"Platonic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... glances, and presence have the subtle power to fill his thoughts, quicken his pulse, stir his soul, and awaken his whole nature into new life. He usually passes through a luminous haze of congeniality, friendship, Platonic affinity, or even brotherly regard, till something suddenly clears up the mist and he finds, like the first man, lonely in Eden, that there is but one woman for him in all ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... took it out of my mouth," said Bones. "It sounds inexplicable that I can be interested in a platonic, fatherly kind of way in the future of ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... her house again, and to return to it as soon as he could stand on his feet. The beautiful social customs of eighteenth-century Italy authorised and even imposed upon a man who had accepted the position of cavaliere servente (a sort of pseudo-platonic vice-husbandship which covered illicit connections with a worldly propriety) to attend upon his lady from the moment of her getting up in the morning to the moment when she returned home or dismissed her guests at night, ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... proceeded became more animated, owing particularly to my accusing him of viewing all politics from a Hungarian point of view, which he did not deny, though he maintained that the dispute was a mere platonic one, as the Entente peace terms appeared to be such that Austria would be left with much less than Hungary. I was also first to state the terms under which we could make peace; then only would it be seen ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... believe, the text of Porphyry really sets forth the theology of the magi, slightly modified by Platonic ideas based on popular beliefs of the Greeks and perhaps of the barbarians, we shall be able to draw interesting conclusions in regard to the mysteries of Mithra. For instance, one of the principles ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... "Intellectual System" along all the "wide watered" shores 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, as if spell-bound, ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... nature manifestation of the rough, the gross, the instinctive, and offer for meditation this saying of Michelet: "Cloth woven by a weaver is just as natural as that a spider weaves. All is in one Being, all is in the Idea and for the Idea, the latter being understood in the way Platonic substantialism has been interpreted...." ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... difficulties. At Rieka one hopes that the largest and wisest party, the Autonomists, will now come into their rights; no doubt a good many of those opportunist citizens who, at the time of the Italian occupation, developed into Italianissimi, after having previously been known as more or less platonic lovers of Italy, Hungary, or Croatia with ambitions chiefly centred on their native town, will presently assure you that in the Free State they are convinced Free Staters; but the local politicians have been ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... 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 balance at ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... traditions, from Folk-lore 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 for the testimony of Lucretius and his manifest ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... 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 course of a year. He was as romantic, in his intercourse with me, as I was. Consequently ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... 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. Fortunately, his wrath did not extend to the offspring of ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... least possible, if we allow that a Mind presides over the universe, and not a mere brute necessity, a Law (absurd misnomer) without a Lawgiver; and to it (strangely enough coinciding here and there with the Platonic doctrine of Eternal Ideas existing in the Divine Mind) all fresh inductive discovery seems to ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... 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 ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... the pangs of jealousy because his younger brother had been able to see Polly before she would allow him to call. Then he remembered his role to act the part of a platonic ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... 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
... light-hearted society, gentle, idle, full of graceful thoughts and delicate perceptions, brilliant reflections and light charms; he regrets the gilded chairs, the huge built-up wigs, the small sword of the 'cavalier servente,' and the abbe's silk mantle, the semi-platonic friendships, the jests borrowed from Goldoni, the 'pastoral' scandal, and exchange of compliments and madrigals and epigrams, and all the brilliant powdered train of that ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... about the fair Madame, I must say, in justice both to her and myself, that any grace with which she has been pleased to honor me is not to be misconstrued. You are not to imagine any but the most Platonic of liaisons. She is as high-strung as an Arabian steed,—proud, heroic, romantic, and French! and such must be permitted to take their own time and way, which we in our gaucherie can only humbly wonder at I ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... Platonic friendships became the rage. David himself, as leader, maintained a dozen such, chiefest of which was with the newly finished Miss Grey. At first her very soul revolted against a friendship of this sort. She was lovely, and she knew it; with lovely clothes she made herself ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... and origin of the doctrine of the Trinity, the Unitarians find in the speculations of those Christianized philosophers of the second century, whose minds were strongly tinctured with the Platonic philosophy, combined with the emanation system, as taught at Alexandria, and held by Philo. From this time they trace the gradual formation of the doctrine through successive ages down to Athanasius ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... stimulants to his brain like these writers. He has entered the Elysian Fields; and the grand and pleasing figures of gods and daemons and demoniacal men, of the "azonic" and the "aquatic gods," daemons with fulgid eyes, and all the rest of the Platonic rhetoric, exalted a little under the African sun, sail before his eyes. The acolyte has mounted the tripod over the cave at Delphi; his heart dances, his sight is quickened. These guides speak of the gods with such depth and with such ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... Greek philosopher, a member of the Platonic School and founder of the New Academy, who held in opposition to the Stoics that perception was not knowledge, denied that we had any accurate criterion of truth, and ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... in 'Blix' just what such a woman's name would imply—a story of a frank, fearless girl comrade to all men who are true and honest because she is true and honest. How she saved the man she fishes and picnics with in a spirit of outdoor platonic friendship, makes a pleasant story, and a perfect contrast to the author's 'McTeague.' A splendid and ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... 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 show that the principles of Christian monasticism ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... imagination and keen (though perhaps not delicate) sensibility, he was strongly attracted toward the softer sex. But a certain austerity of morals, and that purity of feeling which is the inseparable shadow of one's devotion to lofty aims, always kept him within the bounds of Platonic affection. Yet there is enough in Beethoven's letters, as scanty as their indications are in this direction, to show what ardor and ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... handkerchief, he was in the seventh heaven. As his intents were not honorable nor his purpose marriage, it made no difference whether the lady was married or single, young or old. Whether the love remained upon a Platonic and purely poetic basis depended, of course, entirely upon the lady and her watchful relatives. If the family were poor and the lover rich, these things might have a bearing. We hear of alliances in those days, not dishonorable, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... by this pretender. For my part, to look at 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 ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... 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 ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... platonic relationship, I assure you," the tree herself agreed. It would have been silly for her to pretend not to have overheard, since the two were still standing almost ...
— The Venus Trap • Evelyn E. Smith
... 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
... you know that 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 ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... Italy; its reappearance in last century B.C. under the influence of Posidonius, who combined Stoicism with Platonic Pythagoreanism. Cicero affected by this revival; his Somnium Scipionis and other later works. His mysticism takes practical form on the death of his daughter; letters to Atticus about a fanum. Individualisation of the Manes; freedom of belief on such questions. Further evidence of Cicero's ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... denied his request. Young men went to Weimar from all parts of Europe to kiss the hand of these great transformers of aesthetic taste. There was not a sovereign within the pale of civilization who did not envy Karl August's treasures. The story of the literary achievements, of the Platonic friendships, and of the evening entertainments of Weimar, forms one of the most remarkable chapters in the whole ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... few personal questions about Stella, but Millard's answers indicated that he had not contemplated or even hoped for a reconciliation, that his interest in his former wife had become thoroughly platonic. Just now, however, he seemed unable to keep Manton out ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... PLATONIC LOVE An arrangement in which a man and woman attempt a correct imitation of a pair of ...
— The Foolish Dictionary • Gideon Wurdz
... observed that women always prefer other men to their own husbands. Yet, although unmarried, perhaps because unmarried, he heartily admired many clever women; formed with them sedate but genuine friendships, the l'amour sans ailes, sometimes called "Platonic" by persons who have not read Plato; found in their illogical clear-sightedness, in their [Greek word which cannot be reproduced], to use the master's own untranslatable phrase, a titillating stimulus which ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... off from the Duchess of Portsmouth—then the star of Whitehall—the heart of Charles, she found, at all events, in St. Evremond, one of those French, platonic, life-long friends, who, as Chateaubriand worshipped Madame Recamier, adored to the last the exiled niece of Mazarin. Every day, when in her old age and his, the warmth of love had subsided into the ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... she was reviewing all the men who with her had sought to throw off the mantle of the Platonic and invest themselves in the more romantic habiliments of courtship. One lesson had been taught her from the first, and she had learned it thoroughly—too thoroughly! She was no ordinary girl to give way to unwise throbbing of the pulses. Her future must run side by side with ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... 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 ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... of the Introduction is Taylor's notion of the way to find the circumference. It 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 ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... and impressive a defense of this common human feeling, that the doctrine of the reality of abstract objects has been known as the platonic theory of ideas ever since. Abstract Beauty, for example, is for Plato a perfectly definite individual being, of which the intellect is aware as of something additional to all the perishing beauties of the earth. "The true order of going," he says, in the often quoted passage in ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... when we shall have outgrown it. These do not use their imaginations enough. Even if Edenic or Millennial tigers could digest grass and apples, are they therefore immortal? Is a species to live on forever in one representative, or one Platonic pair? ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... people, if you only knew!" and then laughed and then mused in a marked manner; and the young man with the narrow forehead and glasses cleared his throat and asked the young man in the orange tie whether he believed that Platonic love was possible. Mrs. Goopes said she believed in nothing else, and with that she glanced at Ann Veronica, rose a little abruptly, and directed Goopes and the shy young man in the ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... 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 240 She stood: he pass'd, ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... love-poem is founded on the Platonic notion, that souls were united in a pre-existent state, that love is the yearning of the spirit to reunite with the spirit with which it formerly made one—and which it discovers on earth. The idea has ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... wood which he finds around him. This wood is the means by which the alchemy is performed; and having gathered up the bundles the Magian leaves Hasan to his fate. The youth, after despairing of life, finds his way to a palace where dwell seven maidens, with whom he remains for awhile in Platonic friendship. When they are summoned away by their father for a two months' absence, they leave him their keys, straitly charging him not to open a certain door. He disregards their wishes, and finds within a magnificent pavilion enclosing a basin brimful of water, ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... the feeling of a bare quality means to represent it or not. It can DO nothing to the quality beyond resembling it, simply because an abstract quality is a thing to which nothing can be done. Being without context or environment or principium individuationis, a quiddity with no haecceity, a platonic idea, even duplicate editions of such a quality (were they possible), would be indiscernible, and no sign could be given, no result altered, whether the feeling I meant to stand for this edition or for that, or whether it simply resembled the quality without meaning ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... her all that I suspected. I did not reveal to her that at the moment my eye fell upon them my only remaining daughter was gazing up into the face of her male companion with that peculiar look of absorbed attention which has so often wrought the ruin of Platonic friendship. It entered like iron into my parental soul, already quivering with its recent wound, and I murmured to myself, "Oh, my ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... invitation to call upon them. Mrs. Mulrady had not discouraged this mild flirtation. Whether she wished to disconcert Don Caesar for some occult purpose, or whether, like the rest of her sex, she had an overweening confidence in the unheroic, unseductive, and purely platonic character of ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... something negative, or zero at most, that must be added to Ideas to obtain change. In that consists the Platonic "non-being," the Aristotelian "matter"—a metaphysical zero which, joined to the Idea, like the arithmetical zero to unity, multiplies it in space and time. By it the motionless and simple Idea is refracted into a movement spread out indefinitely. In right, there ought to be nothing ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... wooden-featured, blue-faced Major, with his eyes starting out of his head, in whom Miss Tox recognised, as she herself expressed it, 'something so truly military;' and between whom and herself, an occasional interchange of newspapers and pamphlets, and such Platonic dalliance, was effected through the medium of a dark servant of the Major's who Miss Tox was quite content to classify as a 'native,' without connecting him ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... exhalations, and the lava becomes incrusted, as it were, by p 156 the solidification of its outer surface. New masses of rocks are thus formed before our eyes, while the older ones are in their turn converted into other forms by the greater or lesser agency of Platonic forces. Even where no disruption takes place the crystalline moleculres are displaced, combining to form bodies of denser texture. The water presents structures of a totally different nature, as, for instance, concretions ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... a shallow creature by nature, but a wit by the grace of our women here, whom he deals with as of old with the Oxford toasts. He fell into sentiments with my Lady W[alpole] and was happy to catch her at Platonic love: but as she seldom stops there, the poor man will be frightened out of his senses when she shall break the matter to him; for he never dreamt that her purposes were so naught. Lady Mary is so far gone, that to get him from ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... this world: the painter's L'Amour paisible, Love 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 ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... simple bourgeoise Maria, who, to quote Balzac's own words, "fell like a flower from heaven, exacted neither correspondence nor attentions, and said: 'Love me a year and I will love you all my life.'" Though forced to accept the transformation of her relations with her young lover into a purely platonic friendship, she made occasional protests against being supplanted by younger rivals—the imperious Madame de Castries among the number. The birth and growth of his affection for Madame Hanska she appears to have felt and ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... adult in the family worshiped at the shrine of some "ism." Anna professed Israel Zangwill's modified Zionism or Territorialism. This, however, was merely a platonic interest with her. It took up little or none of her time. Her real passion was Minority, a struggling little magazine of "modernistic literature and thought." It was published by a group of radicals of which she was a member. Elsie, on the ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... collocation of persons: "My pride is being your husband, the son of my dear father, and in having Sir William and Lady Hamilton for my friends. While these approve my conduct, I shall not feel or regard the envy of thousands." The matter was passing rapidly into the platonic stage, in which Sir William was also erelong assigned an appropriate, if not wholly flattering, position. "What can I say of hers and Sir William's attention to me? They are in fact, with the exception of you and my ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... could to make her convent-prison less irksome, by frequent visits, by letters, and by presents of flowers and books. It was not long before Shelley's sympathy for this unfortunate lady took the form of love, which, however spiritual and Platonic, was not the less passionate. The result was the composition of "Epipsychidion," the most unintelligible of all his poems to those who have not assimilated the spirit of Plato's "Symposium" and Dante's ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... 