"Platonical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dome which still calls itself Platonic, the questions and experiments of the new learning are beginning. These youths are here to represent the new philosophy, which is science, in the act of taking its first step. The subject is presented ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... simulate or imitate anything, we would honour him as something wonderful and holy; we would even anoint him and adorn his brow with a sacred diadem; but we would urge him to leave our circle for another, notwithstanding." It may be that a member of the Platonic community would have been able to chasten himself to such conduct: we, however, who live in a very different community, long for, and earnestly desire, the charmer to come to us, although we may fear him already,—and we only desire his presence in order that our society ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... excuse the slow manner in which Lord Lufton proceeded in the making and declaring of his love, and the absolute necessity which there is for two strings to one's bow, when one string may be in any way doubtful. Could it be possible that Mrs. Grantly had heard anything of that unfortunate Platonic friendship with Lucy Robarts? ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... seductive, with her olive skin, her frank smile, and her adorable head poised upon a body much too well made. She is too tender, too complex, too intelligent. She has a way of mischievously caressing you with her eyes one moment and giving an old comrade like myself a platonic little pat on the back the next, which is exasperating. As a friend I adore her, but to fall in love with her! Ah, non, merci! I have had a checkered childhood and my full share of suffering; I wish some peace in my old age. At sixteen one goes ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... modified by my experience in how many instances I have ripened into a perception of beauties, where I had before descried faults;) surely, nothing can seem more discordant with our historical preconceptions of Brutus, or more lowering to the intellect of the Stoico-Platonic tyrannicide, than the tenets here attributed to him—to him, the stern Roman republican; namely,—that he would have no objection to a king, or to Caesar, a monarch in Rome, would Caesar but be as good a monarch as he now seems disposed to be! How, too, could ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... the author's archaeological learning. It contains exact descriptions of all the rarities of ancient art, and of things Oriental which he had seen, and pages of transcripts from obscure Latin and Greek authors, descriptive of religious ceremonies; varied with Platonic philosophy, Decameronian obscenities, in laboured pseudo-Florentine style, and Dantesque visions, all held together by the confused narrative of an allegorical journey performed by the author. It is profusely ornamented with woodcuts, representing architectural ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... not altogether brotherly, and his recent trouble with her had crystallized that suspicion into certainty. But he saw nothing back of the letter but friendship and contrition. The girl's love was so great a treasure that he dared not even hope for it, and was more than satisfied with the Platonic affection so plainly set forth in her epistle. We who have looked into Rita's heart know of a thing or two that does not resemble Platonism; but the girl herself did not fully know what she felt, and Dic was sure she could not, under ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... that she talked thus contemptibly of M. de Beaufort, whom she always taxed with impotency, for it is certain that his love was purely Platonic, as he never asked any favour of her, and seemed very uneasy with her for eating flesh on Fridays. She was so sweet upon me, and withal such a charming beauty, that, being naturally indisposed to let such opportunities ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... tongue, and sunny disposition soon made a captive of her middle-aged heart. At the time when Fabre came thus into her life Madame la Comtesse had passed her fiftieth birthday—youth and beauty had taken wings; and passion (if ever she had any—for her relations with Alfieri seem to have been quite platonic) had died down ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... that the attraction which draws a man and a woman together in what they call platonic friendship always has something of the physical in it—on one side or the other. Or on both sides. Women will not admit this, but it is true. They talk about the intellectual bond that joins them to a man—what a precious interchange ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... make love to me,' Elsie answered quickly. 'I hope you don't think there's anything wrong. It is merely Platonic.' ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... latter, it may suffice to observe that, of the editio princeps of Plato, there were not fewer than ten copies; and of that of Aristotle, five or six copies: each the production of the Aldine Press. Several of these Platonic copies were, to my knowledge, beautiful ones; and what more than one such "beautiful copy" need mortal man desire to possess? I believe the copy of the Plato bought at the sale of Dr. Heath's library in 1810 was, upon the whole, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... and Credit—the same sort of service that Sir Charles Macara has done for the cotton industry of the world. The international action and co-ordination of Trades Unions the world over should be made practical and not, in this matter, be allowed to remain a merely platonic aspiration. ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... to Rosa. What would she say, what would she feel, when she learnt that I had been drowned in the Channel? Would she experience a grief merely platonic, or had she indeed a profounder feeling towards me? Drowned! Who said drowned? There were the boats, if they could be launched, and, moreover, I could swim. I considered what I should do at the moment the ship foundered—for I still felt she would founder. I was the blackest of pessimists. ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... of her love, which she believed was returned, the wrong done by her to her cavalier, and the experience of an unknown pleasure, emboldened the fair Marie, who fell into a platonic love, gently tempered with those little indulgences in which there is no danger. From this cause sprang the diabolical pleasures of the game invented by the ladies, who since the death of Francis the First feared the contagion, but wished ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... that we attempt to deal decoratively which such simple figures as the three lowest Platonic solids—the tetrahedron, the hexahedron, and the octahedron. [Figure 12.] Their projection on a plane yields a rhythmical division of space, because of their inherent symmetry. These projections would correspond to the network of lines seen in looking through a glass paperweight of ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... with which we gaze even on insensate walls which once formed the loved abode of genius and virtue, is a natural tribute to a noble nature, and flows from one of the purest and most sustaining sources of emotion by which our humanity is distinguished. It almost looks as if, in accordance with the Platonic philosophy, there remained to man, from an original and more lofty state of existence, some dim remembrance ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... Claudius had determined upon the very same thing, and he knew that Claudius was intimate, to say the least of it, with the woman he loved. But Barker had made up his mind that Claudius had been refused, and had accepted the Platonic position offered him by the Countess, merely because he had not the strength to leave her. "Just like the vanity of a fellow like that," he argued, "not to be willing to believe himself beaten." He had drawn the whole situation in his ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... is excellently illustrated in Greek literature, where is to be found many a joke at which we are laughing to-day, as others have laughed through the centuries. Half a thousand years before the Christian era, a platonic philosopher at Alexandria, by name Hierocles, grouped twenty-one jests in a volume under the title, "Asteia." Some of them are still current with us as typical Irish bulls. Among these were accounts of the "Safety-first" enthusiast who ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... branches of classical philology in which the Renaissance was backward. The general purpose was to set up Plato in the place of Aristotle, discredited as as accomplice of the obscurest schoolmen. Under the Medici, a Platonic academy flourished at Florence, with Ficino and Politian at its head. But there was a tendency to merge Plato in Neoplatonism, and to bridge over what separated him from Christianity. Neither the knowledge of Plato, nor the knowledge of the Gospel, profited by the endeavour. ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... and wrote two Sonnets on——. I never wrote but one sonnet before, and that was not in earnest, and many years ago, as an exercise—and I will never write another. They are the most puling, petrifying, stupidly platonic compositions. I detest the Petrarch so much, that I would not be the man even to have obtained his Laura, which the metaphysical, whining dotard ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... gone, Marty joined Mrs. Fitzpiers. She would fain have consulted Marty on the question of Platonic relations with her former husband, as she preferred to regard him. But Marty showed no great interest in their affairs, so Grace said nothing. They came onward, and saw Melbury standing at the scene of the felling which had been audible to them, when, telling Marty ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... all its antis, as cheerful reading to a heavy spirit. I will venture to say, in the spirit of Montesquieu, that an hour of such reading will place one quietly in his elbow chair in all the tranquillity of a Platonic lover." ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... several problems in social ethics that deeply stirred the English people in the year of our Lord 1890. One was Charles Stewart Parnell's platonic friendship with Mrs. O'Shea, and the other was the Lord Chancellor's decision in the case of Mrs. Jackson. The pulpit, the press, and the people vied with each other in trying to dethrone Mr. Parnell as the great Irish leader, but the united forces did not succeed ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... but also to all experience, inasmuch as no tragic poet had ever attempted to shine in Comedy, nor conversely; his remark, therefore, can only have been meant to apply to the inmost essence of the things. Thus at another time, the Platonic Socrates says, on the subject of comic imitation: "All opposites can be fully understood only by and through each other; consequently we can only know what is serious by knowing also what is laughable and ludicrous." If the divine Plato by working ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... in the sublimest sense. It penetrates everything; and without it nothing can exist an instant. From this double FORCE, designated by the two parts of the word I. H. U. H. emanated the FIRST-BORN of God, the Universal FORM, in which are contained all beings; the Persian and Platonic Archetype of things, united with the Infinite by the primitive ray ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... longer any doubt that the Congress would declare itself in favor of power being handed over to the Soviets. But such a resolution must forthwith be put into actuality, else it would turn into a worthless, Platonic demonstration. The logic of events, therefore, required us to set the uprising for October 25th. Exactly so the entire bourgeois press interpreted it. But in the first place, the fate of the Congress depended upon the Petrograd garrison: would it allow Kerensky ...
— From October to Brest-Litovsk • Leon Trotzky
... set forth to walk, Perhaps grown wearied of their Corinth talk: Over the solitary hills he fared, Thoughtless at first, but ere eve's star appeared His phantasy was lost, where reason fades, In the calm'd twilight of Platonic shades. Lamia beheld him coming, near, more near— Close to her passing, in indifference drear, His silent sandals swept the mossy green; So neighbour'd to him, and yet so unseen She stood: he pass'd, shut up in mysteries, His mind wrapp'd like his mantle, while her eyes Follow'd his steps, ...
— Lamia • John Keats
... for the 'Anti-Duehring' has been long forgotten. Not only is Duehring a thing of the past for the Social Democracy, but the whole throng of academic and platonic Socialists have been frightened away by the anti-Socialist legislation, which at least had the one good effect to show where the reliable supports of our movement are to ...
