Plato

For Plato too agreed that it is not lawful for the impure to touch the pure.

Rightly, then, are they cast out by Plato from that commonwealth which he imagined, when he was inquiring after the best morals and the best ordering of the state.

And perhaps under the head of this right, it may not be improper to assign a place to that true speaking, which Plato, following Simonides, classes with justice, in order to from a more striking contrast with that falsehood, so often prohibited in Scripture, by the name of false witness to, or against, our neighbour, and which Augustin, in defining a lie, calls an intention to deceive.

'When,' he says, 'the insatiable throat of the people has grown parched with the thirst of liberty, and, using ill ministers, has drunk in its thirst a liberty not moderately tempered but too unmixed, then it pursues the magistrates and leaders, unless they be very mild and lax and supply liberty to it abundantly;

Plato is unwilling, as if the immortality of the soul were thereby endangered.

But perhaps it is desirable that we should examine the notion of a Universal Good, and review the difficulties that it involves, although such an inquiry goes against the grain because of our friendship for the authors of the Theory of Ideas.

And shall it not, then, be permitted to set forth in Latin the discussions of Plato upon living well and happily?

Plato says that there is no king who is not sprung from slaves, no slave who is not sprung from kings.

"For it is a task to find the father and maker of this universe, and, having found him, it is impossible to declare him to all.

"Do you suppose that to a mind possessed of greatness and the contemplation of all time and of all substance, human life can seem any great thing?

For your shrewdness has surely perceived this, that even among the philosophers outside the faith, those who composed dialogues — Aristotle and Theophrastus — laid hold at once of the matters themselves, because they were conscious of their own lack of Platonic graces.

Plato (1) built the foundation of his doctrine on the coming-to-be of the world upon the eternity (*azalīyah*) of an original matter, which he expresses as the unformed element, or first prime matter (*hayūlā*) (2):

I will bring forward also the argument of Plato—for what harm is there in using what belongs to others in the part where it is ours?

For this whole body of the world — whether unborn and unmade, as Pythagoras holds, or born and made, as Plato holds — once for all, in its construction, was found ordered and equipped and arranged with every governance of reason.

And since he said this consistently and remained in this opinion, his whole discourse was spent only in praising virtue and in exhorting men to the pursuit of virtue, as can be understood from the books of the Socratics and chiefly of Plato.

What shall I say of Plato, who certainly would not have pursued these matters in so many books had he not approved them?

for Plato very rightly noted this very thing.

illegible character] quae ut vox ipsa indicat inter gentes dissitas, ordine naturae prior est, et sic a Platone ponitur.

and be as Plato (*Aflāṭūn*) said:

To wait is long (for, as Plato says, the conjecture of the human mind is difficult), not to wait is rash.

Where then were the Christians, when the islands of Hiera, Anaphe and Delos and Rhodos and Cea went to the bottom with many thousands of men — or that one, greater than Asia or Africa, which Plato records as sunk in the Atlantic sea?

The first discipline of the vizier is that he consider closely the king's character and his dealing:

If the soul is taken, following Plato, as having three parts, then the virtue of the reasoning part is practical wisdom;

For let us hear Plato, as a kind of god of philosophers;

I was convinced that I spoke the truth, not because I possessed confirmation from having associated with you, but because I observed that, while gaining some renown, you were also glad to have an education, and that too in the school of Plato, the one that really has nothing to do with getting the better of people and the quackeries that concern themselves with this, but has been demonstrated to a …

The search with a platter and girdle was probably a custom derived from Greece, for a similar formality is described by Plato.

Hence it is that Plato cries that the wise man's soul leans wholly toward death, wills this, meditates this, and is ever borne by this desire as it stretches toward the things outside.

" This charge, you most malignant of creatures, you bitter enemies of every best man, was brought against Plato, brought against Epicurus, brought against Zeno;

For whether we believe the Greek poet that 'sometimes it is pleasant even to be mad,' or Plato that 'the man in possession of his senses has knocked in vain at the doors of poetry,' or Aristotle that 'no great genius has ever existed without a mixture of madness':

I will therefore use even the verdict of some Plato pronouncing, "Every soul is immortal";

But even if anyone follows the estimate of Plato — Plato, of whom this world is the image — that other world too must needs change likewise.

though fuller than the Platonic, which restores to you even the dower of a body;