"The cause of all the blunders committed..." - Quote by Plato
The cause of all the blunders committed by man arises from this excessive self-love. For the lover is blinded by the object loved; so that he passes a wrong judgment on what is just, good and beautiful, thinking that he ought always to honor what belongs to himself in preference to truth. For he who intends to be a great man ought to love neither himself nor his own things, but only what is just, whether it happens to be done by himself, or by another.
More by Plato
“I was stupid enough to think that we ought to speak the truth about each person eulogised, and to make this the foundation, and from these truths to choose the most beautiful things and arrange them in the most elegant way; and I was quite proud to think how well I should speak, because I believed that I knew the truth.”
“Socrates said that, from above, the Earth looks like one of those twelve-patched leathern balls.”
“Wonder [said Socrates] is very much the affection of a philosopher; for there is no other beginning of philosophy than this.”
More on Self Love
“Self-love increases or diminishes for us the good qualities of our friends, in proportion to the satisfaction we feel with them; and we judge of their merit by the manner in which they act towards us.”
“It is difficult to persuade mankind that the love of virtue is the love of themselves.”
“Our concern for the loss of our friends is not always from a sense of their worth, but rather of our own need of them and that we have lost some who had a good opinion of us.”
More on Truth
“Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.”
“We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.”
“We commonly say that the rich man can speak the truth, can afford honesty, can afford independence of opinion and action;--and that is the theory of nobility. But it is the rich man in a true sense, that is to say, not the man of large income and large expenditure, but solely the man whose outlay is less than his income and is steadily kept so.”