Platonic Quotes - Page 2

• The art of writing is mysterious; the opinions we hold are ephemeral , and I prefer the Platonic idea of the Muse to that of Poe, who reasoned, or feigned to reason, that the writing of a poem is an act of the intelligence. It never fails to amaze me that the classics hold a romantic theory of poetry, and a romantic poet a classical theory.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Art, Writing, Ideas

  Jorge Luis Borges (1978). “Doctor Brodie's Report”, Plume Books

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• All civilization in a sense exists only in the mind. Gunpowder, textile arts, machinery, laws, telephones are not themselves transmitted from man to man or from generation to generation, at least not permanently. It is the perception, the knowledge and understanding of them, their ideas in the Platonic sense, that are passed along. Everything social can have existence only through mentality.

  Alfred L. Kroeber

  Art, Men, Law

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• As a filmmaker I cannot make anything beautiful. I'm Platonic in that sense.

  Michael Glawogger

  Beautiful, Filmmaker

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• It's the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.

  Alan Lightman

  Country, Philosophy, Republic

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

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• Tis the perception of the beautiful, A fine extension of the faculties, Platonic, universal, wonderful, Drawn from the stars, and filtered through the skies, Without which life would be extremely dull

  Lord Byron

  Beautiful, Stars, Sky

  LORD BYRON (1875). “DON JUAN”, p.76

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• It isn’t necessary to know exactly how your ideal life will look; you only have to know what feels better and what feels worse…Begin making choices based on what makes you feel freer and happier, rather than on how you think an ideal life should look. It’s the process of feeling our way toward happiness, not the realization of the Platonic ideal, that creates our best lives.

  Martha Beck

  Feel Better, Thinking, Choices

  "How to escape your rat race" by Martha Beck, www.cnn.com. January 19, 2009.

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• If the Christian religion, as I understand it, or as you understand it, should maintain its ground, as I believe it will, yet Platonic, Pythagoric, Hindoo, and cabalistical Christianity, which is Catholic Christianity, and which has prevailed for 1500 years, has received a mortal wound, of which the monster must finally die. Yet so strong is his constitution, that he may endure for centuries before he expires.

  John Adams

  Christian, Strong, Believe

  Letter to Thomas Jefferson, "The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States," Volume 10, July 16, 1814.

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• I have platonic relationships with my guy friends. There's some friends that I've kissed or whatever, but it was always just once.

  Aly Michalka

  Guy, Guy Friend, Platonic Relationship

  Pinstripe Magazine Interview, February 07, 2011.

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• Platonic England, house of solitudes,
  rests in its laurels and its injured stone

  Geoffrey Hill

  House, Solitude, Stones

  Geoffrey Hill (2013). “Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012”, p.129, Oxford University Press

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• The Doxology ... that testimonial to the Platonic Trinity, which divided the Roman Empire into at least eighteen quarreling sects, none of whom knew what they were fighting about, and which schisms contributed to the decline and fall of this greatest of states. Rome had thrived for one thousand years with pagan gods at the helm and expired after only one hundred and fifty years under the Christian banner.

  Ruth Hurmence Green

  Christian, Fall, Fighting

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• It has been a long road from Plato's Meno to the present, but it is perhaps encouraging that most of the progress along that road has been made since the turn of the twentieth century, and a large fraction of it since the midpoint of the century. Thought was still wholly intangible and ineffable until modern formal logic interpreted it as the manipulation of formal tokens. And it seemed still to inhabit mainly the heaven of Platonic ideals, or the equally obscure spaces of the human mind, until computers taught us how symbols could be processed by machines.

  Allen Newell

  Plato, Taught Us, Space

  "Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbols and Search". Communications of the ACM 19 (3), (p. 125), March 1976.

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• Russian ladies, for the most part, cherish only Platonic love, without mingling any thought of matrimony with it; and Platonic love is exceedingly embarrassing.

  Mikhail Lermontov

  Love Is, Cherish, Embarrassing

  Mikhail Lermontov (2015). “A Hero of Our Time”, p.103, Xist Publishing

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• Hellenic science is a victory of rationalism, which appears greater, not smaller, when one is made to realize that it had been won in spite of the irrational beliefs of the Greek people; all in all, it was a triumph of reason in the face of unreason. Some knowledge of Greek superstitions is needed not only for a proper appreciation of that triumph but also for the justification of occasional failures, such as the many Platonic aberrations.

