QuoteProject
If there is no contradictory impression, there is nothing to awaken reflection
Plato
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

This quote suggests that without challenges or contradictions, we lack the impetus to think deeply or reflect.

Plato emphasizes the importance of contradictory ideas or experiences in stimulating reflection and critical thinking. This implies that without encountering opposing viewpoints or situations that challenge our understanding, we may become stagnant in our thoughts and fail to engage in deeper contemplation.

Themes

ReflectionContradictionThinkingPhilosophyAwareness

In practice

Example use cases

In a philosophy class discussion about the nature of truth and knowledge.

More from Plato

Never discourage anyone who continually makes progress, no matter how slow... even if that someone is yourself!
PlatoRead
Not one of them who took up in his youth with this opinion that there are no gods ever continued until old age faithful to his conviction.
PlatoRead
...for the object of education is to teach us to love beauty.
PlatoRead
Pleasure is the greatest incentive to evil.
PlatoRead
Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety.
PlatoRead
Let parents bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence.
PlatoRead

Similar quotes

Skepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower than that he will not get.
Thomas CarlyleRead
We have no knowledge, that is, no general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone. The Man of Science, the Chemist and Mathematician, whatever difficulties and disgusts they may have had to struggle with, know and feel this. However painful may be the objects with which the Anatomist's knowledge is connected, he feels that his knowledge is pleasure; and where he has no pleasure he has no knowledge.
William WordsworthRead
The fourth (of the four cardinal virtues) is supportiveness: this manifests as service to others without expectation of reward. (Paraphrased: Such service is not a mere conforming to some external rule of behavior, but instead a manifestation of your original nature).
LaoziRead
It don't matter if you believe in God Nick, he believes in you.
Stephen KingRead
I don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.
W. Somerset MaughamRead
History is always best written generations after the event, when clouded fact and memory have all fused into what can be accepted as truth, whether it be so or not.
Theodore WhiteRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.