Truth Plato Quotes & Sayings

The true lover of knowledge naturally strives for truth, and is not content with common opinion, but soars with undimmed and unwearied passion till he grasps the essential nature of things. — Plato

The good repent on knowing their sin; the evil become angry when discovered. Ignorance is not the cause of evil, as Plato held; neither is education the answer to the removal of evil. These men had an intellect as well as a will; knowledge as well as intention. Truth can be known and hated; Goodness can be known and crucified. The Hour was approaching, and for the moment the fear of the people deterred the Pharisees. Violence could not be triggered against Him until He would say, 'This is your Hour. — Fulton J. Sheen

Why, you know, I said, that the eyes, when a person directs them towards objects on which the light of day is no longer shining, but the moon and stars only, see dimly, and are nearly blind; they seem to have no clearness of vision in them? Very true. But when they are directed towards objects on which the sun shines, they see clearly and there is sight in them? Certainly. And the soul is like the eye: when resting upon that on which truth and being shine, the soul perceives and understands, and is radiant with intelligence; but when turned towards the twilight of becoming and perishing, then she has opinion only, and goes blinking about, and is first of one opinion and then of another, and seems to have no intelligence? Just so. — Plato

But the Platonists never argued that evil's lack of ultimate reality meant that there was no moral evil in the world. Plato was well aware of wars, murders, and lies. Evil exists, but it exists as a lack of good, just as holes in a Swiss cheese exist only as lack of cheese. The evil of a lie is the absence of truth. Plato did not think that the nonbeing of evil removed evil from the world, only that it removed responsibility for evil from the creator. Evil arose not from the God, but from matter. — Jeffrey Burton Russell

For certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are freed from the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many. The truth is, Socrates, that these regrets, and also the complaints about relations, are to be attributed to the same cause, which is not old age, but men's characters and tempers; for he who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden. I — Plato

So I took up those poems with which they seemed to have taken most trouble and asked them what they meant, in order that I might at the same time learn something from them. I am ashamed to tell you the truth, gentlemen, but I must. Almost all the bystanders might have explained the poems better than their authors could. I soon realized that poets do not compose their poems with knowledge, but by some inborn talent and by inspiration, like seers and prophets who also say many fine things without any understanding of what they say. — Plato

There is truth in wine and children — Plato

There is nothing so delightful as the hearing, or the speaking of truth. For this reason, there is no conversation so agreeable as that of the man of integrity, who hears without any intention to betray, and speaks without any intention to deceive. — Plato

Plato also knew clearly, and indicated by allusions in his works, the dogmas of the Trinity, mediation, the incarnation, the Passion and the notions of grace and salvation through love. He knew the essential truth. Namely, that God is good. He is only all-powerful in addition. — Simone Weil

Geometry draws the soul towards truth. — Plato

The great enemy of Plato is the world, not exactly in the theological sense, yet in one not wholly different
the world as the hater of truth and lover of appearance, occupied in the pursuit of gain and pleasure rather than of knowledge, banded together against the few good and wise men, and devoid of true education. — Plato

Who are the true philosophers? Those whose passion is to love the truth. — Plato

The view that the truth is one and undivided, and the same for all men everywhere at all times, whether one finds it in the pronouncements of sacred books, traditional wisdom, the authority of churches, democratic majorities, observation and experiment conducted by qualified experts, or the convictions of simple folks uncorrupted by civilisation
this view, in one form or another, is central to western thought, which stems from Plato and his disciples. — Isaiah Berlin

I am speaking like a book, but I believe that what I am saying is true. — Plato

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. — Plato

How to define a name, may not only be an inquiry of considerable difficulty and intricacy, but may involve considerations going deep into the nature of the things which are denoted by the name. Such, for instance, are the inquiries which form the subjects of the most important of Plato's Dialogues; as, "What is rhetoric?" the topic of the Gorgias, or, "What is justice?" that of the Republic. Such, also, is the question scornfully asked by Pilate, "What is truth?" and the fundamental question with speculative moralists in all ages, "What is virtue? — John Stuart Mill

Society is an illusion to the young citizen. It lies before him in rigid repose, with certain names, men, and institutions, rootedlike oak-trees to the centre, round which all arrange themselves the best they can. But the old statesman knows that society is fluid; there are no such roots and centres; but any particle may suddenly become the centre of the movement, and compel the system to gyrate round it, as every man of strong will, like Pisistratus, or Cromwell, does for a time, and every man of truth, like Plato, or Paul, does forever. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

But he who has been earnest in the love of knowledge and of true wisdom, and has exercised his intellect more than any other part of him, must have thoughts immortal and divine. If he attain truth, and in so far as human nature is capable of sharing in immortality, he must altogether be immortal. — Plato

A village idiot, in the literal sense, who really loves the truth, even when he only babbles, is in his thinking infinitely superior to Aristotle. He is infinitely nearer to Plato than Aristotle ever was. — Simone Weil

Those who are not schooled and practised in truth [who are not honest and upright men] can never manage aright the government, nor yet can those who spend their lives as closet philosophers; because the former have no high purpose to guide their actions, while the latter keep aloof from public life ... — Plato

Plato's sense that this was the only religion that would hold up nowadays was thoroughgoing. The only religion that could be really believed by anyone in his time, he said, is based on belief that the stars have intelligence, and that we and they have immortal souls of some sort.18 The more we learn - and mathematics is the queen of the soul's subjects - the more we will ascend toward self-knowledge and universal truth. This ascension is the drama of Plato's religion. — Jennifer Michael Hecht

Then may we not fairly plead in reply that our true lover of knowledge naturally strives for truth, and is not content with common opinion, but soars with undimmed and unwearied passion till he grasps the essential nature of things with the mental faculty fitted to do so, that is, with the faculty which is akin to reality, and which approaches and unites with it, and begets intelligence and truth as children, and is only released from travail when it has thus reached knowledge and true life and satisfaction? — Plato

Philosophy is dear to me, but dearer still is truth. — Raheel Farooq

There is something very sublime, though very fanciful, in Plato's description of the Supreme Being,
that truth is His body and light His shadow. According to this definition there is nothing so contradictory to his nature as error and falsehood. — Joseph Addison

A man's duty is to find out where the truth is, or if he cannot, at least to take the best possible human doctrine and the hardest to disprove, and to ride on this like a raft over the waters of life. — Plato

Plato is my friend, but truth is a better friend. — Aristotle.

When I asked if she read poetry anymore, she said no. she had lost her taste for it. That was how she said it, lost her taste. I asked how that could happen, and she said she agreed with Plato, or at least Plato as summarized for her: that there was something dishonest about it and that he was right to want to banish the poets.

What she mean't, she told me, was that the only reality was life, real life, and that these beautiful versions were lies and she no longer had patience for it. — Daphne Kalotay

Facts are delusion," he said. "They are a delusion of truth as a mirage is a delusion of sight. The real facts lie in people's minds and not in fingerprints and books and photographs and all the other physical things which are only the accidents that occur as a result of what lies in the mind. Truth is a matter of the mind and all else is only a blurred shadow to reconstruct the original image. Bit it is the image we are searching for. — Leonard Holton

To speak knowing the truth, among prudent and dear men, about what is greatest and dear, is a thing that is safe and encouraging. But to present arguments at a time when one is in doubt and seeking... is a thing both frightening and slippery. — Plato

Beauty is the splendour of truth — Plato

There is no necessity for the man who means to be an orator to understand what is really just but only what would appear so to the majority of those who will give judgment; and not what is really good or beautiful but whatever will appear so; because persuasion comes from that and not from the truth. — Plato

Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught falsehoods in school. And the person that dares to tell the truth is called at once a lunatic and fool — Plato

The cause of all the blunders committed by man arises from this excessive self-love. For the lover is blinded by the object loved; so that he passes a wrong judgment on what is just, good and beautiful, thinking that he ought always to honor what belongs to himself in preference to truth. For he who intends to be a great man ought to love neither himself nor his own things, but only what is just, whether it happens to be done by himself, or by another. — Plato

And isn't it a bad thing to be deceived about the truth, and a good thing to know what the truth is? For I assume that by knowing the truth you mean knowing things as they really are. — Plato

Plato, by the way, wanted to banish all poets from his proposed Utopia because they were liars. The truth was that Plato knew philosophers couldn't compete successfully with poets. — Kurt Vonnegut

