School

Platonism quotes

Platonism treats intelligible forms—especially the Good—as more real than shifting appearances, and education as an ascent of the soul.

Overview

Plato’s dialogues and later Platonic schools explore justice, love, knowledge, and political order through dialectic. This archive page gathers English passages tagged to Platonic lineages.

Historical notes

From the Academy through Middle and Neoplatonism into Renaissance and modern revivals, Platonism remains a standing option in metaphysics and ethics.

Core ideas

  • Forms explain sameness amid change.
  • The Good orients knowledge and politics.
  • Dialectic educates desire as well as intellect.
  • Love can be a ladder from particular beauty to the Beautiful.

Thinkers in this archive

Plato , Plutarch , Boethius , Plotinus , Iris Murdoch , Damascius , Synesius of Cyrene

FAQ

What is Platonism?

It is the family of views descending from Plato that privilege intelligible reality, dialectic, and the ethical centrality of the good.

Is Platonism only Plato?

No. Later Platonists develop the tradition; this page includes related Platonic school labels in the archive.

Where can I find Platonism quotes?

Read the English passages below and follow links to Plato and related thinkers.

  1. Justice is doing one's own work and not meddling in others'.
  2. Love is the desire for the perpetual possession of the good.
  3. Let us not become haters of argument — that is a great danger to the soul.
  4. Extreme freedom seems to change into nothing but extreme slavery.
  5. The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs kindling.
  6. In the bitterest turns of fortune, true friends are proved.
  7. Wealth does not take away need — it kindles new wants.
  8. Withdraw into yourself and look.
  9. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.
  10. Picture human beings as if living in an underground, cave-like dwelling.
  11. First, it always is, and neither comes to be nor perishes.
  12. This very practice of philosophers is a release and separation of soul from body.
  13. I say that the noble and good man and woman are happy, and the unjust and wicked are miserable.
  14. Nothing is miserable unless you think it so.
  15. This feeling—wonder—belongs especially to the philosopher; philosophy has no other beginning than this.
  16. Unless…either philosophers rule in the cities or those now called kings…philosophize genuinely and adequately…
  17. Every human soul has by nature beheld the things that are.
  18. Justice is somehow a kind of virtue.
  19. The beginning is the most important part of any work.
  20. The heaviest penalty is to be ruled by someone worse than oneself.
  21. Wonder is very much the mark of a philosopher.
  22. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love… can once again be made central.
  23. The Good… is to be honored still more highly than knowledge and truth.
  24. I can only choose within the world I can see, in the moral sense of "see" which implies that clear vision is a result of moral imagination and moral effort.
  25. The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself.
  26. Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture.
  27. Anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity and realism is to be connected with virtue.
  28. Moral change and moral achievement are slow; we are not loosely and lightly attached to the world.
  29. She was devoted to philosophy and explained it publicly to anyone who wished to hear.
  30. She honorably presides over the mysteries of philosophy.