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 ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... reserved for Euclid to make his name almost synonymous with geometry. He was born 323 B.C., and belonged to the Platonic sect, which ever attached great importance to mathematics. His "Elements" are still in use, as nearly perfect as any human production can be. They consist of thirteen books. The first four are on plane geometry; the fifth is on ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... growing 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
... 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
... doctrine of; according to the Whigs; according to the Tories; Peace, Address to the Queen concerning (1707). People, madness of the. Peterborough, Earl of, letter from Swift to. Petty, Sir William. Platonic ladies. Political Lying, the Art of. "Political State of Great Britain, The" Popery, the Tories and. Pretender, the, party capital made out of; and the Whigs. Prior, Matthew, contributes to "The Examiner"; stated to be the ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... 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
... unities, and beyond the first adyta—as more ineffable than all silence, and more unknown than all essence,—as holy among the holies, and concealed in the intelligible gods." Such is the piety, such the sublimity, and magnificence of conception, with which the Platonic philosophers speak of that which is in reality in every respect ineffable, when they presume to speak about it, extending the ineffable parturitions of the soul to the ineffable cosensation ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... a month of literary campaigning and the finest platonic discourses, d'Arthez grew bolder, and arrived every day at three o'clock. He retired at six, and returned at nine, to remain until midnight, or one in the morning, with the regularity of an ardent and impatient lover. ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... as summer "lingers in the lap of spring;" so marriage should dally in the lap of courtship. Nature's adolescence of love should never be crowded into a premature marriage. The more personal, the more impatient it is; yet to establish its Platonic aspect takes more time than is usually given it; so that undue haste puts it upon the carnal plane, which soon cloys, ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... In this world of brief sunshine Cosimo appears to us very delightfully as the protector of the arts, the sincere lover of learning, the companion of scholars. To him in some sort the world owes the revival of the Platonic Philosophy, for the Greek Argyropolis lived in his house, and taught Piero his son and Lorenzo his grandson the language of the Gods. When Gemisthus Pletho came to Florence, Cosimo made one of his audience, and was so moved by his eloquence that he ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... 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
... of things. He has banished the poets, and is beginning to use a technical language. He is bitter and satirical, and seems to be sadly conscious of the realities of human life. Yet the ideal glory of the Platonic philosophy is not extinguished. He is still looking for a city in which kings are either philosophers or ...
— Statesman • Plato
... 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 Pater. It was ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... saints. And it is because of things of this kind that many curious people are found to be his worshipers who will never themselves pass forth "to re-behold the stars." They are unwise who find Dante so bitter and theological, so Platonic and devoted, that they cannot open his books. They little know what ambiguous planets, what dark heathen meteors move on the fringe of his great star-lit road. His Earthly Lady, as well as his Heavenly Lady, may have the ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... kinds 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
... resemble man. Epicurus succeeded in barring the door, and admitted nothing more. But the Stoics presently found themselves admitting or insisting that the same consensus proved the existence of daemons, of witchcraft, of divination, and when they combined with the Platonic school, of more ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... so clearly that 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 ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church? What between heretics and Christians?... Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic composition. ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... the 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 grasp over the Duchess by means ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... such persons of a different sex could not possibly be long carried on, without degenerating from the Platonic system of sentimental love. In her paroxysms of dismay, he did not forget to breathe the soft inspirations of his passion, to which she listened with more pleasure, as they diverted the gloomy ideas ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... 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. Just how difficult ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... them; one of the invisible inhabitants of this planet, neither departed souls nor angels; concerning whom the learned Jew, Josephus, and the Platonic Constantinopolitan, Michael Psellus, may be consulted. They are very numerous, and there is no climate or element without ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... called the Apostate, since he proclaimed a change in the established religion, but tolerated Christianity. He was a Platonic philosopher—a man of great virtue and ability, whose life was unstained by vices. But his attempt to restore paganism was senseless and ineffectual. As a popular belief, paganism had expired. His character is warmly praised by Gibbon, and commended by other historians. ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... be implied that Mr. Ditmar's experiences with the opposite sex had been on a property basis. He was one of those busy and successful persons who had never appreciated or acquired the art of quasi-platonic amenities, whose idea of a good time was limited to discreet excursions with cronies, likewise busy and successful persons who, by reason of having married early and unwisely, are strangers to the delights of that higher social ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Plotinus,[276] a 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 guardian. This it was ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... 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 ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... which are proper for their work, and those more certain in their effect than it may be the New Testament is in the rules sufficient for salvation. The perusing of one chapter in the prophecy of Daniel, and accommodating what there they find with the principles of Platonic philosophy as it is now Christianised, would have made the ministry of angels as strong an engine for the working up heroic poetry in our religion as that of the ancients has been to raise theirs by all the fables of their gods, ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... from the absolute collector's point of view—I fear, a weak and false one—is occasionally advanced for books which were formerly in fashion and favour; for example, Sylvester's Du Bartas, the Platonic romances, Townley's French Hudibras, and a hundred—a thousand—ten thousand more. It is thought to be worth while to have a few of these deposed idols to show to your friends when they visit you, that they may join in a homily ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... from 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, ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... In the 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 the nature of ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... says that these lines were written under the influence of spleen. A belief in the existence of a superior Being was a necessity for the fiery and tender nature of Tasso. He was, besides, far too Platonic to try to reconcile such contrary opinions. When he wrote those lines, he probably was in want of a piece of ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... told you before, that she is pure. Consider the Lady Eletta, of Verona, whose thighs were like milk; think you for this they were abstract from the world in general, withdrawn in the invisible and intangible, which is the pure, according to the Platonic doctrine? You would be much mistaken if ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... FitzGerald was the author of "Euphranor" [1851], a Platonic Dialogue on Youth; "Polonius": a Collection of Wise Saws and Modern Instances [1852]; and translations of the "Agamemnon" of AEschylus [1865]; and the "Oedipus Tyrannus" and "Oedipus Coloneus" of Sophocles. Of these translations the "Agamemnon" probably ranks next to the Rubaiyat in merit. To the ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... is 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 ...
— Critias • Plato
... impression that there was no one in the room, enforced his arguments by other than conventional means. But military lips, when applied personally, proved to be a rhetoric as unsuccessful as military words. The maid was platonic, and something more than platonic; and the hero got so much the worst of it, that he gave up the battle, and changed the subject to a conscript in his charge, who had locked himself in his bed-room and would not answer. How was he to know whether ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... 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 were but the froth of his genius, ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... inductive philosophy very nice. He had read something about it in Macaulay. He liked that Platonic question very much. It bordered upon poetry and mysticism Then St. Augustine! That would be charming. He had always such a love for St. Augustine! But Fenelon? The "dove of Cambrai" versus the ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... 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 Celtic readers for omitting many stanzas ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... things he too has felt, but [16] which have never been expressed, or at least never so truly, before. The workshops of the artists, who can select and set before us what is really most distinguished in visible life, are open to him. He thinks that the old Platonic, or the new Baconian philosophy, has been better explained than by the authors themselves, or with some striking original development, this very month. In the quiet heat of early summer, on the dusty gold morning, the music comes, louder at intervals, above the hum of voices from some ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... 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 ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... Maximus Tyriensis, a platonic philosopher, and a man of considerable knowledge, observes, that "notwithstanding the great contention and variety of opinions which have existed concerning the nature and essence of God, yet the law and ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume II (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... your Protean vices pace. Pinch you but in one vice, away you fly To some new frisk of contrariety. You roll like snow-balls, gathering as you run, 20 And get seven devils, when dispossess'd of one. Your Venus once was a Platonic queen; Nothing of love beside the face was seen; But every inch of her you now uncase, And clap a vizard-mask upon the face. For sins like these, the zealous of the land, With little hair, and little or no band, Declare how circulating pestilences Watch, every twenty years, to ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... 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 course of an education, which I hope will only end with your life, ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... 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, a single writer is responsible, ...
— The Religious Situation • Goldwin Smith
... 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 Brutus say that ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... a man and a woman should be called by another name. It cannot be wholly Platonic (3); it need not be wholly Dantesque. Yet women generally strive to make it the one; and men often try to make it the other. And ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... 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. ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... when it comes—he even 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 go—everlastingly ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... good only in so far as we participate in the eternal reality; and the communion is effected whenever we adore beauty, whether in nature, or in passionate love, or in the inspiration of poetry. We shall have to say something presently about the effects of this Platonic idealism on Shelley's conception of love; here we need only notice that it inspired him to translate Plato's 'Symposium', a dialogue occupied almost entirely with theories about love. He was not, however, well ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... 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 ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... religious periodicals, and among them in the "Prospective Review," by my friend James Martineau. I had been about the same time attacked in a book called the "Eclipse of Faith," written (chiefly against my treatise on the Soul) in the form of a Platonic Dialogue; in which a sceptic, a certain Harrington, is made to indulge in a great deal of loose and bantering argumentation, with the view of ridiculing my religion, and doing so by ways of which ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... 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, not alive to the consequences of encouraging ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... reference to this distinction in the present writer's essay on The Dynamic Foundation of Knowledge provoked at the instance of one critic the allegation that it is not borne out by a critical study of the Platonic texts. That is a matter of little moment and one upon which the writer cannot claim to pronounce. The important point is that in one way or another Plato undoubtedly distinguished between and indeed contrasted the idea and the substantial form. No trace of the solipsism ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... conveys us to the scene (he will afterwards use it repeatedly) 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 also clerk of that town, and his old friend ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... "The sun is the Platonic Good; it lights the world, but does not warm it. By its illumination we see the river in which we are involved; see and judge, and condemn, and are swept away. That we can condemn is our greatness; by that we are children of ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... Johnson continued the same oeconomy of life after marriage, which they had pursued before it. They lived in separate houses; nothing appeared in their behaviour inconsistent in their decorum, and beyond the limits of platonic love. However unaccountable this renunciation of marriage rites might appear to the world, it certainly arose, not from any consciousness of a too near consanguinity between him and Mrs. Johnson, although the general voice of some was willing to make them both ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... miles round, contrived to confine his naughtiness strictly to play-hours, while he learnt everything which was to be learnt with marvellous quickness, and so utterly fulfilled the ideal of a bottle-boy (for of him, too, as of all things, I presume, an ideal exists eternally in the supra-sensual Platonic universe), that Bolus told his father,—"In hours, sir, he takes care of my business as well as I could myself; but out of hours, sir, I believe he is possessed ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... Nicolas is inclined to believe in the purity of Nelson's attachment and Southey says there is no reason to believe that it was more than platonic. But these views are certainly not borne out by those who knew Nelson and his connection with ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... 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 ... hm! ... ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... 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 to ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... 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, beauty, fame, good fortune, ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... Thomson and Gray—and that he anticipated Wordsworth also as a lover of animal life. Cowper's love of nature was the less effective than Wordsworth's only, surely, in that he had not had Wordsworth's advantage of living amid impressive scenery. His love of animal life was far less platonic than Wordsworth's. To his hares and his pigeons and all dumb creatures he was genuinely devoted. Perhaps it was because he had in him the blood of kings—for, curiously enough, it is no more difficult to trace the genealogical tree of both Cowper and Byron down to ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... I shall examine is the moralistic or Platonic. According to this, art is an image of the good, and has value in so far as through expression it enables us to experience edifying emotions or to contemplate noble objects. The high beauty of the "Sistine Madonna," for example, ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... word Idola is manifestly borrowed from Plato. It is used twice in connexion with the Platonic Ideas (N. O. i. 23, 124) and is contrasted with them as the false appearance. The [Greek: eidolon] with Plato is the fleeting, transient image of the real thing, and the passage evidently referred to by Bacon is that in the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... "virtue," acknowledged on all hands, alike by busy merchants, soldiers, despots, women, the acquaintance with Greek and Roman literature and art, was not quite the idle dilettanteism it seems. Lorenzo de' Medici said, that, without the knowledge of the Platonic philosophy, it was hard to be a good citizen and Christian. Leo X. thought, "Nothing more excellent or more useful has been given by the Creator to mankind, if we except only the knowledge and true worship of Himself, than these studies, which not only ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... clinometer, graphometer^, goniometer; theodolite; sextant, quadrant; dichotomy. triangle, trigon^, wedge; rectangle, square, lozenge, diamond; rhomb, rhombus; quadrangle, quadrilateral; parallelogram; quadrature; polygon, pentagon, hexagon, heptagon, octagon, oxygon^, decagon. pyramid, cone. Platonic bodies; cube, rhomboid; tetrahedron, pentahedron, hexahedron, octahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron, eicosahedron; prism, pyramid; parallelopiped; curb roof, gambrel roof, mansard roof. V. bend, fork, bifurcate, crinkle. Adj. angular, bent, crooked, aduncous^, uncinated^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Michael Angelo, says Fuseli, rose the Patriarch of Poverty. So the gusto of Munden antiquates and ennobles what it touches. His pots and his ladles are as grand and primal as the seething-pots and hooks seen in old prophetic vision. A tub of butter, contemplated by him, amounts to a Platonic idea. He understands a leg of mutton in its quiddity. He stands wondering, amid the common-place materials of life, like primaeval man with the sun and stars ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... of the essential incognoscibility of the Deity is the same in each case. However, Philo was too thorough an Israelite and too much the child of his time to be content with this agnostic position. With the help of the Platonic and Stoic philosophy, he constructed an apprehensible, if not comprehensible, quasi-deity out of the Logos; while other more or less personified divine powers, or attributes, bridged over the interval between God and man; between the sacred existence, too pure to be called ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the necessity 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 ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... a scholar and 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 them rather ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... then added, with a smile: "We considered ourselves in love at the time,—at least, I did; but as I look back now it seems a very Platonic affair; but I thought I loved her, and ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... in character and manners in our New World—there seems to be a hideous depletion, almost absence, of such moral nature. Elias taught throughout, as George Fox began it, or rather reiterated and verified it, the Platonic doctrine that the ideals of character, of justice, of religious action, whenever the highest is at stake, are to be conform'd to no outside doctrine of creeds, Bibles, legislative enactments, conventionalities, or even decorums, but are to follow the inward Deity-planted law of the emotional ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... 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
... you yonder, sir, are two of the pretty magpies in white and black. If you will lull yourself into a Platonic dream, you may; but consider your sport will be dull when ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... induced him to seek an introduction to her. Although rich, he found her occupying a small lodging in Henry street, where she lived secluded and alone. "Over the chimney-piece of the front drawing-room was suspended the picture of her Platonic idolater. It was a half-length portrait, and had been given her by the man of whose adoration she was so virtuously vain." While Sheil was striving to image to himself the fascinations of the "dangerous Papist," the door was opened: a volume of smoke ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... 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 ...
— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe
... as it was originally issued have been added five Tales, beginning with "The Platonic Bassoon," which are characteristic of the various moods, serious, gay, or pathetic, out of which grew the best work of the author's ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... Romans; those of Aristotle, brought to light in Cicero's time by the transference of Apellicon's library to Rome, [60] were a sealed book to the majority, though certain works, probably dialogues after the Platonic manner, gained the admiration of Cicero and Quintilian. The pre-Socratic thinkers, occupied as they were with physical questions which had little interest for Romans, were still less likely to be resorted to. The demand for a supreme moral ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... that the virgin-queen appropriated the Catholic honours of the Virgin Mary. She was as great as Diana of the Ephesians. The moon shone but to furnish a type of her bright and stainless maidenhood. To magnify her greatness, the humility of courtly adulation merged in the ecstasies of Platonic love. She was charming by indefeasible right;—a jure divino beauty. Her fascinations multiplied with her wrinkles, and her admirers might have anticipated the conceit ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various
... our era DAMASCIUS the SYRIAN, the last of the Neo-Platonic philosophers, wrote in Greek in a work on the Doubts and Solutions of the first Principles, in which he says: "But the Babylonians, like the rest of the Barbarians, pass over in silence the One principle of the Universe, and they ...
— The Babylonian Legends of the Creation • British Museum
... this Edinburgh enchantress, in which he signed himself Sylvander, and addressed her under the name of Clarinda. In these compositions, which no one can regard as serious, and which James Grahame the poet called "a romance of real Platonic affection," amid much affectation both of language and sentiment, and a desire to say fine and startling things, we can see the proud heart of the poet throbbing in the dread of being neglected or forgotten by his country. The love ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... was restored, and take the Kendalls into his confidence; but the thought of Lynda gave him a bad moment now and then. He could not easily depose her from the most sacred memories of his life, but gradually he grew to believe that her relations to him were—had always been—platonic; and that she, in the new scheme, would play no small part ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... heavy burden. In carrying it we sigh with weariness and complain of its weight. Do we really love Life! The Love of Life! The very words sound strange to our ears! We love only our dreams of the future—and this love is Platonic, with no hope ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... 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 ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... benevolence, more alive to 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 character; and by playful dalliance to ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... girl will see a great deal of each other, unless you banish or imprison the Mowbrays. There'll be many dances together, many calls; in fact, a serial romance instead of a short story. Why shouldn't his Majesty know the pleasure of a—platonic friendship with a ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... Mary, or her daughter, Lady Bute, destroyed these collections. For her part, Lady Mary returned letters that she had received from Lord Hervey, but only those that belonged to the last fourteen years of an acquaintance that had endured twice so long. These are for the greater number platonic in character, although there are a few phrases of a freer kind. Croker, who edited Lord Hervey's Memoirs, mentions that Hervey, answering one of her letters in 1737, in which she had complained that she was too old to inspire passion, after paying a compliment ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... Prometheus was on account of man, whom he had befriended; and, by befriending, had defeated the malignity of Jove. According to some, man was even created by Prometheus: but no accounts, until lying Platonic philophers arose, in far later times, represented ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... 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 ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... and the price of sausages, of the moon and their glass of beer, of stars and black radishes. And here and there are a few little Swiss girls, fresh and rosy as wood strawberries, smiling darlings like Dresden shepherdesses, dreaming of scenes of platonic love in a great garden adorned with the statue of William Tell ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... with Turkey—an example in which she was followed by Italy—and gave the Turks her moral and material support in their struggle with the Greeks; while England, though refusing to reverse her policy in favour of their enemies, contented herself with giving the Greeks only a platonic encouragement, which they were unwise enough to take for more ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... 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. But the burden of ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... Venetian clowns, deft and sinister Neapolitan fencing masters, silver-voiced singing boys decoyed from some church, and cynical humanists escaped from the faggot or the gallows, were expected to bring home, together with the newest pastoral dramas, lewd novels, Platonic philosophy and madrigals set in complicated counterpoint; stories of hideous wickedness, of the murders and rapes and poisonings committed by the dukes and duchesses, the nobles and senators, in whose palaces they had so lately supped and danced. The crimes of Italy fascinated ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... Element in Plato,"[251] says: The Platonic theology is strikingly near that of Christianity in regard to God's being, existence, name, and attributes. As regards the existence of God, he argues from the movements of nature for the necessity of an original principle of ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... and maintain a status quo of a pacific neutrality—a sort of Platonic peace. [Laughs.] But I am going into ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... 