40 Best Plato Quotes On REALITY

Last Updated on January 30, 2023

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Are you a fan of Plato’s philosophy? If so, you’ll love these quotes on reality. Plato believed that the world we see is just a shadow or copy of a higher, perfect world.

He also believed that knowledge and understanding of the true reality can bring us closer to living a virtuous and fulfilling life.

So, let’s dive into some of Plato’s most famous quotes on reality and what they can teach us about our own existence. By the way, do not forget to read Plato quotes on Love.

Famous Plato Quotes On Reality

1. “Reality is created by the mind. We can change our reality by changing our mind.” – Plato

2. “When the mind’s eye rests on objects illuminated by truth and reality, it understands and comprehends them, and functions intelligently; but when it turns to the twilight world of change and decay, it can only form opinions, its vision is confused and its beliefs shifting, and it seems to lack intelligence.” – Plato

3. “The philosopher is in love with truth, that is, not with the changing world of sensation, which is the object of opinion, but with the unchanging reality which is the object of knowledge.” – Plato

4. “One trait in the philosopher’s character we can assume is his love of the knowledge that reveals eternal reality, the realm unaffected by change and decay. He is in love with the whole of that reality, and will not willingly be deprived even of the most insignificant fragment of it – just like the lovers and men of ambition we described earlier on.”
– Plato

5. “Remember how in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may.” – Plato

6. “The object of knowledge is what exists and its function to know about reality.” – Plato

7. “Whenever a person strives, by the help of dialectic, to start in pursuit of every reality by a simple process of reason, independent of all sensuous information – never flinching, until by an act of the pure intelligence he has grasped the real nature of good – he arrives at the very end of the intellectual world.” – Plato

8. “A true artist is someone who gives birth to a new reality.” – Plato, On Reality

9. “Those whose hearts are fixed on Reality itself deserve the title of Philosophers.” – Plato

10. “So their combinations with themselves and with each other give rise to endless complexities, which anyone who is to give a likely account of reality must survey.”

11. “Then may we not fairly plead in reply that our true lover of knowledge naturally strives for truth, and is not content with common opinion, but soars with undimmed and unwearied passion till he grasps the essential nature of things with the mental faculty fitted to do so, that is, with the faculty which is akin to reality, and which approaches and unites with it, and begets intelligence and truth as children, and is only released from travail when it has thus reached knowledge and true life and satisfaction?” – Plato, On Reality

12. “‘But surely “blind” is just how you would describe men who have no true knowledge of reality, and no clear standard in their mind to refer to, as a painter refers to his model, and which they can study closely before they start laying down rules about what is fair or right or good where they are needed, or maintaining, as Guardians, any rules that already exist.’
‘Yes, blind is just about what they are.'” – Plato

13. “You cannot conceive the many without the one…The study of the unit is among those that lead the mind on and turn it to the vision of reality.”
– Plato