  George Sarton

  Appreciation, People, Greek

  George Sarton (2012). “Ancient Science Through the Golden Age of Greece”, p.9, Courier Corporation

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• In [Aristotle's] formal logic, thought is organized in a manner very different from that of the Platonic dialogue. In this formal logic, thought is indifferent toward its objects. Whether they are mental or physical, whether they pertain to society or to nature, they become subject to the same general laws of organization, calculation, and conclusion - but they do so as fungible signs or symbols, in abstraction from their particular "substance." This general quality (quantitative quality) is the precondition of law and order - in logic as well as in society - the price of universal control.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Order, Law, Organization

  "One-Dimensional Man" by Herbert Marcuse, (p. 136), 1964.

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• Each one of us must in the end choose for himself how far he would like to leave our collective fate to the wayward vagaries of popular assemblies For myself it would be most irksome to be ruled by a bevy of Platonic Guardians, even if I knew how to choose them, which I assuredly do not I should miss the stimulus of living in a society where I have, at least theoretically, some part in the direction of public affairs.

  Learned Hand

  Fate, Missing, Would Be

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• You were the living image of the entire Platonic shadow show, an illusion that could fill my emptiness with marvellous, imaginary things as long as, just as long as, the movie lasted, and then all would all vanish.

  Angela Carter

  Long, Shadow, Emptiness

  Angela Carter (1977). “The Passion of New Eve”, Harcourt

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• 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.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Religious, Believe, Men

  Thomas Jefferson (1829). “Memoirs, Correspondence and Private Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Late President of the United States”, p.209

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• All our surest statements about the nature of the world are mathematical statements, yet we do not know what mathematics "is"... and so we find that we have adapted a religion strikingly similar to many traditional faiths. Change "mathematics" to "God" and little else might seem to change. The problem of human contact with some spiritual realm, of timelessness, of our inability to capture all with language and symbol-all have their counterparts in the quest for the nature of Platonic mathematics.

  John D. Barrow

  God, Spiritual, Littles

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• Odor of blood when Christ was slain Made all Platonic tolerance vain And vain all Doric discipline.

  William Butler Yeats

  Blood, Discipline, Tolerance

  Thomas Stearns Eliot, William Butler Yeats (2001). “YER”

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• Strange, when one thinks of all the other boys, infinite experimental kisses, test tube infatuations, crushes, pseudo-loves. All through this physical separation, through the testing and the trying of the others, there has been this peculiar rapport, comradeship, of us two so alike, so similar, but for science-boy and humanities-girl - the introspection, self examination, biannual deep summarizing conversations, and then the platonic parting.

  Sylvia Plath

  Crush, Girl, Kissing

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• The influence (for good or ill) of Plato's work is immeasurable. Western thought, one might say, has been Platonic or anti-Platonic, but hardly ever non-Platonic.

  Karl Popper

  Plato, Hard Work, Science

  Karl Popper (2014). “After The Open Society: Selected Social and Political Writings”, p.190, Routledge

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• Do people believe in human rights because such rights actually exist, like mathematical truths, sitting on a cosmic shelf next to the Pythagorean theorem just waiting to be discovered by Platonic reasoners? Or do people feel revulsion and sympathy when they read accounts of torture, and then invent a story about universal rights to help justify their feelings?

  Jonathan Haidt

  Believe, Pythagorean Theorem, Rights

  Jonathan Haidt (2012). “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion”, p.32, Vintage

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• Up until then it had only been himself. Up to then it had been a private wrestle between him and himself. Nobody else much entered into it. After the people came into it he was, of course, a different man. Everything had changed then and he was no longer the virgin, with the virgin's right to insist upon platonic love. Life, in time, takes every maidenhead, even if it has to dry it up; it does not matter how the owner wants to keep it. Up to then he had been the young idealist. But he could not stay there. Not after the other people entered into it.

  James Jones

  Love Life, Men, People

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• Laws of nature have no physical properties of mass /energy. They are platonic truths in transcendent realm that create & govern the Universe.

  Deepak Chopra

  Law, Energy, Mass

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• The most embarrassing part of the film is that the new problem posed by simulation is confused with its classical, Platonic treatment ... The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Confused, Able, Kind

  "Jean Baudrillard" by Steven Poole, www.theguardian.com. March 7, 2007.

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