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 polytheism, choose the latter. Is it any wonder that, along ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... of flesh and blood, men and women, to whom the unsullied purity of their homes, the freedom and power of their country, the respect and love of their fellow-citizens, are inestimably dear. From a Platonic, and still more from a Christian point of view, the best morality of the age of Pericles is no doubt defective. Such counsels of perfection as 'Love your enemies', or 'A good man can harm no one, not even an enemy',—are beyond the horizon of tragedy, unless dimly seen in ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... Navii" Sologoub happily blends fantasy and reality. Revolutionary meetings alternate with improbable hypnotic seances, and terrible corteges of corpses contrast violently with scenes of platonic and ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... supposed miracles and those of the Saviour. His doings as described by Philostratus are extraordinary and incredible, and he was put forward by the Eclectics in opposition to the unique powers claimed by Christ and believed in by His followers. Apollonius is said to have studied the philosophy of the Platonic, Sceptic, Epicurean, Peripatetic and Pythagorean schools, and to have adopted that of Pythagoras. He schooled himself in early manhood in the asceticism of that philosophy. He abstained from animal food and strong drink, wore white linen ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... would have selected to spend a summer was an isolated ranch in the sagebrush, but propinquity, she knew, had done wonders in friendships that had seemed hopelessly platonic, so, when Hugh urged them to join him, and endeavored to impart some of his own enthusiasm ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... whose aid I can pretend that the woman is responsible for the masterpieces, as no doubt Vittoria Colonna sometimes pretended to herself in the case of Michael Angelo. But remember that it must be an affair like that one, romantically platonic—a la maniere ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... public, to scatter amongst them ideas or problems; he made many people think, and gave many people delight. He woke them up in all sorts of ways, about all sorts of things. He wrote lyrics, songs, dramas, romances, sermons, Platonic dialogues, newspaper articles, children's fairy books, scientific manuals, philosophical essays, lectures, extravaganzas, and theological polemics. Hardly any of these were quite in the first rank, and some of them were thin, flashy, and almost silly. But ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... 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
... trust their officers. Even the Army Committees, who refused to call a meeting of our Soviet, betrayed us.... The masses of the soldiers want the Constituent Assembly to be held exactly when it was called for, and those who dare to postpone it will be cursed-and not only platonic curses either, for the ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... conception of such a society is necessarily based upon the idea of evolution. The Platonic state testifies to ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... be sensible would be ridiculous. Were I to extend it farther, it would still conclude more to your disadvantage, but I think enough is said to convince any impartial person, that if the one, with the smallest appearance of justice, was denied an admission into the Platonic commonwealth, the other would have been kick'd out of it with shame and disgrace; yet, you have very pleasantly contrived to find a place there for yourself, in Homer's room. You have adopted and inserted in your Clarissa the four following ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... like the other earlier Platonic Dialogues, is a mixture of jest and earnest, in which no definite result is obtained, but some Socratic or Platonic truths ...
— Ion • Plato
... quite disembarrassed of any attentions whatever. But, I suppose, when I return to Athens, I must get Platonic again.' ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... confess, they would find that Unitarianism was really the religion of all: and I observe a bill is now depending in parliament for the relief of Anti-Trinitarians. It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticisms that three are one, and one is three; and yet that the one is not three, and the three are not one: to divide mankind by a ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... 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 ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... been constitutionally incapable of the passion of love, for he says, himself, that he had never met the woman he wished to marry. His annual tributes to Stella on her birthdays express the strongest regard and esteem, but he "ne'er admitted love a guest," and he had been so long used to this Platonic affection, that he had come to regard women as friends, but never as lovers. Stella, on her part, had the same feeling, for she never expressed the least discontent at her position, or ever regarded Swift otherwise than as her tutor, her counsellor, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift |
