhold Messner

If you have a high-way on Everest, you don't meet the mountain. If everything is prepared, and you have a guide who is responsible for your security, you cannot meet the mountain. Meeting mountains is only possible if you . . . are out there in self-sufficiency.