Famous Quotes & Sayings

Arthur Koestler

When reality becomes unbearable, the mind must withdraw from it and create a world of artificial perfection. Plato's world of pure Ideas and Forms, which alone is to be considered as real, whereas the world of nature which we perceive is merely its cheap Woolworth copy, is a flight into delusion.

Anna C. Brackett

If you read only the best, you will have no need of reading the other books, because the latter are nothing but a rehash of the best and the oldest. To read Shakespeare, Plato, Dante, Milton, Spenser, Chaucer, and their compeers in prose, is to read in condensed form what all others have diluted.

Stephen Jay Gould

With copious evidence ranging from Plato's haughtiness to Beethoven's tirades, we may conclude that the most brilliant people of history tend to be a prickly lot.

Stephen Jay Gould

The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the philosophical tradition that what we can see and measure in the world is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality.

Alfred North Whitehead

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

Plato

No intelligent man will ever be so bold as to put into language those things which his reason has contemplated.

Plato

The democratic youth lives along day by day, gratifying the desire that occurs to him, at one time drinking and listening to the flute, at another downing water and reducing, now practicing gymnastic, and again idling and neglecting everything; and sometimes spending his time as though he were occupied in philosophy.

Plato

Honesty is for the most par less profitable than dishonesty.

Plato

Let no-one ignorant of geometry enter. Said to have been inscribed above the door of Plato's Academy.

Barbara Kingsolver

So one time when I was working in this motel one of the toilets leaked and I had to replace the flapper ball. Here's what it said on the package; I kept it till I knew it by heart: 'Please Note. Parts are included for all installations, but no installation requires all of the parts.' That's kind of my philosophy about men. I don't think there's an installation out there that could use all my parts.

Baruch Spinoza

I do not presume that I have found the best philosophy, I know that I understand the true philosophy.

Augustine Birrell

History is a pageant and not a philosophy.

Ayelet Waldman

Those of us whose parenting style can be described as "a series of reflexes, instincts, and minute-by-minute adjustments," as Julie of A Little Pregnant puts it, rather than as a philosophy, are less invested in our own practices. What we do is often less a matter of conviction than one of convenience. What we need to remember is that there is no need to apologize for that, even in the face of the most red-faced outrage.

Ayn Rand

Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.

Brian Henson

And again, we're kind of trying to be in that place, that's just so absurd and irreverent and hysterical and it's something that at our company we're kind of, we're so irreverent about everything, we're sort of irreverent about the establishment, we're irreverent about civilization, we're irreverent about philosophy, we're irreverent about religion.

Brenda Song

I'd have to say I'm pretty adventurous. I just went to Shanghai for the Special Olympics and I tried dim sum. I'd never really had it before and some of it looked pretty scary, but I tried it anyway. My philosophy is, you're not going to know if you like it until you try it.

Jamie Sives

I came into acting with that sort of dull, meet-with-triumph-and-disaster-the-same philosophy and it's been the right one for me.

Janis Ian

Truth is not the enemy and whatever does not kill us, sets us free.

Fadel Gheit

Oil prices, ... are probably going to go over $26, which will mark the highest level outside the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

Al Naomi

There's no upper limit to category-5, so we're looking at the highest level, the mid-range level, and lower level, maybe like a Katrina-type storm.

Swami Vivekananda

Music alone can take you to the Highest!

Giuseppe Pisanu

We are considering the highest possible risk of an attack, ... and we are preparing ourselves for the worse possible threat.

Publilius Syrus

The highest condition takes rise in the lowest.

Tom Brokaw

Watergate was a constitutional crisis of the highest order.