"Platonical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... up in wood and stone, doth still, As impotent fancy prompts, by his fireside, Rebuild it to his liking. I have thought Of thee, thy learning, gorgeous eloquence, 295 And all the strength and plumage of thy youth, Thy subtle speculations, toils abstruse Among the schoolmen, and Platonic forms Of wild ideal pageantry, shaped out From things well-matched or ill, and words for things, 300 The self-created sustenance of a mind Debarred from Nature's living images, Compelled to be a life unto herself, And unrelentingly possessed ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... HECTOR. Psha! Platonic sense! She makes you her servant; and when pay-day comes round, she bilks you: that is what ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... fine things to England. But the wicked fairy was there with her gift: Pythagoras and Plato. We were not like the Italians who, after the first rapture of discovery was over, soon outgrew these distracted dialectics; we stuck fast in them. Hence our Platonic touch: our demi-vierge attitude in matters of the mind, our academic horror of clean thinking. How Plato hated a fact! He could find no place for it in his twilight world of abstractions. Was it not he who wished to burn the works of Democritus of Abdera, most exact ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... by this assurance, Lola always insisted that her relations with the King were purely platonic. While this view is a little difficult to accept, it is significant that Ludwig's lawful spouse never objected to their "friendship." Her Majesty, however, was of a placid temperament. Perhaps, too, she thought that the ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... 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 ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... back will be detestable," I muttered, and taking up the pen again I wrote: "Your letter contains a phrase which fills me with dismay: you say, 'Virtue must be its own reward,' and this would seem that you are determined to be more aggressively Platonic than ever. Doris, this is ill news indeed; you would not have me consider it good news, ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... is the principle of all virtues; it is God Himself. Next to it in dignity comes humility. The beauty of the soul, he says in the true Platonic vein, is to be well ordered, with the higher faculties above the lower, each in its proper place. The will should be supreme over the understanding, the understanding over the senses. Whatever we will earnestly, ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... can be generated and corrupted, he attributed to the divinities who circulate in the heavens; that is, certain separate substances, which move corporeal things in a circular direction. The third providence, over human affairs, he assigned to demons, whom the Platonic philosophers placed between us and the gods, as Augustine tells us (De Civ. Dei, 1, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... And so vividly could he see her lying back in that chair looking across at him, that he could hardly believe she had never yet sat there. It was odd how—without any resolution taken, without admission that their love could not remain platonic, without any change in their relations, save one humble kiss and a few whispered words—everything was changed. A month or so ago, if he had wanted, he would have gone at once calmly to her house. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... connexion what it might, Halifax meant to tell the world that it might be proclaimed in all its relation to the name of Newton. To those who cannot, under all the circumstances, believe the connexion to have been what is called platonic, the probability that there was a private marriage is precisely the probability that Newton would not have sanctioned the dishonour of his own niece: and even if the connexion were only that of friendship, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... cloth, with trousers and waist-coat to match. With a grey hat and a huge cravat of woolen material, I looked exactly like a first-year student." In the freedom of this rather unalluring garb she entered into relations Platonic, fraternal, or tempestuously passionate with perhaps the most distinguished series of friends and lovers that ever fluttered about one flame. There was Aurelien de Seze; Jules Sandeau, her first collaborator, who "reconciled ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... It was not strictly Platonic, hut it was Policy. Mrs. Hauksbee laid her hand lightly upon the ungloved paw that rested on the turned-back 'rickshaw hood, and, looking the man full in the face, said tenderly, almost too tenderly, 'I believe in you if you mistrust yourself. ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... Vaughan whose name appears in the official list of prisoners taken at Rowton Heath.[16] Powell's name is not there, but then the list does not profess to be complete. But on the whole I think that Vaughan and Powell were only fellow-prisoners in the Platonic sense of imprisonment in the flesh, and even if a literal imprisonment is intended, it may have been due to some act of persecution which Vaughan had to suffer as a Royalist at a later date. There is in The Mount of Olives (1652) a Prayer in Adversity and Troubles occasioned ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... M. Pierre Leroux—who says so many excellent things, but who is too fond, in my opinion, of his Platonic formulas—assures us that the evils of humanity are due to our IGNORANCE OF LIFE, M. Pierre Leroux utters an entite; for it is evident that if we are evil it is because we do not know how to live; but the knowledge of this fact is ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... 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 ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... 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 dialogue, and the opponent had his share of talk; but when in an unlucky ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... figure this scene too, and shudder over it. Some rather handsome male Cousin of Mamsell, Medical Graduate or whatever he was, had appeared in Dessau:—"Seems, to admire Mamsell much; of course, in a Platonic way," said rumor:—"He? Admire?" thinks Leopold;—thinks a good deal of it, not in the philosophic mood. As he was one day passing Fos's, Mamsell and the Medical Graduate are visible, standing together at the window inside. Pleasantly looking out upon Nature,—of ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... especially noticeable in what is called his discours-testament, the speech delivered on the eve of Thermidor. At one moment, with positive ferocity, he lashes the memory of former friends and colleagues sent by himself to the guillotine; at another he dilates upon the virtue of magnanimity in lofty, Platonic strains. ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... the 'Anti-Duehring' has been long forgotten. Not only is Duehring a thing of the past for the Social Democracy, but the whole throng of academic and platonic Socialists have been frightened away by the anti-Socialist legislation, which at least had the one good effect to show where the reliable supports of our movement are to ...
— The Art of Lecturing - Revised Edition • Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow) Lewis
... on whom it was made is one of the finest women in Scotland; and in fact (entre nous) is in a manner to me what Sterne's Eliza was to him—a Mistress, or Friend, or what you will, in the guileless simplicity of Platonic love. (Now, don't put any of your squinting constructions on this, or have any clishmaclaver about it among our acquaintances.) I assure you that to my lovely Friend you are indebted for many of your best songs of mine. Do you think that the sober gin-horse routine of existence could inspire ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... Jules Sandeau, Calmatta the mezzotinter, De Musset, Franz Liszt, Delacroix, Michel de Bourges—I have not the exact chronological order—and later Flaubert. The most lovable event in the life of this much loved woman was her old age affair— purely platonic—with Gustave Flaubert. The correspondence shows her to have been ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... he took a refreshing draught of the beer, and then he looked up at a window, and bestowed a platonic wink on a young lady who was peeling potatoes thereat. Then he opened the paper, and folded it so as to get the police reports outwards; and this being a vexatious and difficult thing to do, when there is any wind stirring, he took another draught of the beer when he had accomplished it. Then, ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... for me to confess, at all? For now, at last, I began to acknowledge to myself that it was not mere friendship or esteem I felt, but, rather, the more overpowering passion of real love. Gone, like a thin veil of vapor, were all my sophistries about a limited Platonic interest; my dread of incongruous association; my resolves against possible rashnesses; my fear of the world or its senseless gossip; my prudence, or my self-restraint! These all seemed to vanish in a day; and, yielding myself, slavishly, a willing ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... woman, even a happily married woman like me—[This is spoken with a slight effort, as if she is persuading herself that she is a happily married woman.]—to have an honest friend like you. It's those people who have failed that say there is no such thing as a platonic friendship. ...
— The Climbers - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... that however truly philosophic, however sacredly pure, his happiness may have been, yet its wisdom and its holiness were without an effort, and, that it is effort which makes the philosopher and the saint: then we must use in answer his own Platonic scheme of things, to express a thought which we can but dimly apprehend; and we must say that though progress be inevitably linked in our minds with struggle, yet neither do we conceive of struggle as without a pause; there must be prospect-places in the long ascent of ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... 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 woman who might introduce ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... source of knowledge, Scripture and tradition being the two channels in which it runs, and the influence, seen in his writings, of the Pseudo-Dionysius links him to the Neo-Platonists. The second source is Reason, and here the channels are the Platonic philosophy and the methods of Aristotle—the latter an alliance that did Christianity no good, for Aristotle became an obstacle to the advance of the higher thought, as was made manifest in the struggles of Giordano Bruno, the ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... 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 point ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... 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 resented to a ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... slow manner in which Lord Lufton proceeded in the making and declaring of his love, and the absolute necessity which there is for two strings to one's bow, when one string may be in any way doubtful. Could it be possible that Mrs. Grantly had heard anything of that unfortunate Platonic friendship with Lucy Robarts? ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... reproducing what he saw, it not only casts light upon the spontaneous working of his genius, but it also shows how the young artist had already come to regard the inmost passion of the soul. When quite an old man, rhyming those rough platonic sonnets, he always spoke of love as masterful and awful. For his austere and melancholy nature, Eros was no tender or light-winged youngling, but a masculine tyrant, the tamer of male spirits. Therefore this Cupid, ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... 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 ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... to wit, a 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 with any geographical ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... rendering her a model of feminine grace. Graham was intimately acquainted with Colonel Morley; and with Mrs. Morley had contracted one of those cordial friendships, which, perfectly free alike from polite flirtation and Platonic attachment, do sometimes spring up between persons of opposite sexes without the slightest danger of changing their honest character into morbid sentimentality or unlawful passion. The Morleys stopped ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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
