Phaedrus
1952
Two men walk into the Athenian countryside, one eager to show off a clever speech about love, the other ready to dismantle it. What begins as a debate about whether the non-lover is preferable to the lover becomes something far stranger and more luminous: a meditation on desire, truth, and the soul's ancient longing for wisdom. Socrates, mid-conversation, suddenly launches into his own breathtaking speech about love as a form of divine madness, a recollection of the soul's glimpse of eternal beauty before it fell into a body. The dialogue then pivots again, examining whether rhetoric is an art worth practicing at all, or merely a trick without truth behind it. Plato weaves these threads together through the famous allegory of the soul as a charioteer guiding two horses, one noble, one unruly, toward the realm of the Forms. Written probably around 370 BC, this is Plato's most poetic dialogue, less rigorous than the Republic but more ravishing, as if beauty itself were the argument.
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“Love is a serious mental disease.””
— Plato
“The madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings.””
— Plato
“If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.””
— Plato
“Only a philosopher's mind grows wings, since its memory always keeps it as close as possible to those realities by being close to which the gods are divine.””
— Plato
“Man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door of his prison and run away... A man should wait, and not take his own life until God summons him.””
— Plato
“If anyone comes to the gates of poetry and expects to become an adequate poet by acquiring expert knowledge of the subject without the Muses' madness, he will fail, and his self-controlled verses will be eclipsed by the poetry of men who have been driven out of their minds.””
— Plato
“O dear Pan and all the other gods of this place, grant that I may be beautiful inside. Let all my external possessions be in friendly harmony with what is within. May I consider the wise man rich. As for gold, let me have as much as a moderate man could bear and carry with him.””
— Plato
“Madness, provided it comes as the gift of heaven, is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings . . . the men of old who gave things their names saw no disgrace or reproach in madness; otherwise they would not have connected it with it the name of the noblest of arts, the art of discerning the future, and called it the manic art . . . So, according to the evidence provided by our ancestors, madness is a nobler thing than sober sense . . . madness comes from God, whereas sober sense is merely human.””
— Plato
“[there are] two kinds of things the nature of which it would be quite wonderful to grasp by means of a systematic art...the first consists in seeing together things that are scattered about everywhere and collecting them into one kind, so that by defining each thing we can make clear the subject of any instruction we wish to give...[the second], in turn, is to be able to cut up each kind according to its species along its natural joints, and to try not to splinter any part, as a bad butcher might do...phaedrus, i myself am a lover of these divisions and collections, so that i may be able to think and to speak.””
— Plato
