"Platonical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "A mere platonic friendship. We both collected autographs. And, if it comes to that, how about Dora Thingummy? You had enough to say ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... of the fountains and rivulets which once abundantly watered the face of the agricultural world seems practicable by such means, even without any general replanting of the forests; and the cost of one year's warfare—or in some countries of that armed peace which has been called "Platonic war"—if judiciously expended in a combination of both methods of improvement, would secure, to almost every country that man has exhausted, an amelioration of climate, a renovated fertility of soil, and a general physical ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... bostonian, country, england, boston, milton, river, girl, mary, hudson, william, britain, miltonic, city, englishman, messiah, platonic, american, deity, bible, book, plato, christian, broadway, america, jehovah, british, easter, europe, man, ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... supposed to be so profitable to the community, exhausted all their ingenuity, both before the days of Constantine the Great and afterward, to arrest the progress of Christianity. In the beginning of this century Hierocles, the great ornament of the Platonic school, composed two books against the Christians, in which he had the audacity to compare our Saviour with Apollonius Tyanaeus, and for which he was chastised by Eusebius in a tract written expressly against him. Lactantius speaks of another philosopher ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... educate, polish and perfect it, transplanted to these sacred shades? One has fancied Plato's Academy—his gleaming colonnades, his blooming gardens and Athenian sky; but was it as good as this one, where Monsieur Hebert does the Platonic? The blessing in Rome is not that this or that or the other isolated object is so very unsurpassable; but that the general air so contributes to interest, to impressions that are not as any other impressions anywhere in the world. And from ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... century A.D.), Greek philosopher of Alexandria, often called the founder of the neo-Platonic school. Of humble origin, he appears to have earned a livelihood as a porter; hence his nickname of "Sack-bearer" (Sakkas, for sakkoforos.) The details of his life are unknown, insomuch that he has frequently been confused with a Christian philosopher of the same name. Eusebius ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... not only platonic, but sexual as well. The growing person needs help in acquiring a potential capacity for mutual, satisfying intimacy with a partner of the opposite sex. Heterosexual mutuality has religious significance, since sexual intimacy ...
— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe
... of the Greek Gnostic and anti-Jewish school, whose design was not to add another to the existing biographies of Christ, not to represent him as a real man, nor to give an account of any human life, but to produce an elaborate theological work in which, under the veil of allegory, the Neo-platonic conception of Christ as the Logos, the realized Word of God, the divine principle of light and life, should be developed. With this purpose, the writer made a free selection from the sayings and doings of Christ as recorded in the three Gospels already written, and as freely invented ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... 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
... 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 ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... "love"—one can call it nothing else—frees his revolutionary thought from that arbitrary isolation, that savage subjectivity, which one notes in many philosophical anarchists. His Platonic insistence, too, on the more spiritual aspects of love separates his anti-Christian "immorality" from the easy-going, pleasant hedonism of such a bold individualist ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... walks of life, who was quite unappropriated, except by the imagination of the poet, and whose fame has passed into the Phillis or Amaryllis ideal of Highland accomplishment and grace. Macdonald was married to a scold, and though his actual relations with Morag were of the Platonic kind, he was persuaded to a retractation, entitled the "Disparagement of Morag," which is sometimes recited as a companion piece to the present. The consideration of brevity must plead our apology with the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... which ever remained the ideal pleasure of life to him: a garden or a garden house outside the town, where in the gladness of a fine day a small number of friends meet to talk during a simple meal or a quiet walk, in Platonic serenity, about things of the mind. The personages whom he introduces, besides himself, are his best friends. They are the valued and faithful friend whom he got to know at Bergen, James Batt, schoolmaster and afterwards ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... report with especial care all cases of unusually close relationship between children in youth, such as childish favoritism, "platonic friendships," "chumming," in school or home, etc. We have in these facts—and there is a very great variety of them—an exaggeration of the social or imitative tendency, a narrowing down of the personal sensibility to a peculiar line of well-formed ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... to think that there was no danger. His little affair with Mrs Lupex was quite platonic and safe. As for doing any real harm, his principles, as he assured his friend, were too high. Mrs Lupex was a woman of talent, whom no one seemed to understand, and, therefore, he had taken some pleasure in studying her character. It was merely a study of character, ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... "Sufi,"(etymologically) one who wears woollen garments, a devotee, a Santon; from wise; from pure, or from Safahe was pure. This is not the place to enter upon such a subject as "Tasawwuf," or Sufyism; that singular reaction from arid Moslem realism and materialism, that immense development of gnostic and Neo-platonic transcendentalism which is found only germinating in the Jewish and Christian creeds. The poetry of Omar-i-Khayyam, now familiar to English readers, is a fair specimen; and the student will consult the last chapter of the Dabistan "On the religion of the Sufiahs." The first ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... at last the poor thing is toiled and hammered into fit 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
... modern fable and invention, as was just enough to shew, that the contrivers of them neither knew how to lye, nor speak truth. In these voluminous extravagances, Love and Honour supplied the place of Life and Manners. But the over-refinement of Platonic sentiments always sinks into the dross and feces of that Passion. For in attempting a more natural representation of it, in the little amatory Novels, which succeeded these heavier Volumes, tho' the Writers avoided the dryness of the Spanish Intrigue, and the extravagance ...
— Prefaces to Fiction • Various
... had, as 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, so far, as to regard all virtue as matter of theory only. ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... in a position of increasing delicacy. Since the day of their conversation in the tea-room Dave had been constant in his attentions, but, true to his ultimatum, had uttered no word that could in any way be construed to be more or less than Platonic. His attitude vexed and pleased her. She was vexed that he should leave her in a position where she must humiliate herself by taking the initiative; she was pleased with his strength, with his daring, with the superb self-control with which he carried out a difficult purpose. ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... conspicuous for lack of beauty, was essentially a handsome man. The person who initiated the discussion by observing that 'Mr. Blank was unquestionably a plain man' expected from the Bibliotaph (if he expected any remark whatever) nothing beyond a Platonic 'That I do most firmly believe.' He was not a little astonished when the great book-collector began an elaborate and exhaustive defense of the gentleman whose claims to beauty had been questioned. At ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... a stout heart, then. Perhaps you have been reading poetry with Minerva, and are caught in one of her Platonic man-traps.' ...
— Ixion In Heaven • Benjamin Disraeli
... Plato, for example. You will find A spirit far more truly Christian In them than in the ravings of the sour-soul'd Savonarola. [Prolonged cries of 'Death to the Sour-Souled Savonarola!' Several cobblers detach themselves from the crowd and rush away to read the Platonic Dialogues. Enter SAVONAROLA. The crowd, as he makes his way through it, gives up all further control of its feelings, and makes a noise for which even the best zoologists might not find a good comparison. The staves and bill-hooks wave like twigs in a ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... at Hanover, 1716, in the midst of his labors and projects—turns mainly on his speculative philosophy. It was only as an incidental pursuit that he occupied himself with metaphysic; yet no philosopher since Aristotle— with whom, though claiming to be more Platonic than Aristotelian, he has much in common—has furnished more luminous hints to the elucidation of metaphysical problems. The problems he attempted were those which concern the most inscrutable, but, to the genuine metaphysician, most ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... seared me as with hot irons when away from her. I loved her with a double love which shot its arrows of desire, and then lost them in the sky, where they faded out of sight in the impermeable ether. If you ask me why, young and ardent, I continued in the deluding dreams of Platonic love, I must own to you that I was not yet man enough to torture that woman, who was always in dread of some catastrophe to her children, always fearing some outburst of her husband's stormy temper, martyrized by him when not afflicted by the illness of Jacques ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... call a fantast (if they honour him with their consideration so far), but whom others may see only as one that gave objective continuity and a name to a delicate dream which in a vaguer form is more or less common to all men, and is by no means new to Platonic philosophers. ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... for babes and sucklings about one-third of it had better be expurgated. The Apocrypha was a favourite work, but above all I loved the Revelations, a work which, I may say by the way, is still a treasure to be investigated as regards the marvellous mixture of Neo-Platonic, later Egyptian (or Gnostic), and even Indian Buddhistic ideas therein. Well, I had learned from it a word which St. John applies (to my mind very vulgarly and much too frequently) to the Scarlet Lady of Babylon or Rome. What this ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... Widows I had little idea that there were any matrimonial relations subsisting in Typee, and I should as soon have thought of a Platonic affection being cultivated between the sexes, as of the solemn connection of man and wife. To be sure, there were old Marheyo and Tinor, who seemed to have a sort of nuptial understanding with one another; but for all that, I had sometimes observed a comical-looking old gentleman dressed in ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... 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 me to Miss Susan ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... their governments. Julian published edicts of universal toleration; from time to time he assumed the garb of each different sect, and claimed affinity with the gods of each conquered race. At one moment the zealous supporter of Christianity, then the ablest advocate of the Platonic philosophy: at another, initiated into all the arcana of the Theurgic science and the Eleusinian mysteries, terminating his checkered religious career by that great edict of universal toleration which ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... new Lochinvar come out of the West!" she laughed. "Oh, Kenneth, how can you be so foolish? It is absolutely indecent of you. I like Mr. Steell, and I think he likes me, but our friendship is purely platonic. I never give him a thought, I ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... to excel, by flying closest to the flame without singeing their satin wings; by executing a pirouette on the extremest ledge of the abyss, yet escape toppling in; female Blondins skipping across the tight rope of Platonic friendship, stretched above the unmentionable. ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... "Prussian" judge the German workers so contemptuously? Because he finds that the "whole question,"—namely the question of labour distress—has not yet been taken up by the "all-comprehending political soul." He carries his Platonic love to the political soul so far ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... you are even Colonel Rufford's daughter?" She did not know what these words meant. She thought of her mother as sleeping beneath the arches whilst the snow fell. That was the impression conveyed to her mind by the words "on the streets". A Platonic sense of duty gave her the idea that she ought to go to comfort her mother—the mother that bore her, though she hardly knew what the words meant. At the same time she knew that her mother had left her father with another man—therefore she pitied her father, and thought it terrible ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... afraid of scandal—which makes Lancelot outlive the Queen, quite comfortably continuing his adventurous career (this is perhaps the "furthest" of the Unthinkable in literature), and (not, it may be owned, quite inconsistently) hints that the connection was merely Platonic throughout. These things are explicable, but better negligible. For my own part I have always thought that the loves of Tristram and Iseult (which, as has been said, were originally un-Arthurian) suggested the main idea ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... which this dark horseman of the third seal careered. Instead of salvation through the Spirit of God being carefully taught, baptismal regeneration was exalted, and the people were instructed in the saving virtues of the eucharist. The Platonic idea concerning sin having its seat in the flesh was adopted, and therefore perfect victory or sanctification was made to consist in the mortification of the natural appetites and desires of the body, with the ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... a companion to the poem of which these verses are a portion, called An Hymne of Heavenly Beautie, filled like this, and like two others on Beauty and Love, with Platonic forms both of thought and expression; but I have preferred quoting a longer part of the former to giving portions of both. My reader will recognize in the extract a fuller force of intellect brought to bear on duty; although it would be unwise to take a mind like Spenser's for a type ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... 