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.
So man's insanity is heaven's sense, and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.
The deep parts of my life pour onward, as if the river shores were opening out. I feel closer to what language can't reach. With my senses, as with birds, I climb into the windy heaven... in the ponds broken off from the sky. . .
There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.
The longest-lived and the shortest-lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing.
I've been present at birth, and death is just as present and in equal balance. And I've been present at death, and birth is just as present, again in equal balance.
They were indeed what was known as 'old money', which meant that it had been made so long ago that the black deeds which had originally filled the coffers were now historically irrelevant. Funny, that: a brigand for a father was something you kept quiet about, but a slave-taking pirate for a great-great-great-grandfather was something to boast of over the port. Time turned the evil bastards into rogues, and rogue was a word with a twinkle in its eye and nothing to be ashamed of.
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