"Platonic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... notable for his virtues as he was 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 first it was ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... fancied they could be friends. If it had not been so sad and so pitiful, it would have been amusing to have heard the conditions of that friendship—they were as numerous as the preliminaries of an article of peace. They made all arrangements; their friendship was to be of the purest and most platonic nature; there was to be nothing said which would remind them of the past; he was to shake hands with her when he came and when he went; he might pay her a visit twice or three times a week; if they ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... police, after the fashion of cockchafers, made by cruel children to fly at the end of a string. He became one of those fugitive and timid beings whom the law, with a sort of coquetry, arrests and releases by turn—something like those platonic fishers who, in order that they may not exhaust their fish-pond, throw immediately back in the water the fish which has just come out of the net. Without a suspicion on his part that so much honor had been done to so sorry a subject, he had a special bundle of memoranda in the mysterious ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... 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 ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... only regret that our relations were not always strictly platonic. That is the highest practical ideal of the age—modern ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... remembered that the woman had lived on very bad terms 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 ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... eight days she made the hotels of Europe ring with her lamentations. Nor was this his only source of discomfort. Though, for convenience, they appeared in the visitors' books as man and wife, the lady's attitude compelled the maintenance of platonic relations, and, whereas in actual life this would merely have meant that he had to occupy a separate bedroom, in Mr. Jerome's vision of things as they might be it meant that he had to sleep ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 27, 1914 • Various
... intractable character; whilst others contended that 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 ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... brain; always unhappy, in need of consolation, never meeting with the kindred spirit that understood her, destined to walk the world alone, her fair thoughts smothered in the recesses of her own heart. Devilish hard to stand this, when you began in a kind of platonic friendship on both sides. More than one poor fellow nearly succumbed, particularly when she came to quote Cowley, and told him, ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... does when he first meets the woman whose words, 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 ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... a Platonic sort of religion, a worship of the ideal apart from its power to realise itself, which has entered largely into the life of Christians; and the more mystical and disinterested they were, the more it has tended to take the ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... been nothing more than an animated lay-figure, I began to disbelieve these assertions, the more especially as the lady herself was as easy under them as she was in every gesture and motion. Whenever she made her appearance, so did my old friend Mr R; he entertained a platonic attachment for her, and that the more strongly, as each visit enabled him to entertain every one who would listen to him, with a long story about the king of Prussia. And every lady expects attention and politeness as a matter of course, ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... page lvi 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 Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... writing a series of letters to 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 ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... was gone, Marty joined Mrs. Fitzpiers. She would fain have consulted Marty on the question of Platonic relations with her former husband, as she preferred to regard him. But Marty showed no great interest in their affairs, so Grace said nothing. They came onward, and saw Melbury standing at the scene of the ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... character of a companion that Kant shone, but also as a most courteous and liberal host, who had no greater pleasure than in seeing his guests happy and jovial, and rising with exhilarated spirits from the mixed pleasures—intellectual and liberally sensual— of his Platonic banquets. Chiefly, perhaps, with a view to the sustaining of this tone of genial hilarity, he showed himself somewhat of an artist in the composition of his dinner parties. Two rules there were which he obviously observed, and I may say invariably: the first was, that the company should ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... 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 completed, the door of the ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... 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, ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... Nevertheless, I'm not in wild despair. How's that? I don't want to shoot or drown 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, and—and—I ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne
... 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 ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... 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
... perfect variety of Nature's forms. This development is one which we must believe to be at 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 ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... Rathburn 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
... nothing to support it; [Greek: haei hosautos dn], the realm of eternal peace; [Greek: oute giguomenon oute apollumenon], some timeless, changeless state, one and undiversified; the negative knowledge of which forms the dominant note of the Platonic philosophy. It is to some such state as this that the denial of the will to live opens ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Neo-Platonism, that half Greek and half Oriental system of doctrine which arose in the third century after Christ, the first system of importance after the schools mentioned above. But I must not pass it by without pointing out that the Neo-Platonic philosopher undertook to give an account of the origin, development, and end of the ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... 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 gratify ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... truthfulness of his history.[1] He modernizes elaborately Solomon's speech at the dedication of the sanctuary, and converts it into an apology for the Jews of his own day. Again he follows an Alexandrian model, and describes God in Platonic fashion: "Thou possessest an eternal house, and we know how, from what Thou hast created for Thyself, Heaven and Air and Earth and Sea have sprung, and how Thou fillest all things and yet canst not be contained ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... hundred. He had remained a bachelor, as his means did not allow him the luxury of a wife, and as he had never enjoyed anything, he desired nothing. From time to time, however, tired of this continuous and monotonous work, he formed a platonic wish: "Gad! If I only had an income of fifteen thousand francs, I ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... mind, love...both the sorts of love, which you remember Plato defines in his Banquet, served as the test of men. Some men only understand one sort, and some only the other. And those who only know the non-platonic love have no need to talk of tragedy. In such love there can be no sort of tragedy. 'I'm much obliged for the gratification, my humble respects'—that's all the tragedy. And in platonic love there can be no tragedy, because in that love all ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... her think and act as she chooses, however. I have never yet found that the advice of a sister could prevent a young man's being in love if he chose. We are advancing now to some kind of confidence, and in short are likely to be engaged in a sort of platonic friendship. On my side you may be sure of its never being more, for if I were not attached to another person as much as I can be to anyone, I should make a point of not bestowing my affection on a man who had dared to think so meanly of ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... rushing in here to me? '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
... 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 but ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... 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, ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... when through every nerve Your lightest touch went thrilling; and began To love you with that human love of man For comely woman. By your coaxing arts, You won your way into my heart of hearts, And all Platonic feelings put to rout. A maid should never lay aside reserve With one who's not her kinsman, out and out. But as we now, with measured steps, retrace The path we came, e'en so my heart I'll send, At your command, back to the olden place, ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... that in Anne's time handsome full-bottomed periwigs were regarded with an enthusiasm far too fervid to be called Platonic. Actors made it a point to have this indispensable headgear as elaborate as possible, and it is even related that Barton Booth and Wilks actually paid forty guineas each "on the exorbitant thatching of ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... alone a 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 his ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... public library. His whole time was not, however, devoted to study; for he formed an acquaintance with Mrs Spencer Smith, the lady of the gentleman of that name, who had been our resident minister at Constantinople: he affected a passion for her; but it was only Platonic. She, however, beguiled him of his valuable yellow diamond ring. She is the Florence of Childe Harold, and merited the poetical embalmment, or rather the amber immortalisation, she possesses there—being herself a heroine. There was no exaggeration in saying that many incidents of her life ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... 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 been as keen as that ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... with Venus; then he forsook her, and she vowed to take 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 ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... and banished, mostly to Syria. Here, at Edessa and Nisibis, they established schools of learning which for several centuries were the most famous in the world. The entire works of Aristotle were turned into Syriac; among them several spurious ones of Neo-Platonic origin, notably the famous 'Liber de Causis' and the 'Theology of Aristotle.' Thus a Neo-Platonic Aristotle came to rule Eastern learning. On the rise of Islam, this Aristotle was borrowed by the Muslims, and became ruler of their schools at Bagdad, Basra, and other places,—schools which produced ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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 ...
— The Dueling Machine • Benjamin William Bova
... the idea is originally, I believe, Platonic; certainly not Homeric. Egyptian possibly—but I have read nothing yet of the recent discoveries in Egypt. Not, however, quite liking to leave the matter in the complete emptiness of my own resources, I have appealed to my general investigator, Mr. Anderson (James R.), ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... permanent successes. The Irish, it is true, do not conduct an argument coolly. Mr. Parnell and his eighty-five have not met the Conservative leader and his following in the Commons with the gravity of platonic disputants. But they have a logical position, equivalent to the best of arguments. They are representatives, they would say, of a country admittedly ill-governed by us; and they have accepted the Bill of the defeated ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Hector and Andromache Barbarous 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 and Jason Poets and ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... exhibits a very just as well as striking picture: for however exalted in theory the Platonic doctrines may appear, it is certain that Platonism and Pyrrhonism are ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... all the world at once responds and surrenders. It is not at first seen to be art at all. The verse which in truth dances so cunningly appears to the uninitiated to stumble and halt. The music, which the common ear is so slow to catch, makes us think of those Platonic mysteries of abstract number seen only in their perfection by some godlike mathematician who lives rapt above sense and matter in the contemplation of the ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... philosopher's 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 a short, thick neck; flat-faced, and of ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... naked sword. I cannot picture to myself a condition of things in which the Prime Minister, with his record behind him, would be an instrument to carry out a government of that kind.... I say this plainly. No British statesman, no matter what his platonic affection for Home Rule may have been in the past, no matter what party he may belong to, who by his conduct once again teaches the Irish people the lesson that any National leader who, taking his political life in his hands, endeavours to combine local and Imperial patriotism—endeavours ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... of the Svetilovitches were also indignant. But their indignation assumed only platonic forms. Perhaps it was impossible for it to have been otherwise. To be sure, all the more or less independent people in town paid the Svetilovitches visits of sympathy. Even the liberal Inspector of Taxes came. He was a patient of Doctor Svetilovitch's, and came during the reception ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... time not uncommon, part of "Governess in erotics" to Benjamin Constant, who was then quite young, and with whose uncle, Constant d'Hermenches, she had, years earlier and before her own marriage, carried on a long and very intimate but platonic correspondence. This is largely occupied with oddly business-like discussions of marriage schemes for herself, one of the pretendants being no less a person than our own precious Bozzy, who met her on the Continental tour for which Johnson started him at Harwich. But—and let this always ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... passion. As in a fair, where time is short and pleasures numerous, the master of 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 of certain ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Justinian in 529 closed the university of Athens, the last seat of paganism in the Roman empire, the last seven teachers of Neoplatonism emigrated to Persia. But they soon found out that neither Chosroes nor his state corresponded to the Platonic ideal, and Chosroes, in his treaty with Justinian, stipulated that they ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... Hartley was not critical. She was a good listener, as women who have something else to think about often are; and so they rode along the twisting path, and the wind sang in the plumes of the bamboo trees, and Hartley believed that it sang a romantic lyric of platonic admiration, exquisitely hinted at by a tactful man, and properly appreciated by ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... certain sense this very idea, but his doctrine of the True in art, although depending upon the mystic basis of a holy Trinity, brought forth developments both rational and scientific which leave far behind the Platonic hypothesis. ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... resembling our own, composed of similar materials and inhabited by countless living creatures, move with freedom. The whole of this infinite and complex cosmos he conceived to be animated by a single principle of thought and life. This indwelling force, or God, he described in Platonic phraseology sometimes as the Anima Mundi, sometimes as the Artificer, who by working from within molds infinite substance into an infinity of finite modes. Though we are compelled to think of the world under the two categories of spirit and matter, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... 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
... 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 ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... romances, implied in the slight shade of sentiment in her voice—wondered in fact how the doose this woman had missed her market; this was the expression his internal soliloquy used. She for her part was on the whole glad that an intensely Platonic friendship didn't admit of catechism, as she was better pleased to leave the customers in that market to the uninformed imagination of others, than to be compelled to draw upon ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... for a subject, and next at the world as 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
