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.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that youthful atheism is often challenged by the experiences and reflections of old age.
Plato reflects on the fleeting nature of youthful beliefs, particularly the conviction that there are no gods. He implies that as individuals age and experience life, they may come to question or abandon the convictions of their earlier years, suggesting that faith or belief often evolves with maturity and life experience.
In practice
During a philosophy lecture, one might quote Plato to discuss how belief systems can change over a lifetime.
Never discourage anyone who continually makes progress, no matter how slow... even if that someone is yourself!
...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.
Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.
There is in each of us an ancient force that takes and an ancient force that gives. A man finds little difficulty facing that place within himself where the taking force dwells, but it's almost impossible for him to see into the giving force without changing into something other than man. For a woman, the situation is reversed. ... These things are so ancient within us that they're ground into each separate cell of our bodies... It's as easy to be overwhelmed by giving as by taking.
Death is a companion for all of us, whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we're aware of it or not, and it's not necessarily a terrible thing.
The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.
We live in condensations of our imagination
The lessons of the First Amendment are as urgent in the modern world as the 18th Century when it was written. One timeless lesson is that if citizens are subjected to state-sponsored religious exercises, the State disavows its own duty to guard and respect that sphere of inviolable conscience and belief which is the mark of a free people.
Fire and water may as well agree in the same vessel, as grace and sin in the same heart.
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