Never discourage anyone who continually makes progress, no matter how slow... even if that someone is yourself!
PlatoRead
They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth.
Interpretation
Truth can often be uncomfortable, causing people to see the truth-teller as an enemy.
This quote by Plato highlights the paradox of truth-telling in society. When individuals are confronted with uncomfortable truths, they may react defensively and perceive the person revealing those truths as a foe, rather than as a friend. This dynamic illustrates how the pursuit of honest dialogue can lead to conflict, as people may prefer comforting lies over harsh realities.
In practice
In a discussion about honesty in friendships.
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.
Since I invoke Torah so often, let me state that I don't personally believe in the God it postulates ... I am not religious, nor were the majority of the early builders of Israel believers. Yet their passion for this land stemmed from the Book of Books ... [The Bible is] the single most important book in my life.
Any newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a web of horrors, I cannot understand how an innocent hand can touch a newspaper without convulsing in disgust.
We're all just bags of bones and muscle and hormones; I'll never understand what makes our minds do the things we do. It's like that statue of the monkey holding a skull. We're trying to use a thing we don't understand to understand ourselves.
It's easier for the former masters to put aside the masks that hid their humanity than for the former slaves to recognise the faces underneath. Or to trust that this is not a new mask these are wearing.
My most resolute opponents believe that I am too visible, that I am a little too alive, that my name echoes too much in the texts which they nevertheless claim to be inaccessible.
Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.
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