... indicated the natural division of those symptoms. They are necessarily of two kinds: the unicorns and the bicorns. The unicorn Minotaur is the least mischievous. The two culprits confine themselves to a platonic love, in which their passion, at least, leaves no visible traces among posterity; while the bicorn Minotaur is ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... 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 often been made subservient to poetry, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... savage, fascination for the occult lore of the ancient East. Abandoning the frivolities of Mayfair, she went to Girton, where she plunged into the study of Sanscrit. After leaving Girton, she applied herself to the study of the occult side of Theosophy. Then she married a black magician in the platonic fashion common to Occultists, early Christians, and Russian Nihilists, and since then she has prosecuted her studies into the invisible world ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... acquaintance, and here he sat in his porch, with aspect grave as the stoics—his tall form, although in ruins now, was stately in decay as the old forest's pines. His head was such as a phrenologist would have loved to look upon; the true platonic breadth of brow, and lofty elevation of the scalp silvered over, told of a mind fitting in its magnitude to spring from that gigantic continent whose streams are mighty rivers and whose lakes are seas; but, valueless ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... paper, which is more distinctly a dialogue on the Platonic model, she isolates the main argument on which the story was based, but without any distinct reference to any of the criticisms on her book. Robert Elsmere rests on the achievements of historic criticism, chiefly German criticism. From the traditional, old-fashioned Christian way of regarding ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... liberty is so passionately desired by the multitude. A negro slave, for instance, dies annually as one to five or six, but a free African in the English service only as one to thirty-five! Freedom is not, therefore, a mere abstract dream, a beautiful name, a Platonic aspiration: it is interwoven with the most practical of all blessings,—life itself! And can you say fairly that by laws labour cannot be lightened and poverty diminished? We have granted already that since there ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... substantially fed this Platonic vengeance. It is very imprudent to criticise others when you are yourself on the point of challenging criticism. A cleverer or less frank artist would have shown more modesty and more respect for his predecessors. But Christophe could see no reason for hiding his contempt ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... the undoubted credentials held 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, ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... authority of those great instincts of our nature which his predecessor appears to have discarded. Clitomachus pursued his steps by innovations in the same direction;[179] Philo, who followed next, attempting to reconcile his tenets with those of the Platonic school,[180] has been accounted the founder of a fourth academy—while, to his successor Antiochus, who embraced the doctrines of the Porch,[181] and maintained the fidelity of the senses, it has been usual to assign the establishment ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... 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
... 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 marriage with Germaine Necker. Such a marriage ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... 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
... make such frequent mention: so he cunningly kept the name, while by his definition he utterly abolished the thing, He has depicted the Church with such properties as altogether hide her away, and leave her open to the secret gaze of a very few men, as though she were removed from the senses, like a Platonic Idea. They only could discern her, who by a singular inspiration had got the faculty of grasping with their intelligence this aerial body, and with keen eye regarding the ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... graphometer[obs3], goniometer; theodolite; sextant, quadrant; dichotomy. triangle, trigon[obs3], wedge; rectangle, square, lozenge, diamond; rhomb, rhombus; quadrangle, quadrilateral; parallelogram; quadrature; polygon, pentagon, hexagon, heptagon, octagon, oxygon[obs3], 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. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the same satisfied vanity with which a beautiful woman of to-day would accept such offerings. Some of these poets may really have been in love with her, while others burned their incense as court flatterers; all, doubtless, were glad to find in her an ideal to serve as a platonic inspiration for ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... 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 ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... 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 ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... gallant lover, this young Crichton, this unassuming but ardent lover, had simply taken up with her as soon as he had failed with her friend. Lady Laura had been most enthusiastic in her expressions of friendship. Such platonic regards might be all very well. It was for Mr. Kennedy to look to that. But, for herself, she felt that such expressions were hardly compatible with her ideas of having her lover all to herself. And then she again remembered Madame ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... virtue, is a natural tribute to a noble nature, and flows from one of the purest and most sustaining sources of emotion by which our humanity is distinguished. It almost looks as if, in accordance with the Platonic philosophy, there remained to man, from an original and more lofty state of existence, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... 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
... just what we should hear from a recluse who knew the passion only from the details of the confessional. Almost all his heroes make love either like Seraphim or like cattle. He seems to have no notion of anything between the Platonic passion of the Glendoveer who gazes with rapture on his mistress's leprosy, and the brutal appetite of Arvalan and Roderick. In Roderick, indeed, the two characters are united. He is first all clay, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and of no errand but to 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. ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... consumed in the effort to procure sustenance for themselves and their young, and are only just sufficient, sometimes even not sufficient, for this. The whole thing, when regarded thus purely objectively, and indeed as extraneous to us, looks as if nature was only concerned that of all her (Platonic) Ideas, i.e., permanent forms, none should be lost. For the individuals are fleeting as the water in the brook; and Ideas, on the contrary, are permanent, like its eddies: but the exhaustion of the water ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... with pictures, statues, and a roof of alabaster, and supported by one hundred columns of Phrygian marble. The public salaries were assigned by the generous spirit of the Antonines; and each professor of politics, of rhetoric, of the Platonic, the Peripatetic, the Stoic, and the Epicurean philosophy, received an annual stipend of ten thousand drachmae, or more than three hundred pounds sterling. [148] After the death of Marcus, these liberal donations, and the privileges ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... 