— The Art of Lecturing - Revised Edition • Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow) Lewis
... been asserted that Washington loved the wife of his friend George William Fairfax, but the evidence has not been produced. On the contrary, though the two corresponded, it was in a purely platonic fashion, very different from the strain of lovers, and that the correspondence implied nothing is to be found in the fact that he and Sally Carlyle (another Fairfax daughter) also wrote each other quite as frequently and on the same friendly footing; indeed, Washington evidently ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... the works of that "Prince of modern philosophers," Lord Bacon. In his great mind were united the characteristics of the two ancient, but nevertheless universal, schools of philosophy, the Aristotelic and the Platonic. It is, I believe, the only instance known of such a difficult combination. His "Essays," his "Advancement of Learning," his "Wisdom of the Ancients," you might understand and profit by, even now. Through all the ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... Pericles, Nicias and Alcibiades, Archidamus, Brasidas and Hermocrates, their characters, principles, and motives. In dealing with Plato they would study the character of Socrates and those ideas contained in the Platonic dialogues which can be most readily comprehended ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... is frumpy enough for anything; and you call that an engagement? My dear, he will no more marry her than he'll marry the moon. It's just a stupid platonic friendship, and as he has not known anything else he thinks it is love. Imagine being in love with that solemn creature! Imagine making pretty speeches and listening to her correct copy-book replies! Wait! I should ...
— The Heart of Una Sackville • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Of its gall on my lip for my heart in such haste To reach out for the cup that is proffered anew. A certain respect to my sorrows is due. I am weary of love as men know it. The calm Of a sweet, tranquil friendship would act like a balm On the wounds of my heart; that platonic regard, Which we read of in books, or hear sung by the bard, But so seldom can find when we want it. I thought, For a time, you had conquered mere self, and had brought Such a friendship to comfort and ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... am laying a tragedy-trap. In the present form I could spin 16 books out of it with comfort and joy; but I shall deny myself and restrict it to one. (If you should see a little short story in a magazine in the autumn called "My Platonic Sweetheart" written 3 weeks ago) that is not this one. It may have been ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... procure sustenance for themselves and their young, and are only just sufficient, sometimes even not sufficient, for this. The whole thing, when regarded thus purely objectively, and indeed as extraneous to us, looks as if nature was only concerned that of all her (Platonic) Ideas, i.e., permanent forms, none should be lost. For the individuals are fleeting as the water in the brook; and Ideas, on the contrary, are permanent, like its eddies: but the exhaustion of the water would also do away with the eddies. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... the especial strength of evil lay, as the philosophers had seen, in matter, it was so far a conclusion which both Jew and Persian were ready to accept; the naked Aristotelic view of it being most acceptable to the Persian, the Platonic to the Hellenistic Jew. But the purer theology of the Jew forced him to look for a solution of the question which Plato had left doubtful, and to explain how evil had crept into matter. He could not allow that what God had created could be of its own nature imperfect. ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... the then impending elections in view, voted to abolish the Secret Service Fund of the Ministry of the Interior. It was a Platonic vote, referring only to the Budget of 1890, nor did it take effect. But on December 14, 1889, M. Constans, having made the re-establishment of this fund a cabinet question, got up in the Chamber and boldly declared that he wanted a Secret ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... man. Keim speaks of him as about sixty or seventy years old at that time, and puts his birth at about B.C. 20. He writes: "The Theology of Philo is in great measure founded on his peculiar combination of the Jewish, the Platonic, and the Neo-Platonic conception of God. The God of the Old Testament, the exalted God, as he is called by the modern Hegelian philosophy, stood in close relations to the Greek Philosophers' conception of God, which believed that the Supreme Being could be accurately defined by the negative ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... real charm for her. Not that for a moment she would think seriously of such a man! That would he simply idiotic! But it would be very nice to have a little innocent flirtation with him, or perhaps a "Platonic friendship! "—her phrase, not mine. What could she have to do with Plato, who, when she said I, was aware only of a neat bundle of foolish desires, not the ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... the Galileans to teach the classics, they promptly undertook to form a Christian literature by throwing Scripture into classical forms. The Old Testament was turned into Homeric verse, the New into Platonic dialogues. Here again Apollinarius was premature. There was indeed no reason why Christianity should not have as good a literature as heathenism, but it would have to be a growth of many ages. In doctrine Apollinarius was a staunch Nicene, and one of ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... My benediction on Mrs. Hoppner, a pleasant journey among the Bernese tyrants, and safe return. You ought to bring back a Platonic Bernese for my reformation. If any thing happens to my present Amica, I have done with the passion for ever—it is my last love. As to libertinism, I have sickened myself of that, as was natural in the ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... oftener I read the poetry of Donne the more firmly I become convinced that, far from being primarily the poet of desire gratified and satiated, he is essentially the poet of frustrated love. He is often described by the historians of literature as the poet who finally broke down the tradition of Platonic love. I believe 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 ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... common destiny of human beings. And the delight which these poems gave me, proved that with culture of this sort, there was nothing to dread from the most confirmed habit of analysis. At the conclusion of the Poems came the famous Ode, falsely called Platonic, "Intimations of Immortality:" in which, along with more than his usual sweetness of melody and rhythm, and along with the two passages of grand imagery but bad philosophy so often quoted, I found that he too had had similar experience ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... salt-dealer, who made his money during the Revolution,—a period when contraband salt-traders made enormous profits by reason of the reaction that set in against the gabelle. He prudently left his wife at home, where Bebelle, as he called her, was supported under his absence by a platonic passion for a handsome clerk who had no other means than his salary,—a young man named Bonnac, belonging to the second-class society, where he played the same role that his master, the ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... of the lectures of Archer Butler, of Dublin, is devoted to the Platonic philosophy. It is at once a criticism and a eulogium. No modern writer has written more enthusiastically of what he considers the crowning excellence of the Greek philosophy. The dialectics of Plato, his ideal theory, his physics, his psychology, and his ethics are most ably discussed, and in ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... Saldana, or Saldenha, Donna Ximena, sister of this virtuous prince, bore a son. Some historians attempt to gloss over this incident, by alleging that a private marriage had taken place between the lovers: but King Alphonso, who was well-nigh sainted for living only in platonic union with his wife Bertha, took the scandal greatly to heart. He shut up the peccant princess in a cloister, and imprisoned her gallant in the castle of Luna, where he caused him to be deprived of sight. ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... promises made him were carried out; meanwhile he went a great deal to the opera, and made acquaintance with a small number of charming people who admired the things that he admired. He joined a dining-club of which the motto was, The Whole, The Good, and The Beautiful. He formed a platonic friendship with a lady some years older than himself, who lived in Kensington Square; and nearly every afternoon he drank tea with her by the light of shaded candles, and talked of George Meredith and Walter ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... some twelve years of his life, he found his muse and his madonna. His letters often address her in terms of idolatrous endearment. She was a wife and a mother, but Weimar society regarded her relation to Goethe as a platonic attachment ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the earliest recorded instance, in our era, of ordeal by fire was in the fourth century. Simplicius, Bishop of Autun, who had been married before his promotion, continued to live with his wife, and in order to demonstrate the Platonic purity of their intercourse placed burning coals upon ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... think it noble. He loved this woman because she was virtuous; he loved her virtue, her modest grace, her imposing saintliness, as the dearest treasures of his hidden passion. This woman was indeed worthy to inspire one of those platonic loves which are found, like flowers amid bloody ruins, in the history of the middle-ages; worthy to be the hidden principle of all the actions of a young man's life; a love as high, as pure as the skies when blue; a love without hope and to which men bind themselves because it can ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... in Greek a form or an image. The word signified in early philosophical use the archetype or primal image which the Platonic philosophy supposed to be the model or pattern that existing objects imperfectly embody. This high sense has nearly disappeared from the word idea, and has been largely appropriated by ideal, tho ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... pomp of professors.' It was not they, but Genseric and Attila and the barbarians, who destroyed the atomic philosophy. 'For, at a time when all human learning had suffered shipwreck, these planks of Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy, as being of a lighter and more inflated substance, were preserved and came down to us, while things more solid sank ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... woman of to-day would accept such offerings. Some of these poets may really have been in love with her, while others burned their incense as court flatterers; all, doubtless, were glad to find in her an ideal to serve as a platonic inspiration for their ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... and act as she chooses, however. I have never yet found that the advice of a sister could prevent a young man's being in love if he chose. We are advancing now to some kind of confidence, and in short are likely to be engaged in a sort of platonic friendship. On my side you may be sure of its never being more, for if I were not attached to another person as much as I can be to anyone, I should make a point of not bestowing my affection on a man who had dared to think so meanly of me. Reginald has a good figure and is not ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... theatrical booth shows you a tragedy, a farce, and a pantomime, all in a quarter of an hour, having a dozen new audiences to witness his entertainments in the course of the forenoon; so this lady with her platonic lovers went through the complete dramatic course,—tragedies of jealousy, pantomimes of rapture, and farces of parting. There were billets on one side and the other; hints of a fatal destiny, and a ruthless, lynx-eyed tyrant, who held a demoniac ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Whatever may be said regarding this passion, however, there can be no doubt that his heart was at this time enslaved by younger and humbler beauties. He had much of the temperament of his father, who, although exemplary in his single and married life, was distinguished for his Platonic gallantry, and cherished a poetic attachment, according to the fashion of the day, for various ladies throughout his career, such as Genevra Malatesta, the beautiful Tullia of Arragon, and Marguerite de Valois, sister of Henry III. These follies ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... the primary grades of the public school had noticed a striking platonic friendship that existed between Tommy and little Mary, two ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... at Southsea, with Rupert Gunning's sister, Maudie Spicer, where she again encountered Captain Carteret, and entered aimlessly upon a semi-platonic and wholly unprofitable flirtation with him. During this epoch she wore out the remnant of her summer clothes and laid in substitutes; rather encouraged than otherwise by the fact that she had long since lost touch with the amount of her ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... Not a platonic kiss upon the brow, not a brotherly kiss upon the cheek, but a kiss full upon the parted lips, a kiss of worship and amazement, such as that with which Adam ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... secret that a name has been chosen of such plain reference and derivation. Plato, in the words quoted above, has said that the whole of a man's life stands in need of a right rhythm: and it is natural to see some kinship between this Platonic attitude and the claim of Dalcroze that his discovery is not a mere refinement of dancing, nor an improved method of music-teaching, but a principle that must have effect ...
— The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze • Emile Jaques-Dalcroze
... Christian tree. At its base lies the heathenish notion that sin can be extirpated by severe onslaughts upon the body and the physical life. It has existed in Buddhism before some Christians adopted it. In the early days of Christianity it was proclaimed as superior wisdom by the Platonic philosophers. Like many a lie it has been decked out with Bible-texts to give it respectability, and to soothe disquieted consciences. The Scripture-sayings regarding fasting, sexual continence, chastity, crucifying the flesh, ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... his birthplace. His influence was great because he was in sympathy so catholic with all the varied life of his age and circle. While during the one hour he would be found learnedly discussing the rival claims of the Platonic and Aristotelian philosophers with Ficino and Landino, the next might witness him the foremost reveller in the Florentine carnival, crowned with flowers and with the winecup in his hand, gayly carolling the ballate he had composed for the occasion; ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... tarantula-dance the great hawk-nose would still be sitting as professor at his lecturing desk, and tickling the young goslings with philosophy and wisdom as they perkt up their yellow beaks to catch the crumbs he dropt into them. Marry! old beldam, this monkey-trick of love, this Platonic drunkenness of the soul, was the only thing wanting to us, to me as well as you, and then the miracle of our heroic existence would have been quite perfect.... Well, goodbye, old dame; tomorrow night about this time I'll come to fetch you, and ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... niches, designed in the illustration, are of rather later date.) The streets were crowded with carts, dragging in from all the neighbouring quarries stones for the future homes of the fair humanities. Erasmus found in Oxford a kind of substitute for the Platonic Society of Florence. "He would hardly care much about going to Italy at all, except for the sake of having been there. When I listen to Colet, it seems to me like listening to Plato himself"; and he praises the judgment and learning ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... within three years of forty. The curious details of the courtship are told by the composer himself in a letter to Frau von Meek, a wealthy idolatress of his genius, with whom he had one of those affairs called Platonic, and of whom more later. To ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... a paper read by the Dean of St Paul's before the Aristotelian Society in May of 1919. Dr Inge's paper is entitled 'Platonism and Human Immortality,' and in it there occurs the following statement: 'To sum up. The Platonic doctrine of immortality rests on the independence of the spiritual world. The spiritual world is not a world of unrealised ideals, over against a real world of unspiritual fact. It is, on the contrary, the real world, of which we have a true though very incomplete ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... for reflection and for reverence towards Kant in these two great results: 1st, That an order of ideas has been established, which all deep philosophy has demanded, even when it could not make good its claim. This postulate is fulfilled. 2ndly, The postulate is fulfilled without mysticism or Platonic reveries. Ideas, however indispensable to human needs, and even to the connection of our thoughts, which came to us from nobody knew whence, must for ever have been suspicious; and, as in the memorable instance cited from Hume, must have been liable for ever to a question of validity. ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... sonnets addressed to Vittoria Colonna and Cavalieri, we find something inexpressibly pathetic in this pure and fervent worship of beauty, when the artist with a soul still young had reached the limit of the years of man. Here and there we trace in them an echo of his youth. The Platonic dialogues he heard while yet a young man at the suppers of Lorenzo, reappear converted to the very substance of his thought and style. At the same time Savonarola resumes ascendency over his mind; and when he turns to Florence, it is ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... The platonic love of Angelique de Guerchi for the handsome Chevalier de Moranges had resulted, as we have seen, in no practical wrong to the Duc de Vitry. After her reconciliation with her lover, brought about by the eminently ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... which protected her against those trials for magic which were so frequently instituted against gypsy women. And then, Gringoire held the position of her brother, if not of her husband. After all, the philosopher endured this sort of platonic marriage very patiently. It meant a shelter and bread at least. Every morning, he set out from the lair of the thieves, generally with the gypsy; he helped her make her collections of targes* and little blanks** in the squares; ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... we have said, formed his morals on the Platonic model, yet he perfectly agreed with the opinion of Aristotle, in considering that great man rather in the quality of a philosopher or a speculatist, than as a legislator. This sentiment he carried a great way; indeed, ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... cause; but the cause had struck deep into the roots of her nature, and its shadow had become a part of her beauty. Dartmouth speculated much and widely, but rejected the hypothesis of a lover. She had never loved for a moment; and in spite of his platonic predilections, this last of his conclusions held a very perceptible flavor of satisfaction. When the classic young lady had gracefully acknowledged the raptures she had evoked, and tripped back to her seat, ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... our era, the two fundamental articles of the Gentile-Christian creed, the Trinity and the Incarnation, neither of them Jewish, were formulated in terms of Platonic philosophy, of which the distinctive tenet is, that the real and eternal is the universal, not the individual. On this assumption it was possible to say that the same real substance could exist in three, or indeed in any number of persons. In the case of God, the dogma-builders ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... written—which it certainly is not. Yet again, if we want to see will struggling against obstacles, the classic to turn to is not Hamlet, not Lear, but Robinson Crusoe; yet no one, except a pantomime librettist, ever saw a drama in Defoe's narrative. In a Platonic dialogue, in Paradise Lost, in John Gilpin, there is a struggle of will against obstacles; there is none in Hannele, which, nevertheless, is a deeply-moving drama. Such a struggle is characteristic of all great fiction, from Clarissa Harlowe ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... these speculations with the recent writers who have adopted them, he is not to be understood as allowing that these writers have originated any novel speculations, or excelled the sceptics of former times in acuteness, or plausibility, or success in urging their cause. He adopts the method of the Platonic dialogue, and exhibits a dialectic skill in confounding by objections when objections can be made to do service as arguments. His frank admission that he leaves insurmountable objections and unfathomable mysteries still involved in the theme, a portion of whose range alone he traverses, should secure ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... us to form these intuitive or platonic ideas. It was through analogy that Goethe arrived at his great discoveries in natural science, and I only repeat what such men as Johannes Mueller, Baer, and Helmholtz have been willing to acknowledge, when I say that the poet's eye has been as keen ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... kept a little book wherein was entered the passe-parole of every pretty woman; age; lovers platonic! When a woman became a grandmother, I put a black mark against her name, for I have always held," continued the nobleman, wagging his head, "that a woman who is a grandmother has no business to deceive a younger generation of men. But present ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... older Buddhism and the younger Christianity. The two have very many features in common, alike in their mythology and in their ethics; indeed, a considerable part of Christianity has come directly from Indian Buddhism, just as another part is drawn from the Mosaic and Platonic systems. But, looked at from the point of view of our present stage of culture, the ethic of Christianity appears to us much more perfect and pure than that of any other religion. We must, it is true, hasten to add that it is exactly ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... own homes, where scarcely any but themselves are invited; they play bridge, they have tea together, but whatever they do, they stay in the pack. In more than one way this group habit is excellent; young women and men are friends in a degree of natural and entirely platonic intimacy undreamed of in their parents' youth. Having the habit therefore of knowing her men friends well, a young girl is not going to imagine a stranger, no matter how perfect he may appear to be, anything but an ordinary human man ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... Platonic philosopher, had, it is said, a familiar demon, who obeyed him from the moment he called him, and was superior in his nature to the common genii; he was of the order of gods, and Plotinus paid continual attention to this divine ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... But Nanny Ainslee was a joyous, laughter-loving creature. And the idea of this boy whom already she half loved asking her to be his friend, his sister! Oh, it was childishly funny. How her father would chuckle if he knew that she who had dismissed so many suitors with platonic friendliness and sisterly solicitude was now being offered that same platonic friendliness and brotherly love. It was too much for Nanny's sense ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... satisfy neither the trained intellects nor the unthinking common people of Japan? Is it far from the truth to suspect that, even when accepted by the Japanese courtiers and nobles, they were received, only too often, in a Platonic, not to say a Pickwickian, sense? The Japanese is too polite to say "no" if he can possibly say "yes," even when he does not mean it; while the common people all over the world, as between metaphysics and ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... the great proprietors, etc. Don Platon Peribanez, a silversmith in the Calle Mayor, represents the middle-class Conservatives; his people are less showy, but more in earnest and better disciplined; this Platonian or Platonic party is made up of chandlers, silversmiths, small merchants, and the poor priests. The friar, who represents the third Conservative nucleus, is Father Martin Lafuerza. Father Martin is prior of the Franciscan monastery, ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... shape, it is in general racked and tortured prose rather than anything resembling poetry." Though Lord Byron wrote a few himself he defined the sonnet as "The most puling, petrifying, stupidly Platonic composition." ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... life entirely away from discussion, from all sense of problem; they are not problematic at all, his pictures; they have lyrical serenity as a basis, chiefly. Often you have the sensation of looking through a Renaissance window upon a Greek world—a world of Platonic verities in calm relation with each other. It is essentially an art created from the principle of the harmonic law in nature, things in juxtaposition, cooperating with the sole idea of a poetic existence. The titles cover the subjects, as I have suggested. ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... pendulous, penultimate, penurious, peregrination, perfunctory, peripatetic, periphery, persiflage, perspicacious, perspicuity, pertinacious, pharmaceutic, phenomenal, phlegmatic, phraseology, pictorial, piquant, pique, plagiarize, platitudinous, platonic, plebeian, plenipotentiary, plethora, pneumatic, poignant, polity, poltroon, polyglot, pontifical, portentous, posterior, posthumous, potent, potential, pragmatic, preamble, precarious, precocious, precursor, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... Braminical Wordsworth. Now it will be remembered that Wordsworth, in that glorious ode whence we extract the above, develops the Platonic idea (shall we call Platonic that which has been entertained by the wise and the feeling of all times?) of a shadowy recollection of past and eternal existence in the profundities of the Divine Heart. 