But the truth is, O men of Athens, that God only is wise; and by his answer he intends to show that the wisdom of men is worth little or nothing; he is not speaking of Socrates, he is only using my name by way of illustration, as if he said, He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing. — Plato

The true lover of learning then must his earliest youth, as far as in him lies, desire all truth ... He whose desires are drawn toward knowledge in every form will be absorbed in the pleasures of the soul, and will hardly feel bodily pleasures I mean, if he be a true philosopher and not a sham one ... Then how can he who has the magnificence of mind and is the spectator of all times and all existence, think much of human life He cannot. Or can such a one account death fearful No indeed. — Plato

The qualities of number appear to lead to the apprehension of truth. — Plato

I imagine that whenever the mind perceives a mathematical idea, it makes contact with Plato's world of mathematical concepts ... When mathematicians communicate, this is made possible by each one having a direct route to truth, the consciousness of each being in a position to perceive mathematical truths directly, through the process of 'seeing'. — Roger Penrose

In the Phaedrus, Plato argued that the new arrival of writing would revolutionize culture for the worst. He suggested that it would substitute reminiscence for thought and mechanical learning for the true dialect of the living quest for truth by discourse and conversation. — Marshall McLuhan

What I call my philosophy of teaching is in fact a philosophy of learning. It comes out of Plato, modified. Before true learning can occur, I believe, there must be in the student's heart a certain yearning for the truth, a certain fire. The true student burns to know. In the teacher she recognizes, or apprehends, the one who has come closer than herself to the truth. So much does she desire the truth embodied in the teacher that she is prepared to burn her old self up to attain it. For his part, the teacher recognizes and encourages the fire in the student, and responds to it by burning with an intenser light. Thus together the two of them rise to a higher realm. So to speak. — J.M. Coetzee

Whereas the truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst. — Plato

If you think that a man who is any good at all should take into account the risk of life or death; he should look to this only in his action, whether what he does is right or wrong, whether he is acting life a good or a bad man. — Plato

Again, truth should be highly valued; if, as we were saying, a lie is useless to the gods, and useful only as a medicine to men, then the use of such medicines should be restricted to physicians; private individuals have no business with them. — Plato

He said: Who then are the true philosophers? Those, I said, who are lovers of the vision of truth. That is also good, he said; but I should like to know what you mean? To — Plato

Since then, as philosophers prove, appearance tyrannizes over truth and is lord of happiness, to appearance I must devote myself. — Plato

But Above all things truth beareth away the victory — Plato

When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to me,
when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no more. When I feel that we two meet in a perception, that our two souls are tinged with the same hue, and do as it were run into one, why should I measure degrees of latitude, why should I count Egyptian years? — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Seek truth while you are young, for if you do not, it will later escape your grasp — Plato

In the most general terms, the Enlightenment goes back to Plato's belief that truth and beauty and goodness are connected; that truth and beauty, disseminated widely, will sooner or later lead to goodness. (While we're making at effort at truth and goodness, beauty reminds us what we're hold out for.) — Susan Neiman

That's because you're a clever fellow, Thrasymachus. You knew very well that if you ask someone how much twelve is, and, as you ask, you warn him by saying "Don't tell me, man, that twelve is twice six, or three [b] times four, or six times two, or four times three, for I won't accept such nonsense," then you'll see clearly, I think, that no one could answer a question framed like that. And if he said to you: "What are you saying, Thrasymachus, am I not to give any of the answers you mention, not even if twelve happens to be one of those things? I'm amazed. Do you want me to say something other than the truth? Or do you mean something else?" What answer would you give him? [c] — Plato

What essence is to generation, that truth is to belief. — Plato

When he looks at Beauty in the only way that Beauty can be seen - only then will it become possible for him to give birth not to images of virtue (because he's in touch with no images), but to true virtue [arete] (because he is in touch with true Beauty). The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he. — Plato

Reading all the quotes in the world won't make you or me into Plato, Gandhi Or Einstein, just like watching hundreds games of soccer won't make you a soccer player or taking a yoga class will make u a yogini, or reading a golf book will make you a golfer. We need to put the Knowledge to practice and that is the challenge. Put it to work for you, make the effort to Follow Through — Pablo

Men say that we ought not to enquire into the supreme God and the nature of the universe, nor busy ourselves in searching out the causes of things, and that such enquiries are impious; whereas the very opposite is the truth. — Plato

A measure of such things which in any degree falls short of the whole truth is not fair measure; for nothing imperfect is the measure of anything, although persons are too apt to be contented and think that they need search no further. — Plato

Christianity does the opposite of Plato. The rejection of reality by philosophy today is the most astonishing thing imaginable. Perhaps it is the proximity of revelation, the ever greater pressure it exerts, that feeds this impulse. But I think that revelation is going to become obvious in the "end times," precisely because the Apocalypse marks the end, the pulling down of the mythological and philosophical screen that was erected against the truth. And since most people do not want to know the truth, this end can come about only in a violent fashion. The — Rene Girard

The souls of people, on their way to Earth-life, pass through a room full of lights; each takes a taper - often only a spark - to guide it in the dim country of this world. But some souls, by rare fortune, are detained longer - have time to grasp a handful of tapers, which they weave into a torch. These are the torch-bearers of humanity - its poets, seers and saints, who lead and lift the race out of darkness, toward the light. They are the law-givers and saviors, the light-bringers, way-showers and truth-tellers, and without them, humanity would lose its way in the dark. — Plato

The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth. — Herbert Marcuse

Art- speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day and that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. The truth lives from day to day, and the marvelous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today. — D.H. Lawrence

My dear Homer, if you are really only once removed from the truth, with reference to virtue, instead of being twice removed and the manufacturer of a phantom, according to our definition of an imitator, and if you need to be able to distinguish between the pursuits which make men better or worse, in private and in public, tell us what city owes a better constitution to you, as Lacedaemon owes hers to Lycurgus, and as many cities, great and small, owe theirs to many other legislators? What state attributes to you the benefits derived from a good code of laws? Italy and Sicily recognize Charondas in this capacity, and we solon. But what state recognizes you. — Plato

When you look at what C.S. Lewis is saying, his message is so anti-life, so cruel, so unjust. The view that the Narnia books have for the material world is one of almost undisguised contempt. At one point, the old professor says, 'It's all in Plato' - meaning that the physical world we see around us is the crude, shabby, imperfect, second-rate copy of something much better. I want to emphasize the simple physical truth of things, the absolute primacy of the material life, rather than the spiritual or the afterlife.

[The New York Times interview, 2000] — Philip Pullman

Knowledge of the soul is the only universal truth and the only wisdom - all other knowledge is transient. — Plato

My opinion is: Truth must be absolute and that you Mr. Protagoras, are absolutely in error. Since this is indeed my opinion, then you must concede that it is true according to your philosophy. — Plato

Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man. — Plato

A library of wisdom, is more precious than all wealth, and all things that are desirable cannot be compared to it. Whoever therefore claims to be zealous of truth, of happiness, of wisdom or knowledge, must become a lover of books. — Plato

The truth is that we isolate a particular kind of love and appropriate it for the name of love, which really belongs to a wider whole. — Plato

And this was what we foresaw, and this was the reason why truth forced us to admit, not without fear and hesitation, that neither cities nor States nor individuals will ever attain perfection until the small class of philosophers whom we termed useless but not corrupt are providentially compelled, whether they will or not, to take care of the State, and until a like necessity be laid on the State to obey them; or until kings, or if not kings, the sons of kings or princes, are divinely inspired with a true love of true philosophy. That either or both of these alternatives are impossible, I see no reason to affirm: if they were so, we might indeed be justly ridiculed as dreamers and visionaries. Am I not right? Quite right. If — Plato

There is a certain way of searching for the truth in mathematics that Plato is said first to have discovered. Theon called this analysis. — Francois Viete

Then if any one at all is to have the privilege of lying, the rulers of the State should be the persons; and they, in their dealings either with enemies or with their own citizens, may be allowed to lie for the public good. But nobody else should meddle with anything of the kind; and although the rulers have this privilege, for a private man to lie to them in return is to be deemed a more heinous fault than for the patient or the pupil of a gymnasium not to speak the truth about his own bodily illnesses to the physician or to the trainer, or for a sailor not to tell the captain what is happening about the ship and the rest of the crew, and how things are going with himself or his fellow sailors. Most — Plato

Creation is the production of order. What a simple, but, at the same time, comprehensive and pregnant principle is here! Plato could tell his disciples no ultimate truth of more pervading significance. Order is the law of all intelligible existence. — John Stuart Blackie

Can the same nature be a lover of wisdom and a lover of falsehood? Never. The true lover of learning then must from his earliest youth, as far as in him lies, desire all truth? Assuredly. But then again, as we know by experience, he whose desires are strong in one direction will have them weaker in others; they will be like a stream which has been drawn off into another channel. True. He whose desires are drawn towards knowledge in every form will be absorbed in the pleasures of the soul, and will hardly feel bodily pleasure - I mean, if he be a true philosopher and not a sham one. That is most certain. Such — Plato

God is truth and light his shadow. — Plato

You should not honor men more than truth. — Plato

An interlude of false innocence has passed. Today, as we enter the post-photographic era, we must face once again the ineradicable fragility of our ontological distinctions between the imaginary and the real, and the tragic elusiveness of the Cartesian dream. We have indeed learnt to fix the shadows, but not to secure their meanings or to stabilize their truth values; they still flicker on the walls of Plato's cave. — William J. Mitchell

Read Demosthenes or Cicero, read Plato, Aristotle, or any other of that class: you will, I admit, feel wonderfully allured, pleased, moved, enchanted; but turn from them to the reading of the Sacred Volume, and whether you will or not, it will so affect you, so pierce your heart, so work its way into your very marrow, that, in comparison of the impression so produced, that of orators and philosophers will almost disappear; making it manifest that in the Sacred Volume there is a truth divine, a something which makes it immeasurably superior to all the gifts and graces attainable by man. Section — John Calvin

Let us affirm what seems to be the truth, that, whether one is or is not, one and the others in relation to themselves and one another, all of them, in every way, are and are not, and appear to be and appear not to be. — Plato

The rhetorician need not know the truth about things; he has only to discover some way of persuading the ignorant that he has more knowledge than those who know. — Plato

So it happens that we must ask ourselves, with regard to truth, not for a new criterion for it, which will be better polished than earlier ones, but, peremptorily and seizing it by the lapels, "what is truth as such," and with regard to reality, not what things are or what and how is that which is, but for what reason that X which we call Being is in the Universe, and with regard to knowledge we must not ask for its bases and limits - as Plato, Aristotle Descartes, Kant did - but for something which comes before all this: for what reason we concern ourselves with trying to know. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

He's garbage, he cares about nothing but the truth. — Plato

The philosopher is in love with truth, that is, not with the changing world of sensation, which is the object of opinion, but with the unchanging reality which is the object of knowledge. — Plato

Plato is my friend; Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth. — Isaac Newton

It stops wandering about the world of sense and settles down in the world of intellect, and there it occupies itself, casting off falsehood and feeding the soul in what Plato calls 'the plain of truth,' using his method of division to distinguish the Forms, and to determine the essential nature of each thing, and to find the primary kinds, and weaving together by the intellect all that issues from these primary kinds, till it has traversed the whole intelligible world; then it resolves again the structure of that world into its parts, and comes back to its starting-point; and then, keeping quiet (for it is quiet in so far as it is present There) it busies itself no more, but contemplates, having arrived at unity. (Ennead I.3.4) — A.H. Armstrong

For the Platonic or Aristotelian philosophy, it is of no importance whether Plato or Aristotle ever lived. For the mystical practice of an Indian, Persian, Chinese, or Neo-Platonic mystic it is a matter of indifference whether Rama, Buddha, Laotse, or Porphyrius are myths or not. The mystic has no personal relation to them. It is not here a question of somebody telling me the truth which of myself I cannot find, but of my finding an access to the depths of the world in the depths of my soul. — Emil Brunner

No man will survive who genuinely opposes you or any other crowd and prevents the occurrence of many unjust and illegal happenings in the city. A man who really fights for justice must lead a private, not a public, life if he is to survive for even a short time — Plato

Ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crises with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth. — William Faulkner

Plato used the dialogue format because the exchange of views, the posing and answering of questions, showed that understanding is a living, dynamic process. He distrusted writing because the settled character of the written word makes it look as if truth can be fixed and made to stand still. It is worth remembering that this greatest advocate of the objective reality of truth also believed that our access to that truth was sustained in reasoned discussion. — John Churchill, 1st Duke Of Marlborough

Appearance tyrannizes over truth. — Plato

Of course, he said, he who is of a certain nature, is like those who are
of a certain nature; he who is not, not. — Plato

Philosophy, for Plato, is a kind of vision, the 'vision of truth' ... Everyone who has done any kind of creative work has experienced, in a greater or less degree, the state of mind in which, after long labour, truth or beauty appears, or seems to appear, in a sudden glory - it may only be about some small matter, or it may be about the universe. I think that most of the best creative work, in art, in science, in literature, and in philosophy, has been a result of just such a moment. — Bertrand Russell

Socrates, Plato, Jesus, Buddha and countless other mystics, in countless cultures, have preached the same thing
that we all exist amid a blur of uncertainty. That one can never know complete truth about physical reality via our senses alone. Much is made of the differences between their systems ... Socrates teaching reason, Buddha urging meditation, and Jesus prescribing faith. But what they all had in common was far more important. Each of those sage-prophets worried that the power of human egotism tends to make us lie to ourselves, leading to error, hypocrisy, and all too often, the rationalization of evil actions. — David Brin

Truthfulness. He will never willingly tolerate an untruth, but will hate it as much as he loves truth ... And is there anything more closely connected with wisdom than truth? — Plato

Why, a dog, whenever he sees a stranger, is angry; when an acquaintance, he welcomes him, although the one has never done him any harm, nor the other any good. Did this never strike you as curious? The matter never struck me before; but I quite recognise the truth of your remark. And surely this instinct of the dog is very charming; - your dog is a true philosopher. Why? Why, because he distinguishes the face of a friend and of an enemy only by the criterion of knowing and not knowing. And must not an animal be a lover of learning who determines what he likes and dislikes by the test of knowledge and ignorance? Most — Plato

Socrates is a shining example of a man who bravely lived up to his ideals, and, in the end, bravely died for them. Throughout his life, he never lost faith in the mind's ability to discern and decide, and so to apprehend and master reality. Nor did he ever betray truth and integrity for a pitiable life of self-deception and semi-consciousness. In seeking relentlessly to align mind with matter and thought with fact, he remained faithful both to himself and to the world, with the result that he is still alive in this sentence and millions of others that have been written about him. More than a great philosopher, Socrates was the living embodiment of the dream that philosophy might one day set us free. — Neel Burton

I have expressed - whether rightly or wrongly God knows. But, whether true or false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally either in public or private life must have his eye fixed. I agree, he said, as far as I am able to understand you. Moreover, — Plato

Similarly with regard to truth, won't we say that a soul is maimed if it hates a voluntary falsehood, cannot endure to have one in itself, and is greatly angered when it exists in others, but is nonetheless content to accept an involuntary falsehood, isn't angry when it is caught being ignorant, and bears its lack of learning easily, wallowing in it like a pig? — Plato

The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before. — G.K. Chesterton

When the mind's eye rests on objects illuminated by truth and reality, it understands and comprehends them, and functions intelligently; but when it turns to the twilight world of change and decay, it can only form opinions, its vision is confused and its beliefs shifting, and it seems to lack intelligence. — Plato

[Genesis] is not myth. It is not history in the conventional sense, a mere recording of events. Nor is it theology: Genesis is less about God than about human beings and their relationship with God. The theology is almost always implicit rather than explicit. What Genesis is, in fact, is philosophy written in a deliberately non-philosophical way. It deals with all the central questions of philosophy: what exists (ontology), what can we know (epistemology), are we free (philosophical psychology), and how we should behave (ethics). But it does so in a way quite unlike the philosophical classics from Plato to Wittgenstein. To put it at its simplest: philosophy is truth as system. Genesis is truth as story. It is a unique work, philosophy in the narrative mode. — Jonathan Sacks

They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth. -Plato, philosopher (427-347 BCE) — Plato