Plato Ideal Forms Quotes & Sayings

For Plato, if two individuals have some common attribute and so are describable by the same predicate-'Tom is a man'; 'Dick is a man'-then there is something in virtue of which Tom and Dick (together with all other referents of the predicate nominative 'man') have this common attribute. This something is the ideal Form man, which Form is what really, ultimately exists, whereas individual men are just temporal appearances of the Form, with a kind of borrowed or derivative existence, like shadows or projected images. That's a very simplified version of the O.O.M., but not a distorted one-and even at this level it should not be hard to see the influences of Pythagoras and Parmenides on Plato's ontological Theory of Forms, which the O.O.M. is an obvious part of. — David Foster Wallace

Plato
who may have understood better what forms the mind of man than do some of our contemporaries who want their children exposed only to "real" people and everyday events
knew what intellectual experience made for true humanity. He suggested that the future citizens of his ideal republic begin their literary education with the telling of myths, rather than with mere facts or so-called rational teachings. — Bruno Bettelheim

Plato may have denied the existence of ideal forms in this world, but Plato never saw a Viking ship.
(Scientific American, February, 1998) — John Hale