... place Mrs. 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 for the ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... loved her with a double love which shot its arrows of desire, and then lost them in the sky, where they faded out of sight in the impermeable ether. If you ask me why, young and ardent, I continued in the deluding dreams of Platonic love, I must own to you that I was not yet man enough to torture that woman, who was always in dread of some catastrophe to her children, always fearing some outburst of her husband's stormy temper, martyrized by him when not afflicted by the illness of Jacques or Madeleine, ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... enormous quantities of punch. Could he be 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
... 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: ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... conducive to the ideal, is variously known as comer hierro, to eat iron, and pelar la pava, to pluck the turkey. One imagines that the cold air of a winter's night must render the most ardent lover platonic. It is a significant fact that in Spanish novels if the hero is left for two minutes alone with the heroine there are invariably asterisks and some hundred pages later a baby. So it is doubtless wise to separate true love by iron ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... nothing of 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 ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... other, I had not In truth a brother's or a cousin's claim. But I remembered, 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 ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... 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 ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... 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, ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... 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 ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... 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 ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... out that she must go; that every hour of intercourse with him was fraught with peril. The fact that his lips were sealed availed her nothing; for these two had long since passed that danger point in platonic friendship when words are discarded for more direct communing of soul with soul. Theo could read every look in her eyes, every tone of her voice, like an open book, and she knew it; though she had never acknowledged ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... dear Albert, I believe you a little too platonic in friendship; very sure that you are loved, you are not pliant enough to give or receive proofs ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... parts of Horsley's letters was that in which he discussed the old objection raised by Priestley that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity was borrowed from Plato. There is, and Horsley does not deny it, a certain resemblance between the Platonic and the Christian theories. The Platonist asserted three Divine hypostases, the Good Being ([Greek: tagathon]), the word or reason ([Greek: logos] or [Greek: noys]), and the Spirit ([Greek: psyche]) that actuates or influences the whole system of the Universe (anima mundi), which had all one common ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... 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 ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... 3 Forbear, Platonic fools! t'inquire What numbers do the soul compose; No harmony can life inspire, But that which from ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... diligently—and Petrarch's sonnets as well; but notwithstanding all that, Maitre Bilot, I don't believe you thoroughly understand anything outside of your own wines and sauces, which, I am bound to admit, are always excellent. And pray, who is the favoured object of this Platonic attachment?" ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... her face. He looked upon Mrs. Slapman as a masculine mind and soul, of uncommon depth, made powerfully magnetic by its enshrinement in a feminine form. Overtop once told Matthew Maltboy, that he knew, in his own experience, the meaning of Platonic love. But Matthew, who was a sad materialist even in his sentimental moods, laughed at him, and winked. Overtop positively felt hurt at this unkind reception of his confidences, and never again alluded to the state of his feelings toward Mrs. Slapman, until subsequent ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... deal to the opera, and made acquaintance with a small number of charming people who admired the things that he admired. He joined a dining-club of which the motto was, The Whole, The Good, and The Beautiful. He formed a platonic friendship with a lady some years older than himself, who lived in Kensington Square; and nearly every afternoon he drank tea with her by the light of shaded candles, and talked of George Meredith and Walter Pater. It was notorious ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... 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 and Augustine; the former of whom, A. D. 362, was the first to insist upon the equality ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... unusually tender friendship be called which he professed for me, and, as I may say, claimed in return from me? I know that he has no notion of the love called Platonic. Nor have I: I think it, in general, a dangerous allowance; and, with regard to our sex, a very unequal one; since, while the man has nothing to fear, the woman has every thing, from the privileges that may be claimed, in an acknowledged ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... developed into the more intimate relation of friendship or love. The "Ewig Weibliche" appears constantly in his music and was always in his life. He formed many romantic attachments which may not always have been Platonic, but they were always pure. Beethoven had as chivalrous a regard for women as had any ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... the Dancing Widows I had little idea that there were any matrimonial relations subsisting in Typee, and I should as soon have thought of a Platonic affection being cultivated between the sexes, as of the solemn connection of man and wife. To be sure, there were old Marheyo and Tinor, who seemed to have a sort of nuptial understanding with one another; but for all that, I had sometimes observed a comical-looking old gentleman dressed in ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... 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 by ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... 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 Meaning of Truth • William James
... the history of European thought since. Let a man soak his soul in Plato; and it shall go hard but the fair flower Theosophy shall spring up there presently and bloom. He prepares the soil: suggesting the way to, rather than precisely formulating, the high teachings. The advantage of the grand Platonic camouflage has been twofold: on the one hand you could hardly dwarf your soul with dogmatic acceptation of Platonism, because he gave all his teachings—even Reincarnation—as hypotheses,—and men do not as a rule crucify their mental freedom on an hypothesis. On the other hand, how was ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... be careful, Grushnitski! Russian ladies, for the most part, cherish only Platonic love, without mingling any thought of matrimony with it; and Platonic love is exceedingly embarrassing. Princess Mary seems to be one of those women who want to be amused. If she is bored in your company for two minutes on end—you are lost irrevocably. Your ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... separate agreement 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 ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... fault in grammar shocks as much as a slit nose at Charing Cross? I shudder when I recall the Saturdays in the Rue du Temple, and compare the conversations there, the play of wit and fancy, the elaborate arguments upon platonic love, the graceful raillery, with any assembly in London—except yours, Hyacinth. At Fareham House we breathe a finer air, although his lordship's esprit moqueur will not allow us any superiority to the ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... appearance, 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, ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... between Dr Hodgson 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 ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... 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 developed ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... Winchelsea could not go to see her friends, in spite of the reiterated invitations of Mrs. Sevenoaks—it became full Sevenoaks in the second year. Then one day near the Easter rest she felt lonely and without a soul to understand her in the world, and her mind ran once more on what is called Platonic friendship. Fanny was clearly happy and busy in her new sphere of domesticity, but no doubt HE had his lonely hours. Did he ever think of those days in Rome—gone now beyond recalling? No one had understood her as he had done; no one ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... Charteris pointed out, there could be no possible objection to this conspiracy, since they had decided that their friendship was to be of a purely platonic nature. It was a severe trial to him, he confessed, to be forced to put aside certain dreams he had had of the future—mad dreams, perhaps, but such as had seemed very dear and very plausible ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... all this, it makes little difference whether the majority has any preferences; its sympathies, if it has any, will never be other than platonic. It no longer counts for anything in either camp, it has withdrawn from the battle-field, it is now simply the stakes of the conflict, the prey and the booty of the winner. For, unable or unwilling ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... care, take 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
... 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 Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... the learned originator of the doctrine we are just now considering gives us to understand, it would compromise the solution of questions by the intoxication of logic, and the ambition of perfect system; if, consequently, it is to be worshipped like a motionless and inactive divinity, how could this platonic satisfaction suffice us? Would not the opponents of economic doctrines be disposed to acknowledge all the principles, provided the consequences to be drawn from them were left to themselves; and would they not come to us, bristling ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... is generally 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 ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... tradition, 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 ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... 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
... sucklings about one-third of it had better be expurgated. The Apocrypha was a favourite work, but above all I loved the Revelations, a work which, I may say by the way, is still a treasure to be investigated as regards the marvellous mixture of Neo-Platonic, later Egyptian (or Gnostic), and even Indian Buddhistic ideas therein. Well, I had learned from it a word which St. John applies (to my mind very vulgarly and much too frequently) to the Scarlet Lady of Babylon or Rome. What this word meant I did not ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... only the courtesy of the friend, and never the tenderness of the lover. Even when the maiden presented him with the silk purse to which she had given so many hours of toil, his thanks, though warm, were distinctly platonic. Both piqued and humiliated at his conduct, the girl was glad enough when, on the morning of the third day, they set out on their journey, and she almost welcomed the advent of Bagby, who overtook them as they were taking their noon baiting at Bristol, ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... will get rid of her. And why? Because her Soul, like all Souls, is imperishable. Now, putting it as a mere supposition, and for the sake of the argument, that you feel a certain admiration for the Princess Ziska, an admiration which might possibly deepen into something more than platonic, ... "—here Denzil Murray looked up, his eyes glowing with an angry pain as he fixed them on Gervase,—"why then the Soul of the other woman you once wronged might come between you and the face of the new attraction and cause ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... in that summary fashion, after so long," he said, "after so long, Pauline! Well—I have lived to be of some service to you—or so I think. Whether Platonic or not, you had better not encourage his reverence to that extent again, do you hear? A veritable Cassius of a man! And, by the way, you are looking very well just now, lady dear. I never ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... warm a withered heart. She had heard it said that men of fifty were apt to love young girls of just that kind. Before the colonel had come regularly to the house Sylvie had heard in the Tiphaines' salon strange stories of his life and morals. Old maids preserve in their love-affairs the exaggerated Platonic sentiments which young girls of twenty are wont to profess; they hold to these fixed doctrines like all who have little experience of life and no personal knowledge of how great social forces modify, impair, and bring to nought such grand and noble ideas. ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... front elevation of whose name is Stella, takes pen in hand and gives the Icon. a red-hot "roast" for having intimated that Platonic Love, so-called, is a pretty good thing for respectable women to let alone. Judged by the amount of caloric she generates, Stella must be a star of the first magnitude, or even an entire constellation. ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... 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 there was not the ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... a very ancient history and unite many strands of historic thought. They came to light in the sixteenth century with the revival through Greek literature of Stoic, Neo-Platonic, and Neo-Pythagorean ideas. But the Greek stream of thought as it now reappeared was fused with streams of thought from many other sources—medieval mysticism, Persian astrology, Arabian philosophy, and the Jewish Cabala, which, in turn, was a fusing of ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... as they emerged into the narrow street. "Now ideas may be divided variously into classes, as, for instance, ideas which are good, bad, or indifferent. Or you may contrast the idea of Plato with ideas anything but platonic—take it as you please. Then there is my idea, which is in itself, good, interesting, and worthy of the embalming process; and there is your idea, which I am human enough to consider altogether bad, worthless, ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... 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 ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... loved abode of genius and virtue, is a natural tribute to a noble nature, and flows from one of the purest and most sustaining sources of emotion by which our humanity is distinguished. It almost looks as if, in accordance with the Platonic philosophy, there remained to man, from an original and more lofty state of existence, some dim ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... 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. ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... of special indebtedness Cicero, in composing the Cato Maior, was no doubt under obligations of a more general kind to the Greeks. The form of the dialogue is Greek, and Aristotelian rather than Platonic.[19] But further, it is highly probable that Cicero owed to some particular Greek dialogue on Old Age the general outline of the arguments he there brings forward. Many of the Greek illustrative allusions may have had ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... enthusiasm of a young father for his firstborn, said: "The child has eyes like the fish-pools of Heshbon, with wondrous depth of intelligent gaze." But, though a poet, it would be a great error to suppose that Lyall was an idealist, if by that term is meant one who, after a platonic fashion, indulges in ideas which are wholly visionary and unpractical. He had, indeed, ideals. No man of his imagination and mental calibre could be without them. But they were ideals based on a solid foundation of facts. It was here that, in spite ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... if I were to associate any one with him it would be Herodotus, and I believe all I have said of the Homeric landscape will be found equally true of the Herodotean, as assuredly it will be of the Platonic;—the contempt, which Plato sometimes expresses by the mouth of Socrates, for the country in general, except so far as it is shady, and has cicadas and running streams to make pleasant noises in it, being almost ludicrous. ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... are translated in the second appendix are not mentioned by Aristotle, or by any early authority, and have no claim to be ascribed to Plato. They are examples of Platonic dialogues to be assigned probably to the second or third generation after Plato, when his writings were well known at Athens and Alexandria. They exhibit considerable originality, and are remarkable for containing several thoughts ...
— Alcibiades II • An Imitator of Plato
... Epithalamion and the Four Hymns rank undoubtedly highest. For splendour of imagery, for harmony of verse, for delicate taste and real passion, the Epithalamion excels all other poems of its class, and the Four Hymns express a rapture of Platonic enthusiasm, which may indeed be answerable for the unreadable Psyches and Psychozoias of the next age, but which is itself married to immortal verse in the ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... delivered this thrust, it had been as skilfully parried; so skilfully, indeed, that Goguet, the smiling clerk, could not conceal an approving grimace. Besides, on principle, he always took the prisoner's part, in a mild, Platonic way, ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... without, and needing 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 ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... 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 ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... people's memories; nor was the position of the Pope in Rome as yet by any means secure. What increased Paul's anxiety was the fact that some scholars, appointed secretaries of the briefs (Abbreviatori) by Pius and deprived of office by himself, were members of the Platonic Society. Their animosity against him was both natural and ill-concealed. At the same time the bitter hatred avowed by Laurentius Valla against the temporal power might in an age of conjurations have meant active malice. Leo Alberti hints that Porcari ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... place, the people have their full growth a few weeks after birth, and finish their education before the first year. During the three remaining years they prepare for death. The province appeared to be a true Platonic republic, in which all the virtues reached to their perfection. The inhabitants, on account of their short lives, are, as it were, continually on the wing. They regard this life as a gate through which they hastily pass. ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... followers had very fixed opinions as to what would befall man hereafter; but the sole point of belief on which they were determined—that the soul has nothing in common with the body, and survives it—was enough to give the Platonic philosophy that sublime aspiration by which it is distinguished. It is clear from the works of Plato, that many philosophical writers, his predecessors or contemporaries, professed materialism. These ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... You see, cousins and curates are regarded as "harmless"—"detrimentals with the chill off," so to speak. His scrap of relationship throws a glimmer of possession around the one, endowing with inherent right every act of his ministry; while his "cloth" invests the other with a halo of sanctity and Platonic freedom that disarms gossip of the usual clothes-peg whereon it hangs its scandal. "Cousin Tom"—by-the-way, did you ever read Mackworth Praed's lines on the same theme?—is allowed opportunities for, and latitude in, flirtation, which poor ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... he had, as we have said, formed his morals on the Platonic model, yet he perfectly agreed with the opinion of Aristotle, in considering that great man rather in the quality of a philosopher or a speculatist, than as a legislator. This sentiment he carried a ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... 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 whom her reveries ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... correcting others; from Severus, "a disposition to do good, and to give to others readily, and to cherish good hope, and, to believe that I am beloved of my friends;" from Maximus, "sweetness and dignity, and to do what was set before me without complaining;" from Alexander the Platonic, "not frequently to say to any one, nor to write in a letter, that I have no leisure; nor continually to excuse the neglect of ordinary duties by alleging ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... eclogues or in Horace's second and sixteenth epodes. Much of Casimire's poetry, is indeed best understood as a conscious effort to apply the allegorical technique of Canticles to the classical beatus ille-themes,[5] just as his thought presents an interesting combination of Stoic and Platonic ideas. ...
— The Odes of Casimire, Translated by G. Hils • Mathias Casimire Sarbiewski
... 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 met, they were to be on friendly terms; they would discuss ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... in the neighbourhood. It was 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 ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... that she talked thus contemptibly of M. de Beaufort, whom she always taxed with impotency, for it is certain that his love was purely Platonic, as he never asked any favour of her, and seemed very uneasy with her for eating flesh on Fridays. She was so sweet upon me, and withal such a charming beauty, that, being naturally indisposed to let ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... another direction, and the bald little philosopher was again taken along—from which we assume, following in the footsteps of Conan Doyle, that Socrates was no bottle-baby. The world should be grateful to Phaenarete that she did not honor the Sairy Gamp precedents and observe the Platonic maxim, "Sandal-makers usually go barefoot": she gave her customers an object-lesson in well-doing as well as teaching them by precept. None of her clients did so well as she—even though her professional ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... tiresome, dull,—a kind of 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
... truth, and a universal scholar; he investigated the Stoic and Peripatetic philosophy, and attempted the Pythagorean; but the behaviour of one of its professors disgusting him, he applied himself to the Platonic, in which he took great delight. About the year 133, when he was thirty years of age, he became a convert to christianity, and then, for the first time, perceived the real nature ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... philosophy, and was indefatigable in his efforts to acquire knowledge and learning of every kind. In Asia, probably at Tyre itself, he attended the lectures of Origen; at Athens he studied under Apollonius and Longinus; in Rome, whereto he ultimately gravitated, he attached himself to the Neo-Platonic school of Plotinus. His literary labours, which were enormous, had for their general object the establishment of that eclectic system which Ammonius Saccas, Plotinus, Jamblichus, and others had elaborated, and were endeavouring to impose upon the world as constituting ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... seem to have had any very firm convictions. In all likelihood, he was a pagan, a sceptical or hesitating pagan, such as existed in numbers at that time. Led by Augustin, he drew near to Manicheeism. Then, when Augustin gave up Manicheeism for Platonic philosophy, we see Romanianus take the airs of a philosopher. Later, when Augustin came back to Catholicism, he drew Romanianus in his wake towards that religion. This man of fashion was one of those frivolous people who never go deep into things, for whom ideas are ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... 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 Hetairai Short Stories Greek Romances ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck |
