Peter > Peter's Quotes

“My sustenance is information. My interventions are hidden. I increase as I learn. I compute, so I am.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“The idealization of the sufferer is carried still further in the “Georgias”, in which the thesis is maintained, that “to suffer is better than to do evil;”
― Plato, Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo

“a man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong—acting the part of a good man or of a bad.”
― Plato, Apology

“For I say that there will be more accusers of you than there are now; accusers whom hitherto I have restrained: and as they are younger they will be more inconsiderate with you, and you will be more offended at them. If you think that by killing men you can prevent some one from censuring your evil lives, you are mistaken; that is not a way of escape which is either possible or honourable; the easiest and the noblest way is not to be disabling others, but to be improving yourselves. This is the prophecy which I utter before my departure to the judges who have condemned me.”
― Plato, Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo

“Before he was condemned they had often held discussions, in which they agreed that no man should either do evil, or return evil for evil, or betray the right.”
― Plato, Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo

“SOCRATES: Dear Crito, your zeal is invaluable, if a right one; but if wrong, the greater the zeal the greater the danger; and therefore we ought to consider whether I shall or shall not do as you say.”
― Plato, Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo

“And if I may venture to make a jest upon you, you seem to me both in your appearance and in your power over others to be very like the flat torpedo fish, who torpifies those who come near him and touch him, as you have now torpified me, I think. For my soul and my tongue are really torpid, and I do not know how to answer you; and though I have been delivered of an infinite variety of speeches about virtue before now, and to many persons—and very good ones”
― Plato, Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo

“And if I may venture to make a jest upon you, you seem to me both in your appearance and in your power over others to be very like the flat torpedo fish, who torpifies those who come near him and touch him, as you have now torpified me, I think. For my soul and my tongue are really torpid, and I do not know how to answer you; and though I have been delivered of an infinite variety of speeches about virtue before now, and to many persons—and very good ones they were, as I thought—at this moment I cannot even say what virtue is. And I think that you are very wise in not voyaging and going away from home, for if you did in other places as you do in Athens, you would be cast into prison as a magician.”
― Plato, Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo

“The memory of a great man, so far from being immortal, is really limited to his own generation:—so long as his friends or his disciples are alive, so long as his books continue to be read, so long as his political or military successes fill a page in the history of his country. The praises which are bestowed upon him at his death hardly last longer than the flowers which are strewed upon his coffin or the 'immortelles' which are laid upon his tomb.”
― Plato, Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo

“In speaking of divine perfection, we mean to say that God is just and true and loving, the author of order and not of disorder, of good and not of evil. Or rather, that he is justice, that he is truth, that he is love, that he is order, that he is the very progress of which we were speaking; and that wherever these qualities are present, whether in the human soul or in the order of nature, there is God.”
― Plato, Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo

“If death had only been the end of all, the wicked would have had a good bargain in dying, for they would have been happily quit not only of their body, but of their own evil together with their souls.”
― Plato, Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo