Best Quotes from Plato - Symposium by Plato with Page Numbers

The world would be a wild and terrible place if our minds did not somehow apprehend relations that allow us to divide the jumble of perceived things into classes.

Our ability to grasp universals is what enables us to recognize and name roses and snowflakes and everything else.

The ability to recognize universals, to see relations and form conceptions, is absolutely essential to human existence.

Without it, the world would be incomprehensible.

Particular things exist in the world that we perceive with our senses; universals exist in a world that we apprehend with intelligence.

Particulars are always imperfect; universals are perfect.

Ceaseless change, therefore, characterizes everything in the sensible world.

Things in the intelligible world, like twoness and equality, do not 'flow.' They do not 'become;' they always 'are.'

Particular things are transitory and always changing; universals are eternal and unchanging.

Plato discovered a whole system of bridges and christened them 'forms.'

There must be some powerful force at work here.

It seems like magic. And that, according to Plato, is just about what is.

The forms are universals-timeless, invariable, and perfect-which enjoy true existence outside the world of sense.

They are not ideas that exist in our minds, but objective realities that would exist even if there were no minds to perceive them.

Our world of transient, changing particulars is merely a pale reflection or a wavering copy of the eternal, unchanging world of forms.

We can have knowledge only of these intelligible forms, and only our souls can grasp them.

Of perceptible things we cannot have knowledge, but only a sort of quasi knowledge.

Socrates refers to the forms in various ways.

Using dialectic, Socrates reveals the truth about Love and thus defeats the other speakers.

Rhetoric aims at persuasion; dialectic aims at truth.

Observation uncovers facts, but not the truth that governs the facts.

Only dialectic can lead the mind from opinion and deceptive appearance to truth.

Dialectic, an activity of the reasoning faculty, has mainly a negative function.

Reason alone cannot clear it up; that is a task for our intuitive or imaginative faculty.

Our reason must be made aware of the discrepancy and convinced of the need for clearing it up.

Myth is therefore both a preparation for and an expression of the revelation of the forms.

Ordinary language cannot adequately express suprarational truth; that requires special modes of expression.

The first is the task of dialectic, the second of myth.

Dialectic, therefore, is both the rational process of arriving at specific truths by question and answer.

Once the forms have been revealed, thought can contemplate them directly.

Love is the desire for something-for wholeness and a lost state of happiness.

Love emerges from Socrates' speech as highly ambiguous: as neither good nor bad, beautiful nor ugly, wise nor foolish, mortal nor immortal, but rather as intermediate between these extremes.

The driving force behind this arduous upward struggle is Love, the desire for beauty and immortality.

Love is the educator of the soul, the ladder that leads it out of the morass of the merely human and physical and sets it on its course to eternity.

The goal of Diotima's Love ladder is knowledge of eternal truth, which is wisdom.

Thus Diotima's erotic education is the education of the true philosopher.

Love is shown to be the desire of possessing beauty forever.

Socrates' discussions are really acts of love, performed in the service of Love.

A true lover, therefore, is a lover of wisdom, for which the Greek word is 'philosopher'.

With perseverance and luck, a worthy lover might finally attain the ultimate bliss of sexual union with his loved one.

The ultimate end is eternal truth, which is beauty.

Socrates acts as a devotee of Love, whose ways, as he says, he 'distinctively practices'.

The true philosopher always tries to separate his soul from his body as much as he can.

Philosophy is defined as the 'practice of dying.'

A true philosopher, therefore, does not fear death but instead looks forward to it as a release.

Knowledge, of course, is only of forms, and it can be obtained only by the soul.

The greatest is knowledge, the thing he has loved and pursued all his life.

Shall we ... tell stories and try to find out whether this is likely to be true or not?

Learning, therefore, is actually recollection.

He believes in the soul's immortality with unshakable conviction.

Love is revered as the most ancient of gods.

Being ancient and venerable, Love is the source of great blessings to man.

To live a beautiful life a man must be guided by a principle which nothing—neither birth, nor wealth, nor office—can so beautifully inspire as Love.

Without that, neither a city nor an individual can do anything beautiful or great.

If there were a way to give birth to a state or an army of nothing but lovers and loved ones who would shun shameful activity while vying with each other for honor, that would be the best possible organization.

A loving man would never throw away his sword or break ranks if he knew his loved one would see him; he'd rather die a thousand deaths.

No one is so base that Love cannot inspire him with courage, as though he were noble by nature.

Thus even gods award the highest honors to courage and diligence in Love.

The gods gave him only a phantom because they considered him a weakling who didn't dare to die for love.

He had considered his lover to be so important.

Love is the most ancient and honored of gods, most effective in providing excellence and happiness for all men, living and dead.

Every act is neutral, neither beautiful nor ugly in itself.

Beauty only comes from doing, the way an act is done.

Not all are beautiful and worth our praise; only the one who turns us to beautiful loving.

Gratifying a lover is not a simple act, beautiful or ugly in itself. It depends how it's done.

A base lover is that common lover, who loves the body more than the soul.

The lover of character is a lover for life, because he's welded to that which is stable.

Time should pass, for time tests most things well.

If gratifying a lover is to turn out beautiful, it must be for excellence.

Thus gratifying lovers for excellence is utterly beautiful.

Love is a great and marvelous god whose influence extends to all things human and divine.

A harmony is a concord and a concord an agreement.

You can never have agreement between parties as long as they differ.

With rhythm: It comes from elements which previously differed... which later are made to agree.

We must gratify orderly men and try to make orderly those who are not.

Common Love comes from the Muse of popular music, and one must prescribe him cautiously in only small doses.

Even the arrangement of the seasons is filled with both Loves...

When the opposites encounter orderly Love and attain a temperate, harmonious blending, they come bearing health and good fellowship.

Total Love has wide and extensive power, and the Love concerned for the good... has the greatest power of all.

He provides total happiness and makes us capable of friendship and social intercourse with one another and with those greater than us, the gods.

If they did, they'd make him the fine temples, altars, and sacrifices he deserves, not neglect him as they do.

Of all the gods Love is the most concerned for our welfare; he is our ally who heals those wounds which, if once cured, would bring mankind perfect happiness.

After man's nature had been split, each half longed for its other, ... they craved to grow back together again.

This desire and pursuit after wholeness is 'love'.

We were whole... Our name for this desire and pursuit after wholeness is 'love'.

Let every man exhort every other to show reverence toward the gods; that we may avoid such a fate.

With Love as our leader and guide, attain what we truly desire.

If we would praise the god who is the cause of this boon, we will justly sing paeans to Love.

...who holds out for the future the greatest hope that if we show reverence toward the gods, he will heal our ancient wounds.

The whole human race will be happy if each of us consummates his love by finding his loved one and returning with him to our original condition.

Of all the happy gods, I say—the happiest is Love, being most beautiful and best.

Love is the cause of like effects in others.

Love... makes poets of others.

The good he's concerned, all evil he's spurned.

Love brings us to brotherhood, flings us from other hood, all unions uniting like this.

In longing and pain, in speaking and strain, our pilot, companion, best savior, and friend.

Peace among mortals, the hushed calm on the deep.

The fairest leader and best, whom all ought to follow exalting in fair-sounding song.

Love... is beautifully gentle, residing in the softest of the soft.

To honor my craft... Love is so wise a poet as to make poets of others.

'Love then, to define it succinctly, is the love of possessing the good forever.'

'A man who would approach love properly must begin as a child and go to beautiful bodies... then... ascend from things here and begin to glimpse the beautiful over there.'

'If you should ever see that, Socrates, it won’t seem to you to compare with the beauty of gold or of clothing or of boys and young men... Do you think life would be worthless then, when a man could look over there with the proper faculty and contemplate and consort with the beautiful?'

'It's for the sake of immortality that this love and eagerness accompanies them all.'

'True excellence... will become god-beloved and immortal.'

'The whole spirit world, in fact, lies between the mortal and the divine.'

'A great spirit... conveys and interprets things from men to gods and from gods to men.'

'There's something between wisdom and ignorance... Holding right opinions without being able to give reasons for them.'

'The better the man, the more he does. For men love immortality.'

'So much for the spirit's nature... a mistake, and not a very surprising one either.'

I claim that Socrates is just like those carved Silenuses you see standing in wood carvers' shops holding flutes and shepherd's pipes...But when you open them, you find little statues of the gods inside.

He forces me to admit that even though I'm lacking myself, I still neglect my own self and try to run the government.

Whenever I hear him, my heart jumps higher than a Corybant, tears stream down my cheeks, and I see that hordes of others suffer the same thing.

He wraps them up in words and phrases that remind you of the hide of some insolent old satyr. But once you see them open and get inside them, you'll find that they are the only words that make any sense.

He's the only one who's ever made me feel ashamed.

I thought he was serious about my beauty, and I considered that a fantastic stroke of luck because all I'd have to do was favor him to learn everything he knew.

The most amazing thing is that no one's ever seen him drunk.

By all the gods and goddesses, gentlemen, I swear that when I got up the next morning...nothing more had happened than if I'd slept with my father or an older brother.

Can you imagine my state of mind after that, torn between humiliation at being rejected and admiration for this one's nature, temperance, and courage?

Not one of you knows him, but I'll expose him now that I've begun.