“Now then, my lad, you’re still young, and as time goes on you’ll come to adopt opinions diametrically opposed to those you hold now. Why not wait till later on to make up your mind about these important matters? The most important of all, however lightly you take it at the moment, is to get the right ideas about the gods and so live a good life:—otherwise you’ll live a bad one. In this connection, I want first to make a crucial and irrefutable point. It’s this: you’re not unique. Neither you nor your friends are the first to have held this opinion about the gods. It’s an illness from which the world is never free, though the number of sufferers varies from time to time. I’ve met a great many of them, and let me assure you that none of them who have been convinced early in life that gods do not exist have ever retained that belief into old age.”

Categories: Philosophy, Plato, Religion, Quote,
"Pleasure is indeed a proper criterion in the arts, but not the pleasure experienced by anybody and everybody. The productions of the Muse are at their finest when they delight men of high calibre and adequate education—but particularly if they succeed in pleasing the single individual whose education and moral standards reach heights attained by no one else. This is the reason why we maintain that judges in these matters need high moral standards: they have to possess not only a discerning taste, but courage too. A judge won’t be doing his job properly if he reaches his verdict by listening to the audience and lets himself be thrown off balance by the yelling of the mob and his own lack of training; nor must he shrug his shoulders and let cowardice and indolence persuade him into a false verdict against his better judgment, so that he lies with the very lips with which he called upon the gods when he undertook office. The truth is that he sits in judgment as a teacher of the audience, rather than as its pupil; his function is to throw his weight against them, if pleasure they show has been aroused improperly and illegitimately."
Trevor J. Saunders, trans., “Laws,” in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1997), pg. 1350, 658e-659b.
Categories: Art, Philosophy, Quote,