Phaedrus Quotes

“But he who, having no touch of the Muses' madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks that he will get into the temple by the help of art—he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man disappears and is nowhere when he enters into rivalry with the madman.”
― Plato, Phaedrus

“Lets get into it”
― Plato, Phaedrus

“See too how wonderfully delicate and sweet the air is, throbbing in response to the shrill chorus of the cicadas - the very voice of summer.”
― Plato, Phaedrus

“Phaedrus
...But you, Wondrous one, appear as someone most strange. For, in what you speak, you are like a stranger who is wandering about. You don't go out from the city, nor over the border, and it seems to me you don't go outside the walls at all.

Socrates
Forgive me, O Best one. For I am a lover of learning. Now the country places and the trees are unwilling to teach me, but the humans in the city are...”
― Plato, Phaedrus

“Socrates: Dear Pan and ye other gods who dwell here, grant that I become beautiful within and that my worldly belongings be in accord with my inner self. May I consider the wise man rich and have only as much gold as a moderate man can carry and use.”
― Plato, Phaedrus

“...when a person uses the dialectical art and selects an appropriate soul, sowing and planting his speeches with knowledge, speeches which have the means to defend themselves and the one who plants them. These speeches are not fruitless but bear seed from which other speeches, planted in other fields, have the means to pass this seed on, forever immortal, and to make the person possessing them as blessed as is humanly possible.”
― Plato, Phaedrus

“But he sows his gardens of written words, it seems, in the joy of play and he will write, whenever he does write, to build up a treasure trove of reminders both for himself in case he reaches forgetful old age and for all who walk down the same path, and he'll take pleasure watching the tender shoots in the garden grow.”
― Plato, Phaedrus

“...my friend, those at Zeus’ sanctuary in Dodona claim that the speeches of oak trees were the first prophetic words. Because people back then weren’t wise the way you young are today, it was enough for them in their simple-mindedness to listen to an oak or a rock so long as it spoke the truth. But perhaps it makes a difference to you who is speaking and where he comes from. Why don’t you consider this alone: whether it is as they say, or not?”
― Plato, Phaedrus

“For this will produce a forgetting in the souls of those who learn these letters as they fail to exercise their memory, because those who put trust in writing recollect from the outside with foreign signs, rather than themselves recollecting from within by themselves. You have not discovered a drug for memory, but for reminding. You offer your students an apparent, not a true wisdom. For they have heard much from you without real teaching, and they will appear rich in knowledge when for the most part there’s an absence of knowledge, and they will be difficult to be with since they appear wise rather than really being wise.”
― Plato, Phaedrus

“...unless someone both enumerates the natures of those who are about to listen and is able to divide up beings according to their forms and to comprehend each individual thing by its unique form, he will not be an artist of speeches (to the extent that any human being can be). Nor will he ever acquire these skills without much diligence.”
― Plato, Phaedrus

“A moderate man does not put himself through this labor in order to speak and to act in the company of human beings, but to put himself in a position to say what is gratifying to the gods and at all times to act in a gratifying manner to the best of his ability. For certainly, Tisias, men wiser than we say that a man of intelligence must not concern himself with gratifying fellow slaves, except in a secondary way, but rather with gratifying masters who are good and from good stock.”
― Plato, Phaedrus

“Only when he is able to explain sufficiently what type of person is persuaded by what type of speech and he has the ability to perceive and to determine for himself in the case of an individual he meets that he is this type of person and his nature is the very type that he heard about in school, and now that he finds himself in front of this man, he must apply these particular words in that particular way to persuade him of these things. After the young rhetorician has mastered all this and understood the appropriate times — both opportune and inopportune—for speaking and for holding back, for concise speech, for speech which stirs pity, for exaggeration, and for each of the other forms of speech he has learnt, only then, and not before, has the art been beautifully and perfectly mastered.”
― Plato, Phaedrus

“Socrates: And that there were two forms of madness, one caused by human illness, the other by a divine upheaval of customary beliefs.

Phaedrus: Yes, exactly.

Socrates: Of the divine type, we separated out four parts assigned to four gods: a seer’s inspiration coming from Apollo, mystical initiation ascribed to Dionysos, a poetic madness coming from the Muses, and a fourth madness coming from Aphrodite and Eros (Love) which we called an erotic madness and the best.”
― Plato , Phaedrus

“Each walks in the footsteps of the god he chooses, joining in that choral dance, living out his life in honor of that god, and imitating him to the best of his abilities for as long as he remains uncorrupted and is in his first incarnation here on earth. He behaves this way to all: both to those he loves and to everyone else. Each person, then, chooses his Love from among the beautiful after his own tastes, and sculpts and fits that person out like a statue as if he were a god for him to honor and to worship with secret rites.”
― Plato, Phaedrus