'It sounds forth here a mournful remembrance of a faded world of gods and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... [320] [Alexander's platonic attachment to the Baronne de Kruedener (Barbe Julie de Wietenhoff), beauty, novelist, illuminee, was the source of amusement rather than scandal. The Baronne, then in her fiftieth year, was the channel through which Franz Bader's theory or doctrine of the "Holy Alliance" was conveyed to the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... inquire, I believe, at this time, as Evodius inquired of St. Austin, whether our immaterial part, the soul, does not remain united, when it forsakes this gross terrestrial body, to some ethereal body more subtile and more fine; which was one of the Pythagorean and Platonic whimsies: nor be under any concern to know, if this be not the case of the dead, how souls can be distinguished after their separation—that of Dives, for example, from that of Lazarus. The second—that is, ontology— treats most scientifically of being abstracted from all being ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... whatever reason, pulverizes because he fails to realize the necessary relations of the world in which he lives in their normal operation, and has no effectual belief in them as unavoidably operant in his nature or over his fortunes. This was the truth that lay in the Platonic doctrine that all sin is ignorance; but Plato did not take account of any possible depravity in the will. Nor is what has been illustrated above true of the mind and the will only. In the region of emotion and of beauty, there may be similar aberration, ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... humanists were not pagans. There arose at Florence, partly under the influence of the revival of Greek, partly under that of Savonarola, a group of earnest young men who sought to invigorate Christianity by infusing into it the doctrines of Plato. The leaders of this Neo-Platonic Academy, Pico della Mirandola [Sidenote: Pico della Mirandola, 1462-94] and Marsiglio Ficino, sought to show that the teachings of the Athenian and of the Galilean were the same. Approaching the Bible in the simple literary ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... amiable infant. The relation of a brother and a sister, especially if they do not marry, appears to me of a very singular nature. It is a familiar and tender friendship with a female, much about our own age; an affection perhaps softened by the secret influence of sex, and the sole species of Platonic love that can be indulged with ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... little lady, the front elevation of whose name is Stella, takes pen in hand and gives the Icon. a red-hot "roast" for having intimated that Platonic Love, so-called, is a pretty good thing for respectable women to let alone. Judged by the amount of caloric she generates, Stella must be a star of the first magnitude, or even an entire constellation. She "believes in the pure, passionless love described by ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... from Lady Laura, and Violet knew that it was a blow. This gallant lover, this young Crichton, this unassuming but ardent lover, had simply taken up with her as soon as he had failed with her friend. Lady Laura had been most enthusiastic in her expressions of friendship. Such platonic regards might be all very well. It was for Mr. Kennedy to look to that. But, for herself, she felt that such expressions were hardly compatible with her ideas of having her lover all to herself. And then she again remembered Madame Goesler's bright ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... of a clear definition of terms as a basis of argument and we contend that that is as necessary in discussing the problem of life from the Bible point of view as in arguments from the platonic standpoint. According to the Bible man is a composite being consisting of body, soul and spirit. The two latter are usually taken to be synonymous, but we insist that they are not interchangeable and present the following to support ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... the pursuit of it is hopeless for mortal man. From this time onward, though he always professes himself a lover of true philosophy, he concerns himself no more with it, except to expose its false professors. The dialogue that perhaps comes next, The Parasite, is still Platonic in form, but only as a parody; its main interest (for a modern reader is outraged, as in a few other pieces of Lucian's, by the disproportion between subject and treatment) is in the combination for the first time ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... fell from the conversation or the tablets of Mengs—a deep scholar, and better fitted to comment on a classic than to give lessons on art and style, he reasoned himself into frigid reveries and Platonic dreams on beauty. As far as the taste or the instruction of his tutor directed, he is right when they are; and between his own learning and the tuition of the other, his history of art delivers a specious ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... unintelligible still; especially among those who live in such an atmosphere of long words. It is a cruel comment on the purity of the Victorian Age, that the age ended (save for the bursting of a single scandal) in a thing being everywhere called "Art," "The Greek Spirit," "The Platonic Ideal" and so on—which any navvy mending the road outside would have stamped with a word as vile and as vulgar ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... be glad to have a drawing of the Platonic solids, since they play so large a part in the building up of elements. The regular solids are five, ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... fault in grammar shocks as much as a slit nose at Charing Cross? I shudder when I recall the Saturdays in the Rue du Temple, and compare the conversations there, the play of wit and fancy, the elaborate arguments upon platonic love, the graceful raillery, with any assembly in London—except yours, Hyacinth. At Fareham House we breathe a finer air, although his lordship's esprit moqueur will not allow us any superiority to ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... which had taken the importance of a great passion, not in my life, as I had sacrificed my life to duty, but in my thoughts. I was in continual correspondence with an absent person to whom I told all my thoughts, all my dreams, who knew all my humble virtues, and who heard all my platonic enthusiasm. This person was excellent in reality, but I attributed to him more than all the perfections possible to human nature. I only saw this man for a few days, and sometimes only for a few hours, in the ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... distinguished for a play upon words. The following is supposed to have been written by one Zebel Rock, a stone-cutter, to a young lady for whom he cherished a love somewhat more than Platonic: ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... follow, but the genital organs will in all probability not be involved; whereas in the case of an analogous fondness between two boys, manipulation of the genital organs is very likely to occur. Homosexual intimacies between girls are far more often platonic than similar ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... and the savory pork-smell of Schnitz un Knepp, a cannibal odor that disturbed not a bit Wutzchen, snoring behind the cookstove. Chickens, penned beneath the bed, chuckled in their bedtime caucus. The cow stood cheek-by-jowl with Yonnie, warming him with platonic graciousness as they shared the hay Aaron had spread before them. Martha stirred her soup. "When the bishop married me to you," she told Aaron, "he said naught of my having to sleep with ...
