Talk:Plato

Are there any guidlines for quoting Socrates as Plato himself in his works? Or should these quotes go to the Socrates article? --Slac 23:34, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

I don't think it's legitimate to quote anything from Socrates directly, since we have no actual evidence from his own hand.

On another topic, anyone know if the following quote can actually be ascribed to Plato, or is it just a common misconception: "He was a wise man who invented god" ??

Order of books

What kind of order of dialogs are applied for this article? It doesn't seem neither the order in the complete works edited by Stephanos, the most traditional order of books, nor the chronological order the most of modern scholars agree on, nor alphabetical order.

I propose to re-order them in the way of Stephanos': it is consequently the book order in the Berlin Academy edition. Does anyone have different ideas? --Aphaia 19:10, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

ok —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 74.50.201.175 (talk)

Stephanus pagination is fine with me. IMHO the chronology is conjectural. ~ Ningauble 19:32, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Two Plato Quotes

I have found the following two quotes which are ascribed to Plato. Can anyone tell me if they really appear in the works of Plato, or, if not, why they are ascribed to him? I would be very grateful!

"Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something."

"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light." —This unsigned comment is by 89.220.109.69 (talk • contribs) .

Unsourced?

How is it possible that there are a large number of unsourced entries for such an extensively studied person? Would someone knowledgeable please clean this up. 67.130.129.135 22:35, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

Unsourced

Wikiquote no longer allows unsourced quotations, and they are in process of being removed from our pages (see Wikiquote:Limits on quotations); but if you can provide a reliable and precise source for any quote on this list please move it to Plato. --Antiquary 11:16, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

• Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

• Courage is knowing what not to fear.

• There is only one good, which is knowledge, and one evil, which is ignorance.

• Wherever it has been established that it is shameful to be involved with sexual relationships with men, that is due to evil on the part of the rulers, and to cowardice on the part of the governed.

• The learning and knowledge that we have, is, at the most, but little compared to that of which we are ignorant.

• No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.

• One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics, is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. [But see next below, and Republic I : 347-C]

• The good are not willing to rule either for the sake of money or of honor. They do not wish to collect pay openly for their service of rule and be styled hirelings nor to take it by stealth from their office and be called thieves, nor yet for the sake of honor, [347c] for they are not covetous of honor. So there must be imposed some compulsion and penalty to constrain them to rule if they are to consent to hold office. That is perhaps why to seek office oneself and not await compulsion is thought disgraceful. But the chief penalty is to be governed by someone worse if a man will not himself hold office and rule. It is from fear of this, as it appears to me, that the better sort hold office when they do, and then they go to it not in the expectation of enjoyment nor as to a good thing, but as to a necessary evil and because they are unable to turn it over to better men than themselves [347d] or to their like. For we may venture to say that, if there should be a city of good men only, immunity from office-holding would be as eagerly contended for as office is now. [1]
  • Note: This is not a precise quotation, but it is a reasonably accurate paraphrase of Republic 1, 347

• Ignorance, the root and the stem of every evil.

• Man shall not see the truth when it surrounds him absolutely.

• Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.

• At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet. (This is verbatim from Symposium)

• You can learn more about a man in an hour of play, than in a year of conversation.

• I would teach the children music, physics and philosophy, but the most important is music, for in the patterns of the arts are the keys to all learning.

• What is left now of the soils of Greece, is like the skeleton of a body wasted by disease. The rich, soft soil has been carried off.

• If a man were to see a great company run out every day into the rain and take delight in being wet - if he knew that it would be to no purpose for him to go and persuade them to return to their houses in order to avoid the storm, and that all that could be expected by his going to speak to them would be that he himself should be as wet as they, it would be best for him to keep within doors, and, since he had not influence enough to correct other people's folly, to take care to preserve himself.

• Never discourage anyone...who continually makes progress, no matter how slow.

• Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song.

Misattributed, invented or "improved" quotes

I removed "Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber"; clearly this is more than just a tone-deaf, colloquial rephrasing of Republic Book 1, 347-C; the elements "too smart" and "dumber" make a larger claim than Plato himself did: "Good men are unwilling to rule, either for money's sake or for honour.... So they must be forced to consent under threat of penalty.... The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself. That is the fear, I believe, that makes decent people accept power...." Objectivesea 19:59, 19 January 2010 (UTC)

I agree that this is just plain wrong. Even the popular translation of Benjamin Jowett, noted for its vernacular and colloquial distortions of Plato's carefully precise language, does not so mangle the meaning of this passage, nor does any other translation I can find. GoogleBooks shows only a handful of appearances of this misquote in print, and leads me to suspect it originated as a joke sometime in the 1980s.

Google shows it repeated as fact on about a million web pages, so, if one thinks it worthwhile to rebut nonsense that appears in bonehead venues, it may be appropriate to include a misquotation note in the article. (What really is needed in this article is to identify the translations used.) ~ Ningauble 19:37, 20 January 2010 (UTC)

Alan Bloom translates the line as "Hence, necessity and a penalty must be there in addition for them, if they are going to be willing to rule - it is likely that this is the source of its being held to be shameful to seek to rule and not to await necessity - and the greatest of penalties is being ruled by a worse man if one is not willing to rule oneself." Are we allowed to paraphrase quotes? If so I think it can be improved as follows - If the decent are not willing to rule, they are punished by being ruled by worse men. This is because in the same translation the he regularly switches between "good" and "decent". N3m6 17:07, 1 September 2011 (UTC)

"What really is needed in this article is to identify the translations used." There are plenty of good translations available, and some that are not so good. If we invite the general public to paraphrase we would get a lot of nonsense. ~ Ningauble 18:21, 1 September 2011 (UTC)

"Someday, in the distant future, our grandchildren's grandchildren will develop a new equivalent of our classrooms. They will spend many hours in front of boxes with fires glowing within. May they have the wisdom to know the difference between light and knowledge." -- Without a source, I am still quite certain this supposed quote was invented quite recently. 78.69.131.19 17:28, 26 October 2011 (UTC)

Kindness

One quote that I've seen all over the web attributed to Plato is, "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle." If nobody can find a source for it, it's a good candidate for the "Misattributed" section. 74.192.112.178, 28 September 2010

A curious one this. I've checked on Google book search and I can find a lot of books ascribing this to either Plato [2] or Philo [3]. However all of the books are ones with titles like "A Spiritual Guide to finding the Inner You," and they're obviously just quoting from each other. I found other books and websites attributing it to a "T.H. Thompson" [4] or a "John Watson," [5] but I've no idea if these names are even genuine. I think this quote should go into a "Misattributed" section for both Plato and Philo. Singinglemon 20:39, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Okay, I've investigated further. I looked at the oldest books which use the quote "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." They attribute it to "John Watson", which was apparently the pseudonym of the Scottish preacher w:Ian Maclaren (1850–1907). I found a recent investigation into this quote at Quoteinvestigator.com [6], and the earliest version of the quote seems to have been published in 1897/8, and the exact words were: "Be pitiful, for every man is fighting a hard battle." The word "pitiful" has largely lost its earlier meaning of "compassionate" so it's no surprise that it's mutated to "kind." I shall add it to the "Misattributed" section. Singinglemon 21:20, 28 September 2010 (UTC)