Phaedrus Quotes

It's all right," Phaedrus said. "We just accidentally stumbled over a genuine question, and the shock is hard to recover from. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

An alliance with a powerful person is never safe. ~ Phaedrus

Am seeking perhaps what Socrates asked for in the prayer from the Phaedrus when he said, May the outward and inward man be at one. ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The stories of Harmonius and Aristogeiton, of Phaedrus of the Theban Band were well enough for those whose hearts were empty, but no substitute for life. That Clive should occasionally prefer them puzzled him. ~ E. M. Forster

This, dear Phaedrus, is the most important point: no geometry without the word. Without it, figures are accidents, and neither make manifest nor serve the power of the mind. ~ Paul Valery

Submit to the present evil, lest a greater one befall you. ~ Phaedrus

And the definition of that person, when he has rejected the mythos, Phaedrus said, is "insane." To ~ Robert M. Pirsig

Success tempts many to their ruin. ~ Phaedrus

Classical understanding is concerned with the piles and the basis for sorting and interrelating them. Romantic understanding is directed toward the handful of sand before the sorting begins. Both are valid ways of looking at the world although irreconcilable with each other. What has become an urgent necessity is a way of looking at the world that does violence to neither of these two kinds of understanding and unites them into one. Such an understanding will not reject sand-sorting or contemplation of unsorted sand for its own sake. Such an understanding will instead seek to direct attention to the endless landscape from which the sand is taken. That is what Phaedrus, the poor surgeon, was trying to do. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

Socrates and Phaedrus, like Odysseus, must sail by the Sirens without being enchanted: instead of listening to their voices, they will outdo them with their own logos. . . . Plato's Odysseus does not even let the song of the Sirens enter him but deafens it with his own rational discourse. Philosophy is itself a Sirens' song, the antidote against the dispersion and drowning of the soul into the body, that is, against the ultimate wandering. ~ Silvia Montiglio

In a change of masters the poor change nothing except their master's name. ~ Phaedrus

The bow kept taut will quickly break, kept loosely strung, it will serve you when you need it. ~ Phaedrus

That only is a disgrace to a man which he has deserved to suffer. ~ Phaedrus

There is also a fable told by Phaedrus, about how Simonides was once a victim of shipwreck. As the other passengers scurried about the sinking ship trying to save their possessions, the poet stood idle. When questioned, he declared, mecum mea sunt cuncta: everything that is me is with me. ~ Anne Carson

The truths Phaedrus began to pursue were lateral truths; no longer the frontal truths of science, those toward which the discipline pointed, but the kind of truth you see laterally, out of the corner of your eye. In a laboratory situation, when your whole procedure goes haywire, when everything goes wrong or is indeterminate or is so screwed up by unexpected results you can't make head or tail out of anything, you start looking laterally. That's a word he later used to describe a growth of knowledge that doesn't move forward like an arrow in flight, but expands sideways, like an arrow enlarging in flight, or like the archer, discovering that although he has hit the bull's-eye and won the prize, his head is on a pillow and the sun is coming in the window. Lateral knowledge is knowledge that's from a wholly unexpected direction, from a direction that's not even understood as a direction until the knowledge forces itself upon one. Lateral truths point to the falseness of axioms and postulates underlying one's existing system of getting at truth. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

Things are not always as they seem; the first appearance deceives many. ~ Phaedrus

Gentleness is the antidote for cruelty. ~ Phaedrus

You, sir, what are the three kinds of particular rhetoric according to subject matter discussed?" But Phaedrus is prepared. "Forensic, deliberative and epideictic," he answers calmly. "What are the epideictic techniques?" "The technique of identifying likenesses, the technique of praise, that of encomium and that of amplification. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

He discovered that the science he'd once thought of as the whole world of knowledge is only a branch of philosophy, which is far broader and far more general. The questions he had asked about infinite hypotheses hadn't been of interest to science because they weren't scientific questions. Science cannot study scientific method without getting into a bootstrap problem that destroys the validity of its answers. The questions he'd asked were at a higher level than science goes. And so Phaedrus found in philosophy a natural continuation of the question that brought him to science in the first place, What does it all mean? What's the purpose of all this? At ~ Robert M. Pirsig

There is no necessity for the man who means to be an orator to understand what is really just but only what would appear so to the majority of those who will give judgment; and not what is really good or beautiful but whatever will appear so; because persuasion comes from that and not from the truth. ~ Plato

His heart thudded rapidly behind its thick-boned prison, the pulse in his neck throbbing with anxiety. He almost smiled at that. If he weren't a vampyre his parents, Phaedrus and Xanthippe, would consider him an impossibly delicious meal with that vein pulsing them into temptation. Instead they looked up at him in bewilderment, their mouths and chin smeared thick with the blood and skin of the unconscious man in their arms. They sat crowded together on one of the pillowed kline's in the andron where his father held Symposia in their home. The man's feet dragged to the floor, the light chiton he wore coming undone from the obvious struggle he had undergone at the hands of Kirios' parents. Blood stained the fabric and ran in rivulets from his masticated neck to puddle on the mosaic floor. Kirios watched as it spread into the expensive tiling, wondering how on earth they would explain the stain. ~ Samantha Young

Beneath the surface of repartee and mock seriousness, [Plato's Phaedrus] is asking whether we ought to prefer a neuter form of speech to the kind which is ever getting us aroused over things and provoking an expense of spirit. ~ Richard M. Weaver

Ilauria on Phaedrus: His love was like the sun and the moon all wrapped in one. ~ Jasmine Angell

As a breath of wind or some echo rebounds from smooth, hard surfaces and returns to the source from which it issued, so the stream of beauty passes back into its possessor through his eyes, which is its natural route to the soul; arriving there and setting him all aflutter, it waters the passages of the feathers and causes the wings to grow, and fills the soul of the loved one in his turn with love. ~ Plato

The only problem with seeing too much is that it makes you insane. ~ Phaedrus

The leaders of the revolt were Robert Maynard Hutchins, who had become president of the University of Chicago; Mortimer Adler, whose work on the psychological background of the law of evidence was somewhat similar to work being done at Yale by Hutchins; Scott Buchanan, a philosopher and mathematician; and most important of all for Phaedrus, the present chairman of the committee, who was then a Columbia University Spinozist ~ Robert M. Pirsig

Witticisms please as long as we keep them within boundaries, but pushed to excess they cause offense. ~ Phaedrus

The matter is as it is in all other cases: if it is naturally in you to be a good orator, a notable orator you will be when you have acquired knowledge and practice ... ~ Plato

Whoever is detected in a shameful fraud is ever after not believed even if they speak the truth. ~ Phaedrus

Everyone ought to bear patiently the results of his own conduct. ~ Phaedrus

The intelligence of few perceives what has been carefully hidden in the recesses of the mind. ~ Phaedrus