“She is not willing at all to be deprived of this pleasure, nor does she consider anything more valuable than this beautiful boy; but has already forgotten mothers, brothers, and all her companions. She thinks nothing of losing property through neglect and spurns all habits and refinements by which she beautified herself before, ready now to be a slave and to sleep wherever she is permitted so long as it is very near the object of her desire.”
― Plato, Phaedrus

“...someone who has amply observed things from that past realm, at first shudders and feels something of those old terrors come over him when he sees a god-like face or any part of the body which is a good imitation of beauty. Later, looking more, he feels reverence as if he were before a god...”
― Plato, Phaedrus

“...the person who has been corrupted or who is not a recent initiate is not conveyed quickly to beauty itself, that is, he is not carried from here to there quickly. When looking at beauty's namesake here, such a person fails to experience true reverence as he gazes but yields to pleasure and tries to mount and to spawn children according to the law of a four-footed animal.”
― Plato, Phaedrus

“...when someone looks upon earthly beauty and is reminded of the true beauty, he acquires wings; and when he tries those wings, eager but unable to take flight—like a bird looking upward—and he shows no concern for things below, there are reasons to think him touched with madness. Both for the person who has this madness and for the one who shares in it, this is the very best of all the divine possessions, and it comes from the best sources; and the lover hit with this madness is called a lover of beautiful people and beautiful things.”
― Plato, Phaedrus

“For thought is always, according to her capability through memory, near to those things, and by this nearness a god is divine. And only a man who correctly handles such reminders and is perpetually initiated into these perfect mysteries is truly perfect. But standing apart from zealous human pursuits and being near to the divine, he is admonished by the many for being deranged, because they fail to see that he is divinely possessed, having the god within.”
― Plato, Phaedrus

“... a human being must understand what is said in reference to form, that which, going from a plurality of perceptions is drawn together by reasoning into a single essence. This process occurs by recollecting those things which our soul once saw when traveling in the company of a god, looking with contempt at those things which we now say exist, and lifting up its head to see what really is. As is just, only the discursive thinking of a philosopher, the one who is in love with wisdom, grows wings.”
― Plato, Phaedrus

“...whenever a soul cannot see the truth and is thus unable to follow the path, and by some misfortune gets weighed down burdened by forgetfulness and wrongdoing, and in her heaviness sheds her feathers and falls to earth, then the following law applies. In the first generation of a soul’s fall to earth, she can never be planted into a brute animal, but the soul which has witnessed Being the most in heaven shall be planted into the seed of someone who will become a lover of wisdom, or a lover of beauty, or of something musical and erotic.”
― Plato, Phaedrus

“This is the place of Being, the Being that truly is—colorless, shapeless, and untouchable, visible to the mind alone, the soul’s pilot, and the source of true knowledge.”
― Plato, Phaedrus

“The vicious horse is heavy and to the extent that it was not trained well it sinks earthward and weighs the charioteer down. At this point, the soul experiences extreme toil and struggle. But when those souls which we call immortal” reach the summit of heaven, they go to the edge and stand on the rim; there, the revolving motion carries them around as they stand and gaze on things outside the heavens [i.e., a vision of the Forms].”
― Plato, Phaedrus

“Let us liken the soul to the innate power of a winged team of horses and a charioteer. All of the gods’ horses and charioteers are themselves good and from good stock, but the situation of other horses and charioteers is mixed. For us men, first of all, a charioteer rules over and guides a pair of horses, and secondly, one of these horses is noble and good and from like stock, but the other is the Opposite and from opposite stock. So, for us chariot-driving must be difficult and irksome.”
― Plato, Phaedrus

“...the gods do not send eros to a lover and the beloved for their benefit. For our part we must show the opposite—namely that the gods grant such madness for our greatest good fortune. Clever people surely will scoff at this demonstration, but not the wise.”
― Plato, Phaedrus

“Whoever comes to the doors of poetry without the madness of the Muses, confident that he will become an accomplished poet by skill or art alone, this person and his poetry will fall short of his aim; the poetry of those who are mad will obliterate the poetry of a sound and self-controlled mind.”
― Plato, Phaedrus

“...madness itself, as the ancients testify, is more ennobling than moderation, the one coming from a god, the other from man.”
― Plato, Phaedrus

“...it is not a “genuine account” if it claims that one ought to grant favors to a non-lover rather than to a lover who is near at hand, just because one is of sound mind, and the other is mad.
If madness were simply bad, all would be fine. But as it is, the greatest of all good things come to us through madness, provided that the madness is divinely given.”
― Plato , Phaedrus

“Just as I was about to cross the river, my good man, that daimonic spirit and its customary sign came to me; it always restrains me when I’m about to do something wrong. And I thought I heard some voice all of a sudden which would not allow me to go away before I purified myself, as though I had committed some offence or other against the divine. I am really, then, a prophet, although not an entirely serious one...”
― Plato, Phaedrus

“When right opinion with reason rules and leads toward the best, we call this moderation. But when desire irrationally drags us toward pleasures and rules over us, we call this excess.”
― Plato, Phaedrus