"Platonism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that, so far is this from being the case, he is the supreme example of a Platonic lover among the English poets. He was usually Platonic under protest, but at other times exultantly so. Whether he finally overcame the more consistent Platonism of his mistress by the impassioned logic of The Ecstasy we have no means of knowing. If he did, it would be difficult to resist the conclusion that the lady who wished to continue to be his passionate friend and to ignore the physical side of love ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... one level, for Marius the only possible dilemma lay between that old, ancestral Roman religion, now become so incredible to him and the honest action of his own untroubled, unassisted intelligence. Even the Arcana Celestia of Platonism—what the sons of Plato had had to say regarding the essential indifference of pure soul to its bodily house and merely occasional dwelling-place—seemed to him while his heart was there in the urn ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... without passion? But it demanded that the passion should be winnowed, and free from all rodomontade. I fancied what might be said on such a subject as to that overlauded star-spangled banner, and how the star-spangled flag would look when wrapped in a mist of mystic Platonism. ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... points, but a conspectus of the actual literary progress and accomplishment of the century, from 1557 to 1660. Such essays exist already in great numbers, though some no doubt are yet to write. The extraordinary influence of Plato, or at least of a more or less indistinctly understood Platonism, on many of the finer minds of the earlier and middle period, is a very interesting point, and it has been plausibly connected with the fact that Giordano Bruno was for some years a resident in England, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... that in order to inscribe themselves upon the heart of humanity with everlasting claims, all great things have first to wander about the earth as enormous and awe-inspiring caricatures: dogmatic philosophy has been a caricature of this kind—for instance, the Vedanta doctrine in Asia, and Platonism in Europe. Let us not be ungrateful to it, although it must certainly be confessed that the worst, the most tiresome, and the most dangerous of errors hitherto has been a dogmatist error—namely, Plato's invention ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... true, also, when we compare Shelley and Byron. Shelley's excitable sensuousness produces in him in the presence of Nature a very different attitude from that of Wordsworth's philosophic Christian-mysticism. For the sensuousness of Shelley gets the upper hand of his somewhat shadowy Platonism, and he creates out of Nature mainly an ethereal world of delicate and rapidly shifting sights and sounds and sensations. And while he is not unresponsive to the majestic greatness of Nature in her vast forms and vistas, he is never impelled, like Byron, to claim with them ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... or other of advance or degradation, the theistic conception of a Maker and Judge of the world is also present. Meanwhile even civilised and monotheistic peoples also admit the existence of a world of spirits of the dead, of 'demons' (as in Platonism), of saints (as in Catholicism), of devils, of angels, or of subordinate deities. Thus the elements of religion are universally distributed in all degrees of culture, though one element is more conspicuous in one place or mood, ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... but quite breezy and Platonic friendship with Frances Blogg, reading, talking and enjoying life together, having great sympathies on all subjects; and the second half in making the thrilling, but painfully responsible discovery that Platonism, on my side, had not the field by any means to itself. That is how we stand now. No one knows, except her ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... perceive allusions to his own domestic affairs, which none but Lady Bulwer can fully appreciate. Every reader of the novel must be struck with its attempt at the moral tone. Edith, the heroine, is the bride of Harold's soul, and Platonism appears in all its splendor of self-denial and noble sentiments in a Saxon thane and his maiden. History pronounces this lady to be his mistress, and it certainly is a great stretch of the reader's charity to be compelled to view her in the capacity of ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... Poliziano and all the fashion of the town crowded to the sermons of Fra Mariano da Genezzano in Santo Spirito. This man flattered the taste of the moment by composing orations on the model of Ficino's addresses to the Academy, and by complimenting Christianity upon its similarity to Platonism. Who could then have guessed that beneath the cowl of the harsh-voiced Dominican, his rival, burned thoughts that in a few years would inflame Florence with a conflagration powerful enough to destroy the fabric of ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... him to learn music, astronomy, and geometry. Those kinds of knowledge, however, were not what Justin wanted, and besides he thought that they would take up too much time. So he next resolved to make a trial of Platonism; and this time ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... Angels. Protestantism in the same condition in a less degree. 17. Francis of Assisi. Gradually made into a god. 18. (II.) Manichaeism. Evil spirits as inevitable as good. 19. (III.) Tendency to treat the gods of hostile religions as devils. 20. In the Greek theology. [Greek: daimones]. Platonism. 21. Neo-Platonism. Makes the elder gods into daemons. 22. Judaism. Recognizes foreign gods at first. Elohim, but they get degraded in time. Beelzebub, Belial, etc. 23. Early Christians treat gods of Greece in the same way. ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... as a commentator on the Pandects—why is Ficino, whose Latin is an offence to me, and who wanders purblind among the superstitious fancies that marked the decline at once of art, literature, and philosophy, to descend to posterity as the very high priest of Platonism, while I, who am more than their equal, have not effected anything but scattered work, which will be appropriated by other men? Why? but because my son, whom I had brought up to replenish my ripe ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... Marks a Step in Progress.—There arose in the ninth century a speculative philosophy which sought to harmonize the doctrine of the church with the philosophy of Neo-Platonism and the logic of Aristotle. The scholastic philosophy may be said to have had its origin with John Scotus Erigena, who has been called "the morning star of scholasticism." He was the first bold thinker to assert the supremacy of reason and openly to rebel against the dogma of ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... the spiritual contemplation of a universal Life of which all things are modes, the highest thoughts of men hovered during the process by which, in some measure under extraneous influences, Greek speculation finally produced Neo-platonism—or, as we might say in the current phraseology of our time—a restatement of Plato's teaching. Of this school, arising in the early Christian centuries, some leaders were undoubtedly Pantheists. But we ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton |