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 peak of Monte Catria, and saw that a ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... only daughter of a salt-dealer, who made his money during the Revolution,—a period when contraband salt-traders made enormous profits by reason of the reaction that set in against the gabelle. He prudently left his wife at home, where Bebelle, as he called her, was supported under his absence by a platonic passion for a handsome clerk who had no other means than his salary,—a young man named Bonnac, belonging to the second-class society, where he played the same role that his master, the notary, ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... smile, and her adorable head poised upon a body much too well made. She is too tender, too complex, too intelligent. She has a way of mischievously caressing you with her eyes one moment and giving an old comrade like myself a platonic little pat on the back the next, which is exasperating. As a friend I adore her, but to fall in love with her! Ah, non, merci! I have had a checkered childhood and my full share of suffering; I wish some peace in my old age. At sixteen one goes to the war of ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... he presents me with a solid medallion locket with turquoises and pearls running in a vine around the border. Away with him! 'Tis only you I love.' 'Back to the cosey corner!' says Redruth. 'Was I bound and lettered in East Aurora? Get platonic, if you please. No jack-pots for mine. Go and hate your friend some more. For me the Nickerson girl on Avenue B, and gum, and a ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... about the inability of Ethiopians to change their skin. The third time she hinted vaguely that there was "another." The star of Abinger Vennard was now blazing in the firmament, and she had conceived a platonic admiration for him. The truth is that Miss Claudia, with all her cleverness, was very young and—dare ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... 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
... themselves, and 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
... appear, that the most comprehensive formula to which life is reducible, would be that of the internal copula of bodies, or (if we may venture to borrow a phrase from the Platonic school) the power which discloses itself from within as a principle of unity in the many. But that there is a physiognomy in words, which, without reference to their fitness or necessity, make unfavorable as well as favorable impressions, and that every unusual ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... advantages if we regard them as a means of education in philosophy; for in this point of view their very artlessness gives them something of the same stimulating, suggestive power which is attained by the consummate art of the Platonic dialogues." The importance of the work is evidenced by the influence it has exercised over the mind of a later generation; and many readers, to whom Hegel (see Vol. XIV) is little more than a name, will certainly find here the sources of much that has become familiar as an essential part of ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... care! Aren't you and Cellini getting to be rather particular friends—something a little beyond the Platonic, eh?" ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... in supposing that he may have laid his labours aside for a time, or turned from one work to another; and such interruptions would be more likely to occur in the case of a long than of a short writing. In all attempts to determine the chronological order of the Platonic writings on internal evidence, this uncertainty about any single Dialogue being composed at one time is a disturbing element, which must be admitted to affect longer works, such as the Republic and the Laws, ...
— The Republic • Plato
... 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 on her invulnerability ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... even on the night of the eighth he had no intention of giving up the fight. He expected to find only cavalry before him next morning, and thought his remnant of infantry could break through while he himself was amusing Grant with platonic discussions in the rear. But on arriving at the rendezvous he had suggested, he received Grant's courteous but decided refusal to enter into a political negotiation, and also the news that a formidable force of infantry barred ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... far-famed Stoughton of our own day, does not present so powerful a remedy, amid all its antis, as cheerful reading to a heavy spirit. I will venture to say, in the spirit of Montesquieu, that an hour of such reading will place one quietly in his elbow chair in all the tranquillity of a Platonic lover." ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... a word much affected by the learned Aristarchus in common conversation, to signify genius or natural acumen. But this passage has a further view: [Greek: Nous] was the Platonic term for mind, or the first cause, and that system of divinity is here hinted at which terminates in blind nature without a [Greek: ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... Emperor and the 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 beautiful and ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... impassioned vein appealed to the young man's mind. His heart was touched by the manifest holiness of the good bishop's life and conduct, especially when he contrasted them with those of the Manicheans with whom he had so long been associated. The study of Platonic philosophy urged him on to celestial heights and made him gaze on the infinite nature of God. The Epistles of St. Paul riveted his attention in his search after purest truth, and joined to the pious prayers of the Sainted Monica, who thus drew down abundant grace ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... by the pleasantly distinguished style in which the author writes and the intimate knowledge which she appears to possess of the Paris prefecture de police. Gerald Burton, the young American, not entirely platonic in his solicitude, is baffled; Salgas, a famous enquiry agent, is baffled; and I am ready to take very long odds against the reader's unravelling the mystery, unless he happens to be familiar with a certain legend of the plague (though no plague comes in here). Indeed, it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... That a presentiment of its own worthlessness began to dawn on the Stoa itself, is shown by its attempt artificially to infuse into itself some fresh spirit in the way of syncretism. Antiochus of Ascalon (flourishing about 675), who professed to have patched together the Stoic and Platonic-Aristotelian systems into one organic unity, in reality so far succeeded that his misshapen doctrine became the fashionable philosophy of the conservatives of his time and was conscientiously studied by the genteel dilettanti and literati ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... those lofty and divine Platonic doctrines, that are familiar to but few of the elect and wholly unknown to all the uninitiate, such for instance as that which teaches us that Venus is not one goddess, but two, each being strong in her own type of love and several types of lovers. The one is the goddess of ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... corresponded regularly and frequently, and Julia's letters were always good, sensible, and affectionate. If our marriage, and all the sequel to it, could have been conducted by epistles, nothing could have been more satisfactory. But I felt a little doubtful about the termination of this Platonic friendship, with its half-betrothal. It did not appear to me that Olivia's image was fading in the slightest degree; no, though I knew her to be married, though I was ignorant where she was, though ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... Tevkin, each 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 other hand, who was a socialist, was an ardent member ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... 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 ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... eye thou hast that witcheth far and wide; From pure platonic love[FN253] of it deliverance none ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... extraordinary man—who died 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, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... 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 when in theological ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... written—which it certainly is not. Yet again, if we want to see will struggling against obstacles, the classic to turn to is not Hamlet, not Lear, but Robinson Crusoe; yet no one, except a pantomime librettist, ever saw a drama in Defoe's narrative. In a Platonic dialogue, in Paradise Lost, in John Gilpin, there is a struggle of will against obstacles; there is none in Hannele, which, nevertheless, is a deeply-moving drama. Such a struggle is characteristic of all great fiction, ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... 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 ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... 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 Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various
... wondered why I wrote to you, and you must have wondered why I forgave you for the wrong you did me. I guessed that our friendship when I was in the parish was a little more than the platonic friendship that you thought it was, so when you turned against me, and were unkind, I found an excuse for you. When my hatred was bitterest, I knew somehow, at the back of my mind—for I only allowed myself to ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... the especial strength of evil lay, as the philosophers had seen, in matter, it was so far a conclusion which both Jew and Persian were ready to accept; the naked Aristotelic view of it being most acceptable to the Persian, the Platonic to the Hellenistic Jew. But the purer theology of the Jew forced him to look for a solution of the question which Plato had left doubtful, and to explain how evil had crept into matter. He could not allow that what God had created could be of its ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... women, whether a bride or a long-time wife?" The answer is, Simply those conditions of the organs in which they are not properly prepared, by anticipation and desire, to receive a foreign body. The modest one craves only refined and platonic love at first, and if husbands, new and old, would only realize this plain truth, wife-torturing would cease and the happiness of each one of all ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... excellently illustrated in Greek literature, where is to be found many a joke at which we are laughing to-day, as others have laughed through the centuries. Half a thousand years before the Christian era, a platonic philosopher at Alexandria, by name Hierocles, grouped twenty-one jests in a volume under the title, "Asteia." Some of them are still current with us as typical Irish bulls. Among these were accounts of the "Safety-first" enthusiast who determined ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... branches of classical philology in which the Renaissance was backward. The general purpose was to set up Plato in the place of Aristotle, discredited as as accomplice of the obscurest schoolmen. Under the Medici, a Platonic academy flourished at Florence, with Ficino and Politian at its head. But there was a tendency to merge Plato in Neoplatonism, and to bridge over what separated him from Christianity. Neither the knowledge of Plato, nor the knowledge of the Gospel, profited ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... had followed 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 one ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... my name runs ringing through Reviews, And maids, wives, widows, smitten with my Muse, Assail me with Platonic billet-doux. From this suburban attic I'll dismount, With Coutts or Barclays open an account; Ranged in my mirror, cards, with burnish'd ends, Shall show the whole nobility my friends; That happy host with whom ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... show of utter ruin: though he were (for that time) an excellent orator, came not among them upon trust of figurative speeches, or cunning insinuations: and much less, with far-fetched maxims of philosophy, which (especially if they were Platonic [Footnote: Alluding to the inscription over the door of Plato's Academy: No entrance here without Geometry.)], they must have learned geometry before they could well have conceived: but forsooth he behaves himself, like a homely, and familiar poet. He telleth them a tale, that there was a ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... careful parent to find anything against me at this moment, unless it be a platonic devotion. The youth of Mademoiselle de Nailles is an advantage, for I might indulge myself in that till we were married, and then I should settle down and leave Paris, where nothing keeps ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... 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
... stained and polluted by 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 of the French Heroism, ...
— Prefaces to Fiction • Various
... considered a match for the extremely clever Mlle. Necker, whose father had an enormous fortune, and who was herself considered a gem of wit and mental power, ready to discuss political economy, or the romantic movement of socialism, or platonic love? ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... ladies would greatly like to have occupied the position of stepmother to "those nice girls," but Anthony, universal lover as he was within strictly platonic limits, showed no desire to give his girls anything of the sort. Jan satisfied his craving for a gracious and well-ordered comfort in all his surroundings. Fay gratified his aesthetic appreciation of beauty and gentleness. What would he do with a third ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... it 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 foreign to the ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... there are such things as Love divine, Bright and immaculate, unmixed and pure, Such as the angels think so very fine, And matrons, who would be no less secure, Platonic, perfect, "just such love as mine;" Thus Julia said—and thought so, to be sure; And so I'd have her think, were I the man On ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... 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, ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... some length to give a picture of Madame de Rambouillet's hotel because it really is the earliest modern house. There, where the society that frequented it was analyzing its soul in dialogue and long platonic discussion that would seem stark enough to us, the word which it invented for itself was urbanite—the coinage of one ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... 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 such ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... general—cordial, sympathetic, informing letters enough, though apparently not suited for publication. A good deal of the work done at this period did not find its way into print. An interview with Satan; a dream-story concerning a platonic sweetheart, and some further comment on Austrian politics, are ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... hopeless because he calls Charles the 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 ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... mistaken in the case. Our fair, brilliant heroine was, at this time of speaking, as heart-whole as the diamond on her bosom, which reflected the light in too many sparkling rays ever to absorb it. She had, to be sure, half in earnest, half in jest, maintained a bantering, platonic sort of friendship with George Elliot. She had danced, ridden, sung, and sketched with him; but so had she with twenty other young men; and as to coming to any thing tender with such a quick, brilliant, restless creature, Elliot would as soon have undertaken to sentimentalize ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... and George Pelham, when George Pelham promised that if he were the first to die and if he found that he had another life he would do all that he could to prove its existence, they referred to the old Platonic myth. In the communications of the so-called George Pelham allusion was made to the allegory, and that justifies me ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... the Platonic, not often nor without great necessity to say, or to write to any man in a letter, 'I am not at leisure'; nor in this manner still to put off those duties, which we owe to our friends and acquaintances (to every one in his kind) ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... nature under the threefold modification—of the first cause, the reason, or Logos, and the soul or spirit of the universe. His poetical imagination sometimes fixed and animated these metaphysical abstractions; the three archical on original principles were represented in the Platonic system as three Gods, united with each other by a mysterious and ineffable generation; and the Logos was particularly considered under the more accessible character of the Son of an Eternal Father, and the Creator and Governor of the world. Such appear to have been the secret doctrines which ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... impressed by Dr. Carillon's real earnestness in the pulpit. The visit was a great success. Before he left, he begged Agnes to write to him "when she could spare the time." The young man had tried everything except a Platonic friendship with a lovely girl. He fancied that he found in Agnes Carillon that purity coupled with magnetism which makes such experiments attractive. They corresponded regularly, but they did not meet again for several ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes |
