Never discourage anyone who continually makes progress, no matter how slow... even if that someone is yourself!
PlatoRead
Entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all.
Interpretation
Complete ignorance isn't the worst thing; there are worse states of being.
Plato suggests that while ignorance is often viewed negatively, it shouldn't be seen as the worst possible condition. There are more severe existential challenges and states of being than simply not knowing something, highlighting that ignorance can sometimes be a less serious affliction compared to pain, suffering, or moral failures.
In practice
In a discussion on what makes life meaningful, one could use this quote to illustrate that there are worse things than not knowing.
Never discourage anyone who continually makes progress, no matter how slow... even if that someone is yourself!
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.
...for the object of education is to teach us to love beauty.
Pleasure is the greatest incentive to evil.
Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety.
Let parents bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence.
Here's the reality. The image of a white Jesus has been used to justify enslavement, conquest, colonialism, the genocide of indigenous peoples. There are literally millions of human beings whose lives have been snuffed out by people who conquered under the banner of a white god.
Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. "Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing." Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.
Day after day I read Freud, thinking myself to be very enlightened and scientific when, as a matter of fact, I was about as scientific as an old woman secretly poring over books about occultism, trying to tell her own fortune, and learning how to dope out the future form the lines in the palm of her hand. I don't know if I ever got very close to needing a padded cell: but if I ever had gone crazy, I think psychoanalysis would have been the one thing chiefly responsible for it.
I myself, from the very beginning, Seemed to myself like someone's dream or delirium Or a reflection in someone else's mirror, Without flesh, without meaning, without a name. Already I knew the list of crimes That I was destined to commit.
We all have a responsibility to create a just society
We cannot afford to spend millions and millions over nuclear arms when there is poverty and unemployment all around us.
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