TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY ®  •  TODAYINSCI ®
Celebrating 24 Years on the Web
Find science on or your birthday

Today in Science History - Quickie Quiz
Who said: “Genius is two percent inspiration, ninety-eight percent perspiration.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Dictionary of Science Quotations > Scientist Names Index P > Plato Quotes > Geometry

Thumbnail of Plato (source)
Plato
(c. 427 B.C. - c. 347 B.C.)

Greek philosopher who was a student of Socrates. Plato founded the Academy in 387 BC. He has been called the world's most influential philosopher.

Plato Quotes on Geometry (6 quotes)

>> Click for 41 Science Quotes by Plato

“Yes,” he said. “But these things (the solutions to problems in solid geometry such as the duplication of the cube) do not seem to have been discovered yet.” “There are two reasons for this,” I said. “Because no city holds these things in honour, they are investigated in a feeble way, since they are difficult; and the investigators need an overseer, since they will not find the solutions without one. First, it is hard to get such an overseer, and second, even if one did, as things are now those who investigate these things would not obey him, because of their arrogance. If however a whole city, which did hold these things in honour, were to oversee them communally, the investigators would be obedient, and when these problems were investigated continually and with eagerness, their solutions would become apparent.”
— Plato
In The Republic 7 528bc, trans. R.W. Sharples.
Science quotes on:  |  Apparent (85)  |  Arrogance (22)  |  Become (821)  |  City (87)  |  Community (111)  |  Continuity (39)  |  Cube (14)  |  Difficult (263)  |  Difficulty (201)  |  Discover (571)  |  Discovery (837)  |  Do (1905)  |  Eagerness (5)  |  Feeble (28)  |  Find (1014)  |  First (1302)  |  Geometry (271)  |  Hard (246)  |  Honour (58)  |  Investigate (106)  |  Investigator (71)  |  Obedience (20)  |  Obedient (9)  |  Obey (46)  |  Overseer (2)  |  Problem (731)  |  Reason (766)  |  Solid (119)  |  Solution (282)  |  Solution. (53)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Two (936)  |  Way (1214)  |  Whole (756)  |  Will (2350)

An astronomer must be the wisest of men; his mind must be duly disciplined in youth; especially is mathematical study necessary; both an acquaintance with the doctrine of number, and also with that other branch of mathematics, which, closely connected as it is with the science of the heavens, we very absurdly call geometry, the measurement of the earth.
— Plato
From the 'Epilogue to the Laws' (Epinomis), 988-990. As quoted in William Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences from the Earliest to the Present Time (1837), Vol. 1, 161. (Although referenced to Plato’s Laws, the Epinomis is regarded as a later addition, not by Plato himself.)
Science quotes on:  |  Absurd (60)  |  Acquaintance (38)  |  Astronomer (97)  |  Both (496)  |  Branch (155)  |  Call (781)  |  Connect (126)  |  Discipline (85)  |  Doctrine (81)  |  Earth (1076)  |  Geometry (271)  |  Heaven (266)  |  Heavens (125)  |  Mathematics (1395)  |  Measurement (178)  |  Mind (1377)  |  Must (1525)  |  Necessary (370)  |  Nomenclature (159)  |  Number (710)  |  Other (2233)  |  Study (701)  |  Wise (143)  |  Youth (109)

At the Egyptian city of Naucratis there was a famous old god whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis was sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters.
— Plato
In the Phaedrus. Collected in Plato the Teacher (1897), 171. A footnote gives that Naucratis was a city in the Delta of Egypt, on a branch of the Nile.
Science quotes on:  |  Arithmetic (144)  |  Art (680)  |  Astronomy (251)  |  Bird (163)  |  Calculation (134)  |  Call (781)  |  City (87)  |  Dice (21)  |  Discovery (837)  |  Egypt (31)  |  Geometry (271)  |  God (776)  |  Great (1610)  |  Inventor (79)  |  Letter (117)  |  Name (359)  |  Old (499)  |  Sacred (48)  |  Use (771)

Let no-one ignorant of geometry enter.
— Plato
Said to have been inscribed above the door of Plato's Academy. As stated in A.S. Riginos, Platonica: the Anecdotes concerning the Life and Writings of Plato (1976), 38-40.
Science quotes on:  |  Academy (37)  |  Enter (145)  |  Entrance (16)  |  Geometry (271)  |  Ignorance (254)  |  Ignorant (91)  |  Inscription (12)

The ludicrous state of solid geometry made me pass over this branch.
— Plato
In The Republic, VII, 528. As translated by B. Jowett in The Dialogues of Plato (1871), Vol. 2.
Science quotes on:  |  Branch (155)  |  Geometry (271)  |  Ludicrous (7)  |  Pass (241)  |  Republic (16)  |  Solid (119)  |  Solid Geometry (2)  |  State (505)

The science [geometry] is pursued for the sake of the knowledge of what eternally exists, and not of what comes for a moment into existence, and then perishes.
[Also seen condensed as: ``Geometry is knowledge of the eternally existent” or “The knowledge at which geometry aims is the knowledge of the eternal.”]
— Plato
The Republic of Plato Book VII, trans. by John Llewelyn Favies and David James Vaughan (1908), 251.
Science quotes on:  |  Aim (175)  |  Eternal (113)  |  Exist (458)  |  Existence (481)  |  External (62)  |  Geometry (271)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Moment (260)  |  Perish (56)  |  Pursue (63)  |  Sake (61)


Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
Sitewide search within all Today In Science History pages:
Visit our Science and Scientist Quotations index for more Science Quotes from archaeologists, biologists, chemists, geologists, inventors and inventions, mathematicians, physicists, pioneers in medicine, science events and technology.

Names index: | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

Categories index: | 1 | 2 | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
Thank you for sharing.
- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


by Ian Ellis
who invites your feedback
Thank you for sharing.
Today in Science History
Sign up for Newsletter
with quiz, quotes and more.