"Platonist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... John Norris (1657-1711), Rector of Bemerton, author of "The Theory and Regulation of Love" (1688), and of many other works. His correspondence with the famous Platonist, Henry More, is appended to this "moral essay." Chalmers speaks of him as "a man of great ingenuity, learning, and piety"; but Locke refers to him as "an obscure, enthusiastic ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... produce the same effect! In the exactness of its assembling, the rarity of its elements, the polish of its surface, the harmony of its ensemble, is there not an intrinsic virtue, a sort of divine force, something eternal as a principle? (I speak as a Platonist.) Thus, why is a relation necessary between the exact word and the musical word? Why does it happen that one always makes a verse when one restrains his thought too much? Does the law of numbers govern then the feelings and the images, and is what seems to be the exterior ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... "objurgatory," "consolatory," "castigatory," "admonishing," "threatening," "vituperatory," "laudatory," "persuasive," "begging," "questioning," "answering," "allegorical," "explanatory," "accusing," "defending," "congratulatory," "ironic" and "thankful," while the neo-Platonist, Proclus, is responsible for, or at least has attributed to him, a list of nearly double the length, including most of those given above and adding many. Of these last, "love-letters" is the most important, and "mixed" the canniest, for ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... in all his enchanted forests. Chaucer was tolerant of everything, the vices not excepted; morally speaking, an easy-going man, he took the world as it came, and did not fancy himself a whit better than his fellows. Spenser was a Platonist, and fed his grave spirit on high speculations and moralities. Severe and chivalrous, dreaming of things to come, unsuppled by luxury, unenslaved by passion, somewhat scornful and self-sustained, it needed but a tyrannous king, an electrical political atmosphere, and a deeper interest ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... man, created a form of God, could pass from day into such night, as to be capable of denying God and life eternal." To this the several teachers replied in order; first the Pythagoreans, next the Socratics, and afterwards the rest: but among them there was a certain Platonist, who spoke last; and his opinion prevailed, which was to this effect; That the men of the saturnine or golden age knew and acknowledged that they were forms receptive of life from God; and that on this ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... critical edition of Walter Hilton seems still in the far future.[17] The Song of Angels has been twice printed since the edition of Pepwell.[18] In profoundly mystical language, tinged with the philosophy of that mysterious Neo-Platonist whom we call the pseudo-Dionysius, it tells of the wonderful "onehead," the union of the soul ...
— The Cell of Self-Knowledge - Seven Early English Mystical Treaties • Various
... party in the great theological and political controversy of the time. There were famous theologians, like Hales, Chillingworth, and Baxter; historians and antiquaries, like Selden, Knolles, and Cotton; philosophers, such as Hobbes, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and More, the Platonist; and writers in rural science—which now entered upon its modern, experimental phase, under the stimulus of Bacon's writings—among whom may be mentioned Wallis, the mathematician; Boyle, the chemist, and Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood. These ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... self-evidency that many persons were led to consider them abstruse. It is to Bon-Bon—but let this go no farther—it is to Bon-Bon that Kant himself is mainly indebted for his metaphysics. The former was indeed not a Platonist, nor strictly speaking an Aristotelian—nor did he, like the modern Leibnitz, waste those precious hours which might be employed in the invention of a fricasee or, facili gradu, the analysis of a sensation, in frivolous attempts at reconciling the obstinate ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... comprehensible, for more than any contemporary Spanish poet—more even than Herrera in his odes—is he saturated with the Jewish spirit. In all his work Luis de Leon adheres closely to the Bible. In the De los nombres de Cristo he is also a Platonist within limits: not so much as regards the manner (which tends to an oratorical pomp more reminiscent of Cicero) as in his conciliatory method. With the Jewish and Hellenic blend of influence we ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... written in the Middle Ages,—the "Summa Theologica,"—in which all the great questions in theology and philosophy are minutely discussed, in the most exhaustive manner. He took the side of the Realists, his object being to uphold Saint Augustine. He was more a Platonist in his spirit than an Aristotelian, although he was indebted to Aristotle for his method. He appealed to both reason and authority. He presented the Christian religion in a scientific form. His book is an assimilation ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... the wrist, the lynxes chained to the saddle, all the magnificence dreamed by Gentile da Fabriano; and among it all ride, met by bevies of peacock-winged angels, kneeling and singing before the flowering rose-hedges, the Three Kings. The old man, who looks like some Platonist philosopher, the beardless prince, surrounded by his noisy huntsmen and pages; and that dark-bearded youth in the Byzantine dress and shovel hat, the genuine king from the East, riding with ardent, wistful eyes, a beautiful kingly young Quixote: Sir Percival seeking ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... scholar, mathematician, philosopher and historian, lived 233-305 (?) A.D. He was a pupil of the neo-Platonist Plotinus.] ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... kathierotai, kai suniontes eis to hieron hoi Kaphallenes kata noumenian genethlion apotheosin thuousin Epiphanei, spendousi te kai euochountai kai humnoi legontai]. Clement's quotations from the writings of Epiphanes shew him to be a pure Platonist: the proposition that property is theft is found in him. Epiphanes and his father, Carpocrates, were the first who attempted to amalgamate Plato's State with the Christian ideal of the union of men with each other. Christ was to them, therefore, a philosophic Genius like Plato, ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... As a Platonist and a poet there could not be any doubt on which side were all his prejudices; but he takes ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who offers to ship with the phaedon instead of Bowditch in his head. Beware of such an one, I say; your whales must be seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. Nor are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... discontent and weariness—nay, even a fretfulness such as might have been that of a Moses at Rephidim who could not bring water out of the rock. A Psychological Parallel is an attempt to buttress the apologia by referring to Sir Matthew Hale's views on witchcraft, to Smith, the Cambridge Platonist and Latitudinarian, and to the Book of Enoch (of which, by the way, it is a pity that Mr Arnold did not live to see Mr Charles's excellent translation, since he desiderated a good one). Of course the argument is sun-clear. If Hale ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... metaphysic wit can fly. Ardent persuasion and deep feeling enkindle words, so that the weakest take on glory. The humblest and most despised of common phrases may be the chosen vessel for the next avatar of the spirit. It is the old problem, to be met only by the old solution of the Platonist, that ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... of Cambridge, Johnson did not much affect; he was a Platonist, and, in Johnson's opinion, a visionary. He would frequently cite from him, and laugh at, a passage to this effect:—"At the consummation of all things, it shall come to pass that eternity shall shake hands with ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... brotherhood, like the Japanese Samurai, living by a Rule, a kind of lay monastic order, who should endeavour to live in a perfectly rational and wholesome manner, so as to be the nucleus of whatever was best in the society of the time. The scheme is interesting to a Platonist, because of its resemblance to the Order of Guardians in the 'Republic.' A very good case may be made out for having an ascetic Order of moral and physical aristocrats, and entrusting them with the government ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... the works of Plato and Aristotle. Upon which great models he had principally formed himself; sometimes according with the opinion of the one, and sometimes with that of the other. In morals he was a profest Platonist, and in religion he inclined to ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... again reacts upon the word "star," which, as it before expressed only the shining of the god, acquires a metaphysical significance from our habitual association of star with the notions of hope and promise. Again nothing can be more fanciful than this bit of Henry More the Platonist: ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... sermons that by a strange, yet natural law, excess of spirituality is next door to sensuality. Theodore Schroeder has recently brought together a number of opinions of religious teachers, from Henry More the Platonist to Baring Gould, concerning the close relationship between sexual passion and religious passion, American Journal of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Compromise thy egotism. Who cares for that, so thou gain aught wider and nobler? Never mind the taunt of Boswellism: the devotion may easily be greater than the wretched pride which is guarding its own skirts. Be another: not thyself, but a Platonist; not a soul, but a Christian; not a naturalist, but a Cartesian; not a poet, but a Shakspearian. In vain, the wheels of tendency will not stop, nor will all the forces of inertia, fear, or love itself, hold thee there. On, and forever onward! The microscope observes a monad or wheel-insect among ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... a Platonist, in politics an Opportunist. She attached herself to no particular party. She loved the people when they were king-like, and kings when they showed themselves to be men. Of the real value and motive of poetry she had a most exalted idea. 'Poetry,' she says, in ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... humanity in all its visible attractiveness, since there, too, in [238] truth, divinity lurks. From those first fair days of early Greek speculation, love had occupied a large place in the conception of philosophy; and in after days Bruno was fond of developing, like Plato, like the Christian platonist, combining something of the peculiar temper of each, the analogy between intellectual enthusiasm and the flights of physical love, with an animation which shows clearly enough the reality of his experience ...
— Giordano Bruno • Walter Horatio Pater
... imperfection in such a world. In his later writings Plato sounds his characteristic note less frequently, and permits the ideal to create a cosmos through the admixture of matter. But in his moment of inspiration, the Platonist will have no sense for the imperfect. It is the darkness behind his back, or the twilight through which he passes on his way to the light. He will use even the beauties of earth only "as steps along which he mounts upward for the sake of ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... "Faerie Queen" the conception of love widens, as it widened in the mind of a Greek, into the mighty thought of the productive energy of Nature. Spenser borrows in fact the delicate and refined forms of the Platonist philosophy to express his own moral enthusiasm. Not only does he love, as others have loved, all that is noble and pure and of good report, but he is fired as none before or after him have been fired with a passionate sense of moral beauty. Justice, Temperance, ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... and prolixity of the Alexandrian Age. It extends to about thirty pages of the book, and is thirty times the length of the original. It is surprising that this voluminous work should have found a translator (Thomas Taylor, a kindred spirit, who was himself a Neo-Platonist, after the fashion, not of the fifth or sixteenth, but of the nineteenth century A.D.). The commentary is of little or no value, either in a philosophical or philological point of view. The writer is unable to explain particular passages in any precise manner, ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... warm in the subject he had started, and soared miles away from Riccabocca and "My Novel." "And observe," he exclaimed,—"observe with what gravity this eminent Platonist pleads guilty to the charge of having a mirror. 'Why, what,' he exclaims, 'more worthy of the regards of a human creature than his own image' nihil respectabilius homini quam formam suam! Is not that one of our children the most dear to us who is called 'the picture of his father'? But ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... from Newstead:—"I will have nothing to do with your immortality; we are miserable enough in this life, without the absurdity of speculating upon another. Christ came to save men, but a good Pagan will go to heaven, and a bad Nazarene to hell. I am no Platonist, I am nothing at all; but I would sooner be a Paulician, Manichean, Spinozist, Gentile, Pyrrhonian, Zoroastrian, than one of the seventy-two villainous sects who are tearing each other to pieces for the love of the Lord and hatred ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... Officiis. He softened down the harsher features of the Stoic doctrines, approximating them in some degree to the opinions of Xenocrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and made them attractive by the elegance of his style; indeed, he modified the principles of the school so much, that some writers called him a Platonist. In natural philosophy he abandoned the Stoic doctrine of the conflagration of the world; endeavoured to simplify the division of the faculties of the soul; and doubted the reality of the science of divination. ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... die, and then Epitynchanus died. Antoninus saw Faustina die, and then Antoninus died. Such is everything. Celer saw Hadrianus die, and then Celer died. And those sharp-witted men, either seers or men inflated with pride, where are they,—for instance the sharp-witted men, Charax and Demetrius the Platonist and Eudaemon, and any one else like them? All ephemeral, dead long ago. Some indeed have not been remembered even for a short time, and others have become the heroes of fables, and again others have disappeared even from fables. Remember this ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius
... Orphic Phanes, "as a serpent with bull's and lion's heads, with a human face in the middle and wings on the shoulders," is sufficiently rude and senseless. But these physical attributes could easily be explained away as types of anything the Platonist pleased.(1) The Orphic Phanes, too, was almost as many-headed as a giant in a fairy tale, or as Purusha in the Rig-Veda. He had a ram's head, a bull's head, a snake's head and a lion's head, and glanced around with four eyes, presumably human.(2) ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... a modern Platonist. He quoted Porphyry, Iamblicus, Plotinus, Proclus, Hierocles, Maximus ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... At its height friendship becomes love, and the palliative one is forced to apply to soothe it for a moment only increases its intensity. Such was the experience of Anacreon with Smerdis, and Cleobulus with Badyllus. A Platonist who pretends that one is able to live with a young woman of whom one is fond, without becoming more than her friend, is a visionary who knows not what he says. My housekeeper was too young, too pretty, and above all too pleasant, she had too keen a wit, for me not to be captivated by all these qualities ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... assurance about itself, which possessed Socrates so immovably, his masters, his disciples. Those who do not already know Wordsworth's Ode ought soon to read it for themselves. Listen instead to the lines which perhaps suggested Wordsworth's: The Retreat, by Henry Vaughan, one of the so- called Platonist poets of about two centuries ago, who was able to blend those Pythagorean doctrines with the Christian belief, amid which indeed, from the unsanctioned dreams of Origen onwards, those doctrines have shown themselves ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... real name was Theophrastes Bombast von Hohenheim, and he took the name by which he is generally known because he held himself superior to Celsus. He was a famous physician and pharmacist, but was also a mystic and neo-Platonist. He lectured in German on medicine at Basel, but lost his position through the opposition of the orthodox ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... of unity, or tacit bond of sympathy which holds a sect together depends upon the intellectual idiosyncrasy of the individuals. Coleridge was aiming at an important truth when he said that every man was born an Aristotelian or a Platonist.[1] Nominalists and realists, intuitionists and empiricists, idealists and materialists, represent different forms of a fundamental antithesis which appears to run through all philosophy. Each thinker is apt to take the ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... that every man is born a Platonist or an Aristotelian, though the enormous majority of us, to be sure, live and die without being conscious of any invidious philosophic partiality whatever. With more truth (though that does not imply very ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... very little moulded by any outside influence on their literature. From the time of Abraham to the age of Moses the old stock was changed by the intermarriage of some of their race with the Egyptians and Arabians. During this period their literature was influenced by Zoroaster, and by the Platonist and Pythagorean schools. This is especially noticeable in the work of Philo of Alexandria, who was born a few ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... are there only lovely things, friendly emotions in this individual and that, deeds which we may, according to our standards, pronounce honorable or dishonorable? If you believe in beauty, truth, and love as such you are a Platonist. If you believe that there are only individual instances and illustrations of various classified emotions and desires and acts, and that abstractions are only the inevitable categories of thought, you would in the Middle Ages have been called ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... name of Eugenius Philalethes, except the Aula Lucis (1652), which was issued as by S. N., i.e. [Thoma]S [Vaugha]N. Some of these pamphlets contain Vaughan's share of a vigorous and scurrilous controversy with Henry More, the Platonist. Anthony a Wood distinguishes from Vaughan another Eugenius Philalethes, author of the Brief Natural History (1669), also one Eirenaeus Philalethes, author of Ripley Redivivus and other works, ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan |
