The Quotes canon

Sourced and curated.

Every quote has been curated by hand and carefully authenticated.
Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
633 quotes
SortEditorial Year Length
Genre·Philosophical literature✕clear
Political literature · Philosophical literature

The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers... Of all men to the extent they desire to know. But in fact, this includes only a few, the true friends, as Plato was to Aristotle at the very moment they were disagreeing about the nature of the good... They were absolutely one soul as they looked at the problem. This, according to Plato, is the only real friendship, the only real common good. It is here that the contact people so desperately seek is to be found.

Allan Bloom
The Closing of the American Mind · 1987
★ 5.2
Philosophical dialogue · Dialogue · Philosophical literature

Let us now suppose that in the mind of each man there is an aviary of all sorts of birds-some flocking together apart from the rest, others in small groups, others solitary, flying anywhere and everywhere... We may suppose that the birds are kinds of knowledge, and that when we were children, the receptacle was empty; whenever a man has gotten and detained in the enclosure a kind of knowledge, he may be said to have learned or discovered the thing which is the subject of the knowledge: and this is to know.

Socrates
Plato, Theaetetus · 369 BC
★ 3.8
Philosophical dialogue · Dialogue · Philosophical literature

I would have you imagine, then, that there exists in the mind of man a block of wax, which is of different sizes in different men; harder, moister, and having more or less of purity in one than another, and in some of an intermediate quality... Let us say that this tablet is a gift of Memory, the mother of the Muses; and that when we wish to remember anything which we have seen, or heard, or thought in our own minds, we hold the wax to the perceptions and thoughts, and in that material receive the impression of them as from the seal of a ring; and that we remember and know what is imprinted as long as the image lasts; but when the image is effaced, or cannot be taken, then we forget and do not know.

Socrates
Plato, Theaetetus · 369 BC
★ 3.8
Show 20 more of 633 (301–320)