— Blind Man's Lantern • Allen Kim Lang
... discours-testament, the speech delivered on the eve of Thermidor. At one moment, with positive ferocity, he lashes the memory of former friends and colleagues sent by himself to the guillotine; at another he dilates upon the virtue of magnanimity in lofty, Platonic strains. ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... was the first to direct attention to the nature of virtue, it received from Plato a more systematic treatment. Platonic philosophy may be described as an extension to the universe of the principles which Socrates applied to the life of the individual. Plato attempts to define the end of man by his place in the cosmos; and by bringing Ethics into connection with ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... mezzotinter, De Musset, Franz Liszt, Delacroix, Michel de Bourges—I have not the exact chronological order—and later Flaubert. The most lovable event in the life of this much loved woman was her old age affair— purely platonic—with Gustave Flaubert. The correspondence shows her to have been "maternal" ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... the sentiments that civilize life, than the square elbowed family drudge; but, wanting a due proportion of reflection and self-government, they only inspire love; and are the mistresses of their husbands, whilst they have any hold on their affections; and the platonic friends of his male acquaintance. These are the fair defects in nature; the women who appear to be created not to enjoy the fellowship of man, but to save him from sinking into absolute brutality, by rubbing off the rough angles of his ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... is so complex that she can prove to a man by every possible convincing argument that she feels nothing but platonic friendship for him, at the same time that she is thinking how she would like to run her fingers ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland
... Christopher Smith, Sir Henry ——, Horace, esq., his 'Horace in London' ——, Mrs. Spencer. See 'Florence.' ——, Miss (afterwards Mrs. Oscar Byrne), dancer Smyrna, Lord Byron's stay at Smythe, Professor Socrates Sonnets, 'the most puling, petrifying, stupidly platonic compositions,' Sorelli, his translation of Grillparzer's 'Sappho' Sotheby, William, esq., his tragedies his 'Ivan' accepted for Drury Lane Theatre similarity of a passage in 'Ivan' to one in the 'Corsair' a 'row' about 'Ivan' the AEschylus of the age his 'Orestes' ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... silver candle-sticks, Across the oak table, with his keen white face, Dark smouldering eyes, and black, dishevelled hair; Chapman, with something of the steady strength That helms our ships, and something of the Greek, The cool clear passion of Platonic thought Behind the fringe of his Olympian beard And broad Homeric ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... strictly Platonic, hut it was Policy. Mrs. Hauksbee laid her hand lightly upon the ungloved paw that rested on the turned-back 'rickshaw hood, and, looking the man full in the face, said tenderly, almost too tenderly, 'I ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... I wrote to you, and you must have wondered why I forgave you for the wrong you did me. I guessed that our friendship when I was in the parish was a little more than the platonic friendship that you thought it was, so when you turned against me, and were unkind, I found an excuse for you. When my hatred was bitterest, I knew somehow, at the back of my mind—for I only allowed myself to think of it occasionally—that you acted from—there is but ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... appearance of middle life. He had died at length, it was supposed, of grief for the sudden death of a great-grandchild, the only creature he had ever appeared to love. The works of this philosopher, though rare, were extant, and found in the library of Glyndon's home. Their Platonic mysticism, their bold assertions, the high promises that might be detected through their figurative and typical phraseology, had early made a deep impression on the young imagination of Clarence Glyndon. His parents, ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Padua, and other cities of the north; and the Florentines, though they knew perhaps very little about him, had had the name of the great idealist often on their lips. To increase this knowledge, Cosmo had founded the Platonic academy, with periodical discussions at the villa of Careggi. The fall of Constantinople in 1453, and the council in 1438 for the reconciliation of the Greek and Latin Churches, had brought to Florence many a needy Greek scholar. And now the work was completed, the door of ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... indeed they are) from Pinturricchio's well-found Popes and Princesses, and Sodoma's languishing boys or half-ripe Catherines dying of love. Have I not said this was once a city of pleasure? And whether the pleasure was a blood-feast or an Agape, or a Platonic banquet where the flute-players and wine-cups and crowns crushed out the high disquisition and philosophic undercurrent—it was all one to soft Siena drowsing the days out on her hills. Her pleasures were fierce, and beautiful as ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... Platonic, as in the rabbinic, speculation the idea must precede the fact. Every step of progress is a defection from that idea. The dogma suffers from an insoluble contradiction within itself. It aims to give us the point of departure by which we are to recognise ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... acquaintances of the Svetilovitches were also indignant. But their indignation assumed only platonic forms. Perhaps it was impossible for it to have been otherwise. To be sure, all the more or less independent people in town paid the Svetilovitches visits of sympathy. Even the liberal Inspector of Taxes came. He was a patient of Doctor Svetilovitch's, and came during the reception hour to express ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... intuition of one's own thought, even if it be erroneous; that is to say, not of its scientific, but of its aesthetic truth, since it is this truth itself. A philosopher like Schopenhauer can imagine that art is a representation of the Platonic ideas. This doctrine is absolutely false scientifically, yet he may develop this false knowledge in excellent prose, aesthetically most true. But we have already replied to these objections, when we observed that at that precise point where a speaker or a writer enunciates an ill-thought concept, ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... Juan, a Galahad, a Chesterfield. To tantalize arises from the mythical perpetual frustration of Tantalus in the Greek story. Expressions that had a special meaning in the works of a philosopher or litterateur come to be generally used, as "Platonic love."[1] Again words that arise as mere popular witticisms or vulgarisms may be brought into the language as permanent acquisitions. "Mob," now a quite legitimate word, was originally a shortening of mobile vulgum, and was, only a hundred years ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman |