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 ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... passages, unhappily too rare, the high Platonic Mysticism of our Author, which is perhaps the fundamental element of his nature, bursts forth, as it were, in full flood: and, through all the vapour and tarnish of what is often so perverse, so mean in his exterior and environment, we seem to look into a whole ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Britons were impressed with this idea. It was a favorite theme of the Arab philosophers and many Mahomedan Sufis. The Jews adopted it after the Babylonian captivity. Philo of Alexandria, who was a contemporary of Christ, preached amongst the Hebrews the Platonic idea of the pre-existence and rebirth of human souls. Philo says: "The company of disembodied souls is distributed in various orders. The law of some of them is to enter mortal bodies, and after certain prescribed periods be again set free." John the Baptist was according ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... 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 ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... the fellow was almost enough. But to the ladies, his brutality signifieth strength and power; and his uncouthness, originality and genius. Marguerite, even, is prepossessed in his favor and has written a platonic poem in his honor. As for the princess"—pressing the other's arm gently—"do you not know, mon ami, that women are all alike? There is but one they obey—the king—that is as high as their ambitions can reach—and even him they deceive. Why, the Countess d'Etampes—but ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... 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
... be attracted to women. But Beethoven, it is said, was very susceptible to the charm of the opposite sex. He was however, most careful and high-souled in all his relations with women. He was frequently in love, but it was usually a Platonic affection. For the Countess Julie Guicciardi he protested the most passionate love, which was in a measure returned. She was doubtless his "immortal beloved," whose name vibrates through the Adagio of the "Moonlight Sonata," which is dedicated to her. He wrote ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... ideal republic in the name of science, which, through modesty and euphemism, he called philosophy. Aristotle, a practical man, refuted the Platonic utopia in the name of the same philosophy. Thus the social war has continued since Plato and Aristotle. The modern socialists refer all things to science one and indivisible, but without power to agree either as to its content, its limits, or its method; the economists, on their side, affirm ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... degree of rarity. Of the 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, the most desirable.[474] Both works are from ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... and useful to the Republic. The more various the anxieties, the greater your glory. Let that glory beam forth, not in our Palace only, but be reflected in far distant Provinces. Let your prudence be equal to your power; yea, let the fourfold virtue [of the Platonic philosophy] be seated in your conscience. Remember that your tribunal is placed so high that, when seated there, you should think of nothing sordid, nothing mean. Weigh well what you ought to say, seeing that it is listened to by so many. Let ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... companion, "when you quote the divine Plato and the world of ideas, I do not think you are angry with me, however much my previous utterance may have merited your disapproval and wrath. As soon as you speak of it, I feel that Platonic wing rising within me; and it is only at intervals, when I act as the charioteer of my soul, that I have any difficulty with the resisting and unwilling horse that Plato has also described to us, the 'crooked, lumbering animal, put together anyhow, with ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Treatment of Greek Women Love in Sappho's Poems Masculine Minds in Female Bodies Anacreon and Others Woman and Love in Aeschylus Woman and Love in Sophocles Woman and Love in Euripides Romantic Love, Greek Style Platonic Love of Women Spartan Opportunities for Love Amazonian Ideal of Greek Womanhood Athenian Orientalism Literature and Life Greek Love in Africa Alexandrian Chivalry The New Comedy Theocritus and Callimachus Medea ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... Muslim philosophy had gradually been eliminating the Neo-Platonic, mystic element, and returning to pure Aristotelianism. In Averroes, who professed to be merely a commentator on Aristotle, this tendency reached its climax; and though he still regarded the pseudo-Aristotelian works as genuine, and did not entirely escape their influence, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... sphere (as 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 fierce. ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... onion-tangy tzvivvele Supp 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 ...
— Blind Man's Lantern • Allen Kim Lang
... endeavoured to render the Platonic theory more complete, and to give it a more direct applicability to human life; admitting, besides the good and the bad, of something which is neither good nor bad, and some of these intermediate things, such as health, ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... class, the pied-a-terre hunters, not as a potential neighbour, but as a mere counsellor and very platonic friend, I would say that I have recently discovered two ways of acquiring country places, both of which, although no doubt neither is infallible, have from time to ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... Plato, while the colder and more practical philosophy of Aristotle had flourished in 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 ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... individuals of all that can be generated and corrupted, he attributed to the divinities who circulate in the heavens; that is, certain separate substances, which move corporeal things in a circular direction. The third providence, over human affairs, he assigned to demons, whom the Platonic philosophers placed between us and the gods, as Augustine tells us (De Civ. Dei, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... into a chuckle. "Well, young man, to begin with, you were much too flustered. It made you appear overanxious. On the other hand, I am at an age where I can be strictly platonic. She was on guard against you, but she knows she has very little to ...
— The Dueling Machine • Benjamin William Bova
... with her late husband, that she had on many occasions exhibited strong symptoms of possessing a very vindictive temper, and that during the farmer's lifetime she had openly manifested rather more than a Platonic preference for the man whom she subsequently married. Suspicion was generally excited: people began to doubt whether the first husband had died fairly. At length the proper order was applied for, and his body was disinterred. On examination, enough arsenic to have poisoned three men was found ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... great tributary poured into this stream, as we approach the bloom of the Middle Ages, appears to have come from the brain of Michael Psellus. Mingling scriptural texts, Platonic philosophy, and theological statements by great doctors of the Church, with wild utterances obtained from lunatics, he gave forth, about the beginning of the twelfth century, a treatise on The Work of ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... Petrovitch had made a very strong impression on me. Her subsequent conduct had made me set a guard on myself, and the memory of the Japanese maiden whose portrait had become my cherished "mascot," of course insured that my regard for the Princess could never pass the bounds of platonic friendship. ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... re-enforces that definition of war set forth above, as a manifestation of the world-spirit, co-extensive with being, and as such, inseparable from man's life here and now. In all these great wars which we have touched upon, the conflict of two ideas, in the Platonic sense of the word, unveils itself, but both ideas are ultimately phases of one Idea. It is by conflict alone that life realizes itself. That is the be-all and end-all of life as such, of Being as such. From ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... Platonic unions between the self-mutilators and the Siberian peasant-women were fairly frequent, so deeply-rooted in the heart of man does the desire for a ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... to write it? Mr Best asked. You ought to make it a dialogue, don't you know, like the Platonic dialogues Wilde wrote. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... he was an Evil Power at open war with the righteous Sovereign of the universe. The Gnostics also differed in their views respecting matter. Those of them who were Egyptians, and who had been addicted to the study of the Platonic philosophy, held matter to be inert until impregnated with life; but the Syrians, who borrowed much from the Oriental theology, taught that it was eternally subject to a Lord, or Ruler, who had been perpetually at variance with the Great God of ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... equally faithful record of Shelby's actions might salt the narrative. He had a lawyer's perception of the values of words as words, and through extended practice with Mrs. Hilliard excelled in that deft juggling of pregnant trifles without which Platonic friendships must die of inanition. He now thanked the lady for her successful coup at the club without specifically naming it—to hint at prearrangement were too fatuous; and Mrs. Hilliard admired his tact. Parenthetically she reflected that Joe had no tact. Without specifically ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... the destruction of the universe failed to follow, as surely as a, flood ensues from a breach in a dyke. How indeed could it be otherwise, according to the explanation which her teacher had given her of the Neo-Platonic conception of the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... is," he said, "that I care too much to make Platonic friendship possible, and don't care enough to marry any particular woman—that is, of course, supposing that any particular one would be so little particular as to be willing to marry me. How embarrassing it would be, now," he argued, ...
— The Princess Aline • Richard Harding Davis
... her a gruel of acid Which she very obligingly ate, And at once with a touchingly placid Demeanor succumbed to her fate. With affection that passed the platonic They buried her under the moss, And her epitaph wasn't ironic In stating, "We ...
— Fables for the Frivolous • Guy Whitmore Carryl
... 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, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... welcomed the learned Greeks who fled from Constantinople when that city was taken by the Turks in 1453. He founded a Platonic Academy in Florence so that his guests were able to discuss philosophy at leisure. He professed to find consolation for all the misfortunes of his life in the writings of the Greek Plato, and read ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... 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 ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... had taken his romance seriously to heart, refused to be kept as l'ami de la maison, and as a platonic admirer. Deeply disappointed—for he was prepared to give his life to Edith and her children (he was a widower of independent means)—he had left England; she had never ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... 'I've seen the most beautiful woman in the world, and I'm drunk with her.' And how I couldn't understand? For I thought her plain, just as I still do.—But then, if I remember aright, your admiration was by no means the platonic, artistic affair it ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... Malherbe and Racan, the latter sighing hopelessly over the attractions of the dignified Marquise, gave her the romantic name of Arthenice, and forthwith the other members of the coterie took some nom de parnasse, by which they were familiarly known. They read the "Astree" of d'Urfe, that platonic dream of a disillusioned lover; discussed the romances of Calprenede and the sentimental Bergeries of Racan. Such Arcadian pictures seemed to have a singular fascination for these courtly dames and plumed cavaliers. They tried to reproduce ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... whether I should undertake the long journey. "The journey back will be detestable," I muttered, and taking up the pen again I wrote: "Your letter contains a phrase which fills me with dismay: you say, 'Virtue must be its own reward,' and this would seem that you are determined to be more aggressively Platonic than ever. Doris, this is ill news indeed; you would not have me consider it ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... a fragment which breaks off in the middle of a sentence. It was designed to be the second part of a trilogy, which, like the other great Platonic trilogy of the Sophist, Statesman, Philosopher, was never completed. Timaeus had brought down the origin of the world to the creation of man, and the dawn of history was now to succeed the philosophy of nature. The Critias is also connected with the Republic. ...
— Critias • Plato
... that the present tendency to unbelief has wider range and fresher foundations than our fathers knew. The belief in the natural immortality of the human soul whether of Platonic or Christian origin is shaken to an extent not known in a century. The doubts of Huxley, the denials of Haeckel had a purely scientific basis. The suspension of consciousness by sleep, by accident, by drugs, the decay of mind by old age and by disease are ...
— The Things Which Remain - An Address To Young Ministers • Daniel A. Goodsell
... species which has not yet been distinguished—biographies composed by some domestic friend, or by some enthusiast who works with love. A term is unquestionably wanted for this distinct class. The Germans seem to have invented a Platonic one, drawn from the Greek, psyche, or the soul; for they call this the psychological life. Another attempt has been made, by giving it the scientific term of idiosyncrasy, to denote a peculiarity of disposition. I would call ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... forms at the time to which I refer. The community of plan which is observable in each great group of animals was hypostatised into a Platonic idea with the appropriate name of "archetype," and we were told, as a disciple of Philo-Judaeus might have told us, that this realistic figment was "the archetypal light" by which Nature has been guided amidst the "wreck of worlds." ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... 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
... never dreamed of supposing that this reaction (which extends beyond the limit of the tribe or group) had a 'supernatural' origin! It has been argued that 'tribal morality' is only a set of regulations based on the convenience of the elders of the tribe: is, in fact, as the Platonic Thrasymachus says, 'the interest of the strongest.' That does not appear to me to be demonstrated; but this is no place for a discussion of the origin of morals. 'The interest of the strongest,' and of the nomadic group, would be ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... replying as an Epicurean, and here and there Epicurean opinions are expressed in the fragments of the original work that Origen has preserved. But Origen himself was somewhat puzzled to find that the main principles of the author were rather Platonic or Neo-platonic than Epicurean, and this observation has been confirmed by modern enquiry. The Celsus of Origen is ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... miracles and some lack of local knowledge, that it is not the work of a Palestinian Jew. Opening with a reference to the Logos, it strikes the key of Alexandrian philosophy. It is, indeed, rather theological than historical, so that it has been not inaptly compared to the Platonic, in contrast to the Xenophontic, account of Socrates, the theology seems like that of a post-evangelical era. Martineau's conclusion is that "the only Gospel which is composed and not merely compiled and edited, and for which, therefore, ...
— The Religious Situation • Goldwin Smith
... Italian opera was what it is now, frivolous, insincere, imbecile. Its sole function was, and always has been, to help idlers of the upper classes to while away their evenings. The absurd notion of a Platonic music was rivalled by the absurdity of the composition. The inane dialogue was made up of interminable recitative, in the midst of which an occasional chorus—introduced in conformity with supposed classical practice—must have ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... been 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
... significance of the doctrine for intellectual history. Character of the opposition to the evolutionary theory. Popular confusion of 'Darwinism' with 'evolution.' Revolutionary effects of the new point of view. Does away with conception of fixed species (Platonic ideas) that had previously dominated speculation. The genetic method adopted in all the organic sciences, including the newer social sciences. Problem of adjusting history to the discoveries of the past 50 years. Bearing of evolution on the theory of progress. Organic evolution ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... had been both, officiously, to say I was, although I never intended to conceal it. In short, I acquitted myself so well with both ladies, that a family intimacy was consented to. I renewed my visits; and we accounted to one another's honour, by entering upon a kind of Platonic system, in which sex was to have no ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... of antiquity, running after witches to hear them recite the Common Prayer and the Creed, as a rational test of guilt or innocence;[8]—The gentle spirit of Dr. Henry More, girding on the armour of persecution, and rousing itself from a Platonic reverie on the Divine Life, to assume the hood and cloak of a familiar of the Inquisition;[9]—and the patient and enquiring Boyle, putting aside for a while his searches for the grand Magisterium, and listening, ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... most observers as a very tempting one in any respect, though it carried with it some exceptional and rather eccentric guarantees for that position at court and in society on which Germaine was set. The King of Sweden, Gustavus, whose family oddity had taken, among less excusable forms, that of a platonic devotion to Marie Antoinette, gave a sort of perpetual brevet of his ministry at Paris to the Baron de Stael-Holstein, a nobleman of little fortune and fair family. This served, using clerical language, as his "title" to ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... myself. How's that? On the contrary, I want to live and rescue her. I could serve or die for that child with pleasure—without even the reward of a smile! There must be something peculiar here. Is it—can it be Platonic love? Of course that must be it. Yes, I've often heard and read of that sort of love before. I know it now, ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne
... of female loveliness and wifely affection, soft, warm, chaste, gentle, and ardent; not sensual nor yet platonic, but that living, breathing, warm-hearted love which fits woman for the fond mother and faithful wife.—Spenser, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... for a moment aside), the Epithalamion and the Four Hymns rank undoubtedly highest. For splendour of imagery, for harmony of verse, for delicate taste and real passion, the Epithalamion excels all other poems of its class, and the Four Hymns express a rapture of Platonic enthusiasm, which may indeed be answerable for the unreadable Psyches and Psychozoias of the next age, but which is itself married to immortal verse in ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... easy to justify the sentimentality that characterizes Fritiof's love for Ingeborg, an element in Fritiofs Saga that has been most severely condemned by the critics. To the criticism that this love is too modern and Platonic, Tegnr correctly answers that reverence for the sex was from the earliest times a characteristic of the German people so that the light and coarse view that prevailed among the most cultivated nations of antiquity was a thing quite ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... as an independent literary form is commonly supposed to have been introduced by Plato, whose earliest experiment in it is believed to survive in the Laches. The Platonic dialogue, however, was founded on the mime, which had been cultivated half a century earlier by the Sicilian poets, Sophron and Epicharmus. The works of these writers, which Plato admired and imitated, are lost, but it is believed that they were ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... everybody has a party, either to dine or sup. The company, almost entirely consisting of young people, wait together till twelve o'clock strikes, at which time every one begins to move, and they all fall to work. At what? why, kissing. Each male is successively locked in pure Platonic embrace with each female; and after this grand ceremony, which, of course, creates infinite fun, they separate and go home. This matter is not at all confined to these, but wherever man meets woman it is the peculiar privilege of this hour. The common people ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... what it means to a woman, even a happily married woman like me—[This is spoken with a slight effort, as if she is persuading herself that she is a happily married woman.]—to have an honest friend like you. It's those people who have failed that say there is no such thing as a platonic friendship. ...
— The Climbers - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... of Satan was Valentine, who being a Platonic philosopher, puffed up with the vain opinion of his learning, and full of resentment for another's being preferred to him in an election to a certain bishopric in Egypt, as Tertullian relates,[4] revived the errors of Simon ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... soul, was therefore right. Modeste loved; she loved with that rare platonic love, so little understood, the first illusion of a young girl, the most delicate of all sentiments, a very dainty of the heart. She drank deep draughts from the chalice of the unknown, the vague, the visionary. She admired the blue plumage ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... disarmed, seated in the shadows, which the poet of Theos wished to engrave upon a sweet cup of spring; a smiling Arcadia; a Decameron of sentiment; a tender meditation; attentions with vague glances; words that lull the soul; a platonic gallantry, a leisure occupied by the heart, an idleness of youthful company; a court of amorous thoughts; the emotional and playful courtesy of the young newly married leaning upon the offered arm; eyes without fever, desire without appetite, voluptuousness without desire, audacious ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... realized, is undoubted, even in manners and morals, which are both at root only motor habits. Indeed consciousness itself is largely and perhaps wholly corrective in its very essence and origin. Thus life is adjusted to new environments; and if the Platonic postulate be correct, that untaught virtues that come by nature and instinct are no virtues, but must be made products of reflection and reason, the sphere and need of this principle is great indeed. But this implies a distrust of physical human nature as deep-seated ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... adds to her agony the clear consciousness that she cannot feel her plight as more passionate natures might. But he allows her, at the last, an intimation of immortality. From her unresponding beauty, she sees, her sculptor lover has caught a madness eventually sublimated to a Platonic vision which, partially forgetful of her as an individual, has made him and his works great. Without, in the common way, modeling her at all, he has snared the essence of her spirit and has set it—as such mortal things ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... was, indeed, rather too unfair that a female should be made responsible for eleven children upon the faith of a misinterpreted abbreviation, and the decision of a librarian.[572] It is, however, satisfactory to think that the love of Petrarch was not platonic. The happiness which he prayed to possess but once and for a moment was surely not of the mind,[573] and something so very real as a marriage project, with one who has been idly called a shadowy nymph, may be, perhaps, detected in at least six ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... vengeance on him. He returned to his friends, and entered for a competition in minstrelsy. While in the middle of his song, which would have gained him the prize, Venus visited him with sudden madness, and throwing away all cant about pure platonic love, he chanted the praise of foul carnal lust and the joy of living with the Goddess of Love in the heart of the hills. Coming to himself, he went on a pilgrimage to Rome, and asked and was refused the Pope's forgiveness. Then he returned to Venus, and so the story ends with the eternal ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... connexion what it might, Halifax meant to tell the world that it might be proclaimed in all its relation to the name of Newton. To those who cannot, under all the circumstances, believe the connexion to have been what is called platonic, the probability that there was a private marriage is precisely the probability that Newton would not have sanctioned the dishonour of his own niece: and even if the connexion were only that of friendship, Newton must have sanctioned the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... Claude Duval penitent. His wife in his arms. The young lady conveying in dumb show how platonic has been her attachment, of which, nevertheless, she seems a little ashamed. The sheriff benignant; the turnkeys amused; the comic servant, obviously in liquor, brandishing his fiddlestick, and the orchestra playing "God save ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... it must be admitted that this platonic caress created in her maidenly bosom a nervous thrill of pleasure not quite consistent in a young woman known to give the "savate" to young gentlemen who approached such familiarity, and who plumed herself ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... powerful genius; Racine, elegiac and graceful; Moliere, inimitable; Voltaire, supremely witty; Bossuet and Pascal, incomparable in argument. A professor of philosophy may make a name by explaining how Plato is Platonic. Another discourses on the history of words, without troubling himself about ideas. One explains Aeschylus, another tells you that communes were communes, and neither more nor less. These original ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... Troubadours at Home, says that it was their expedient to make love a "science and an art. Rules were devised, and passion was to be bound with a rigid etiquette like that of chivalry or social intercourse. It was to be mainly an affair of sentiment and honor, not wholly Platonic to be sure, but thoroughly desensualized. Four stages were marked off in the lover's progress: first, he adored for a season without venturing to confess it; secondly, he adored as a mere suppliant; ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... will. All students of Plato know that the different grades of objectification of will which are manifested in countless individuals, and exist as their unrealized types or as the eternal forms of things, are the Platonic Ideas. Thus these various grades are related to individual things as their eternal forms ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... 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 ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... resumed Belinda, 'the chaste delight, the calm happiness, of this one week of Platonic love, is too much for me!' Cymon was about to suggest that it was too little for him, but he stopped himself, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... fleeting symbolisms that suggest themselves now and then. The confession sometimes made by the poet, that high-flown compliment and not true despair is intended, prepares us to accept the symbolic application where it forces itself upon us, and to feel the presence here and there of platonic or spiritual shadowings. Those who do not find pleasure in the Arcadian world of the sonneteer's fancy, may still justify their taste in the aspiration that speaks in his ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Phillis - Licia • Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher
... when they introduce a miser, make him address his gold as his mistress; as something to be seen, felt, and hugged; as capable of satisfying two of the senses at least. The substitution of a thin, unsatisfying medium in the place of the good old tangible metal, has made avarice quite a Platonic affection in comparison with the seeing, touching, and handling pleasures of the old Chrysophilites. A bank-note can no more satisfy the touch of a true sensualist in this passion, than Creusa could return her husband's embrace in the shades. See the Cave of Mammon in Spenser; Barabas's contemplation ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... The Platonic Republic has become proverbial as an example—and a striking one—of imaginary perfection, such as can exist only in the brain of the idle thinker; and Brucker ridicules the philosopher for maintaining that a prince can never govern ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... Florence (1438) called in behalf of the union of the Churches (among these were Pletho and his pupil Bessarion; Nicolas Cusanus was one of the legates invited), while part were fugitives from Constantinople after its capture by the Turks in 1453. The Platonic Academy, whose most celebrated member, Marsilius Ficinus, translated Plato and the Neoplatonists into Latin, was founded in 1440 on the suggestion of Georgius Gemistus Pletho[1] under the patronage of Cosimo dei ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... to convict it of what he called Philistinism; but it is no longer devoid of taste or indifferent to beauty. And it has never been a contemptible artist in life. Mr Bridges describes the progress of vulgarity as an inverted Platonic progress. We descend, he says, from ugly forms to ugly conduct, and from ugly conduct to ugly principles, till we finally arrive at the absolute ugliness which is vulgarity. This identification of insensibility ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... spirit, and the two drifted into a pleasant little wrangle—the kind of sparring match by which youths and maidens frequently endeavour to convince themselves, and the world at large, of the purely Platonic nature ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... Great Charlemagne, or vice versa, he is constantly out of focus. The perfect reviewer would be (and the only reviewer whose reviews are worth reading is he who more or less approximates to this ideal) the Platonic or pseudo-Platonic philosopher who is "second best in everything," who has enough special knowledge not to miss merits or defects, and enough general knowledge to estimate the particular subject at, and not above, its relative value to the whole. There have been good critics who were unable ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... dreamed of a friendship with him, perhaps more perfect and helpful than any she had yet known; but they had met, and in that one glance had been revealed to her a natural affinity deeper than any of which she had ever dreamed, and the impossibility of a calm, Platonic friendship between kindred spirits ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... of the Academies. During the Ecumenical Council of Florence, Giovanni de' Medici, fired with enthusiasm for the study of Platonic philosophy, brilliantly expounded by the learned Greek, Gemisto, conceived the plan of promoting the revival of classical learning by the formation of an academy, in imitation of that founded by the immortal Plato. Under such lofty ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... lastly, your humble slave of the pen, being an American,—at the prospect of such a heterogeneous assembly of men and women, you will suppose, my dear lady, that I am about to embark upon the cerulean waters of a potentially platonic republic, humbly steering my craft by the charts of a recent voyager, who, after making a noble but ineffectual attempt to discover the Isles of the Blessed, appears to have stumbled into the ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... good deal more. Moreover, even when absent, he could generally have given a shrewd guess where they were and what they were doing. Without altogether neglecting the other claims at which Rickmansworth had hinted, and which resolved themselves into a long-standing and entirely platonic attachment, he yet devoted himself with zest and assiduity to ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... yet by any means secure. What increased Paul's anxiety was the fact that some scholars, appointed secretaries of the briefs (Abbreviatori) by Pius and deprived of office by himself, were members of the Platonic Society. Their animosity against him was both natural and ill-concealed. At the same time the bitter hatred avowed by Laurentius Valla against the temporal power might in an age of conjurations have meant ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... 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
... to himself, "is in love with Cinta. It is a platonic passion: with him, it couldn't be anything else. But it annoys me greatly.... I'm going to say ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... is not geometrical, for it proceeds on the motion of a point: the words "on account of the simplicity of the impulsive motion, such a line must be either straight or circular" will suffice to show how Platonic it is. Taylor certainly professed a kind of heathenism. D'lsraeli said, "Mr. T. Taylor, the Platonic philosopher and the modern Plethon,[423] consonant to that philosophy, professes polytheism." Taylor printed this in large type, in a page by itself ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... the relation of brother and sister, the same feeling may exist between two persons who feel as brother and sister towards each other. Moreover, the capacity for that kind of friendship belongs to the choicer spirits who have a natural inclination for Platonic feasts, such as poets, artists, philosophers, and generally, people who cannot be measured by the common standard. If this be a proof that I was not made of the stuff artists, poets, and great men are made of,—the worse for me. Most likely it is so, since I am nothing but Leon Ploszowski. ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... some months of platonic love, of pressing of hands, of kisses rapidly stolen behind a door, the Captain had declared that he would ask permission to exchange, and leave the town immediately, if she would not grant him a meeting, a real meeting, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... 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 something of the original meaning still appears ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... at Constantinople. Studied at Alexandria and Athens, and succeeded Syrianus in the Neo Platonic School. Died 485, Several of ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, Vol. XII., America, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... co-ordination between the ideas of the human reason and the laws of the natural world. Science, the real knowledge of that natural world, is to be attained, not by observation, experiment, analysis, patient generalisation, but by the evolution or recovery of those ideas directly from within, by a sort of Platonic "recollection"; every group of observed facts remaining an enigma until the appropriate idea is struck upon them from the mind of a Newton, or a Cuvier, the genius in whom sympathy with the universal reason becomes entire. In the next place, he conceives that this reason or intelligence in nature ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... 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 ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... explains the changes of the natural world by the hypothesis of certain unconscious forces; and the sum of these forces, in their combined action, constitutes the scientific conception of nature. But, side by side with the growth of this more mechanical conception, an older and more spiritual, Platonic, philosophy has always maintained itself, a philosophy more of instinct than of the understanding, the mental starting-point of which is not an observed sequence of outward phenomena, but some such feeling as most of us have on the first warmer days in spring, when we seem to feel the ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... passions some influence must be ascribed to Charlotte von Stein, a woman in whom, for 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
... Countenance.' And it will be no great matter if it is in some other person's hand, for as well as I recollect Dulcinea can neither read nor write, nor in the whole course of her life has she seen handwriting or letter of mine, for my love and hers have been always platonic, not going beyond a modest look, and even that so seldom that I can safely swear I have not seen her four times in all these twelve years I have been loving her more than the light of these eyes that the earth will one day devour; and perhaps even of those four ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... dislike them in consequence. There were so many things that she hadn't yet learned to dislike, in spite of her friend's earnest efforts to teach her. She had the idea vividly (that was the marvel) of the cruelty of man, of his immemorial injustice; but it remained abstract, platonic; she didn't detest him in consequence. What was the use of her having that sharp, inspired vision of the history of the sex (it was, as she had said herself, exactly like Joan of Arc's absolutely supernatural apprehension of the state of France) if she wasn't going to carry ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... Finally, I recommend to your unceasing and most respectful study 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
... in short, and to have been raised by him to the rank of "pious opinion," if not of dogma. Now, Lucretius represents nothing but the reaction against all this dread of future doom, whether that dread was inculcated by Platonic philosophy or by popular belief. The latter must have been much the more powerful and widely diffused. It follows that the Romans, at least, must have been haunted by a constant dread of judgment to come, from which, but ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... principle of all virtues; it is God Himself. Next to it in dignity comes humility. The beauty of the soul, he says in the true Platonic vein, is to be well ordered, with the higher faculties above the lower, each in its proper place. The will should be supreme over the understanding, the understanding over the senses. Whatever we will earnestly, that we have, and no one can ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... 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 in all ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... two principal meanings. In the Platonic sense of it, it is the search after what is beautiful, great, noble, pure,—after what, as being of the very real nature of the soul, attracts, fills, and delights it. But there is another sort of love, which does not pursue greatness and beauty, but which gives ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... walked out in the afternoon, and, as I returned, saw the evening star set over a poor man's cottage with other thoughts and feelings than I shall ever have again. Oh for the revolution of the great Platonic year, that those times might come over again! I could sleep out the three hundred and sixty-five thousand intervening years very contentedly!—The picture is left: the table, the chair, the window where I learned to construe ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... not, let us in the end ask ourselves, here and there at least, a man who is of real account in the world of affairs, and who is—not simply a luke-warm Platonic friend or an opportunist advocate—but an impassioned promoter of the woman's suffrage movement? One knows quite well that there is. But then one suspects —one perhaps discerns by "the spirit sense"—that this impassioned promoter of woman's suffrage is, on the sequestered side of his life, an ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... of love. There is filial love, platonic love, the love leading to marriage, and the greatest love of all, mother love. Too many desecrate love by regarding it as a pastime, or selling all that passes for it, for favors, ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... pointed out, there could be no possible objection to this conspiracy, since they had decided that their friendship was to be of a purely platonic nature. It was a severe trial to him, he confessed, to be forced to put aside certain dreams he had had of the future—mad dreams, perhaps, but such as had seemed very dear and very plausible ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... submerged in the unity that is Wagner; and so reconcile life's duality by balancing its opposing laughters in a definite form—thereby sending out into life a profounder duality than existed before. A Platonic equipoise, Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence—the only real philosophic problem, therefore one of which these ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... "Introducer." In his clutches one is helpless. It is impossible to escape from such philanthropic tyranny. He, in his freshness, imagines that to present human beings to each other is his mission in this world and moves through life making these platonic unions, oblivious, as are other match-makers, of the misery ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... with her ladies, she spied M. Alanus, one of the king's chaplains, a silly, old, [4563]hard-favoured man fast asleep in a bower, and kissed him sweetly; when the young ladies laughed at her for it, she replied, that it was not his person that she did embrace and reverence, but, with a platonic love, the divine beauty of [4564]his soul. Thus in all ages virtue hath been adored, admired, a singular lustre hath proceeded from it: and the more virtuous he is, the more gracious, the more admired. No man so much followed upon ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... and are not without their influence here. Winkelmann was the parasite of the fragments that 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 system, and a prodigious ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... this sketch, as in some silhouette, bring back the antique life, and link the present with the past—a hint, perhaps, for reticence in our descriptions. The gentlemen and ladies of the court had spent a summer night in long debate on love, rising to the height of mystical Platonic rapture on the lips of Bembo, when one of them exclaimed, "The day has broken!" "He pointed to the light which was beginning to enter by the fissures of the windows. Whereupon we flung the casements wide upon that side of the palace which looks toward the high ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... and 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 to ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... withered heart. She had heard it said that men of fifty were apt to love young girls of just that kind. Before the colonel had come regularly to the house Sylvie had heard in the Tiphaines' salon strange stories of his life and morals. Old maids preserve in their love-affairs the exaggerated Platonic sentiments which young girls of twenty are wont to profess; they hold to these fixed doctrines like all who have little experience of life and no personal knowledge of how great social forces modify, impair, and bring to nought such grand and noble ideas. The mere thought of being jilted ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... eyes like the fish-pools of Heshbon, with wondrous depth of intelligent gaze." But, though a poet, it would be a great error to suppose that Lyall was an idealist, if by that term is meant one who, after a platonic fashion, indulges in ideas which are wholly visionary and unpractical. He had, indeed, ideals. No man of his imagination and mental calibre could be without them. But they were ideals based on a solid foundation ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... why should the blamer gar thee blaming bow? * How be consoled for thee that art so tender bough? Bright being! on my vitals cost thou prey, and drive * My heart before platonic passion's[FN490] force to bow. Thy Turk like[FN491] glances havoc deal in core of me, * As furbished sword thin ground at curve could never show: Thou weigh's" me down with weight of care, while I have not * Strength e'en ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... wanted to—he had fought himself mentally away from that conviction time after time; had threshed over every scintilla of evidence, searching futilely for something which would clear this radiant woman whom he had met but once. Carroll's interest—however platonic—was intensely personal. The woman had impressed herself indelibly upon him. It was perhaps her air of game helplessness; perhaps the stark tragedy which he had seen reflected in her eyes when he had first entered her home and saw that she ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... analogy which helps 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 ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... towards each other just as we are now," she continued, "and although I intended to torment you till you agreed I was worth an occasional kiss on the forehead in return for mine—which would not at all take us out of the platonic, or rather plutonic, regions in which you so sternly insist we must abide—I shall give you my word to cease from active hostilities for six whole months. Just think—I undertake to be content for the next six months with kissing you on ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... he does not stand alone, but is the representative and exponent of a certain school of ascetic thought whose tendency is diametrically contrary to that pseudo-mysticism which we have dealt with elsewhere, and have ascribed to a confusion of neo-platonic and Christian principles. This counter-tendency misses the Catholic mean in other respects and owes its faultiness, as we shall see, to some very analogous fallacies. If in our chapter on "The True and the False Mysticism," it was needful to ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... enthusiast or a sentimentalist, but one who aspired only to see reasoned truth, and whose thoughts are clearly explained in his language. There is no foreign element either of Egypt or of Asia to be found in his writings. And more than any other Platonic work the Symposium is Greek both in style and subject, having a beauty 'as of a statue,' while the companion Dialogue of the Phaedrus is marked by a sort of Gothic irregularity. More too than in any other of his Dialogues, Plato is emancipated from ...
— Symposium • Plato
... grey-headed old 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 |
