Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Platonists. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Platonists Quotes And Sayings by 94 Authors including Iris Murdoch,J.l. Austin,Thomas Molnar,Dennis Lehane,Joseph Joubert for you to enjoy and share.
Plato was suspicious of writing which seems to remove knowledge from the present moment of the individual and lodge it elsewhere, in books, which are inert and cannot defend themselves against fools.
...the philosopher's professional addiction to furniture...
Teilhard merely seems to set the problem of man, as the utopian sees it, on lofty heights; yet, hi terminology, which mixes archeology, sociology, biology, astronomy, and a vulgarized theology, can, in fact, be translated at every turn into the language of collectivism and of totalitarian polices.
Men who believe that the way to the mind is not by way of ice picks through the brain or large dosages of dangerous medicine but through an honest reckoning of the self.
How many people make themselves abstract to appear profound. The most useful part of abstract terms are the shadows they create to hide a vacuum.
Cynic' is the sentimentalist's name for the realist.
There are teachers and students with square minds who are by nature meant to undergo the fascination of catagories. For them, 'schools' and 'movements' are everything; by painting a group symbol on the brow of mediocrity, they condone their own incomprehension of true genius.
They are the gateway for our modern esthetic development, the prophets of the new time. They are most of all, the primitives of the way they have begun; they have voiced most of all the imperative need of essential personalism, of direct expression of direct experience.
The phantasmogoric philosophy, ineluctable bride of mediocrity.
When we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to which also Plato was debtor.
Plato, by the way, wanted to banish all poets from his proposed Utopia because they were liars. The truth was that Plato knew philosophers couldn't compete successfully with poets.
I fantasize that our politicians have been moved by the dialogues of Plato, and thus contemplate the ancient conflict of the sophists versus the lovers of truth.
Plato is my friend, but truth is a better friend.
I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.
They seek neither truth nor likelihood; they seek astonishment. They think metaphysics is a branch of the literature of fantasy
I remember something Mrs. Harbor once said on one of her crazy tangents in English: that Plato believed that the whole world - everything we can see - was just like shadows on a cave wall. We can't actually see the real thing, the thing that's casting the shadow in the first place.
It was futile class of people who discussed not merely science and poetry but even the ways of governing men
Those [who] assiduously fabricate for themselves a self-conscious originality, and after having made a choice of certain practices, their principal preoccupation is never to depart from them, to remain for ever on their guard and allow themselves not a moment's relaxation.
It was an observation of Plato, long since, that those are not the best stomachs that reject, without distinction, all sorts of aliments." "True," said Candide, "but still there must certainly be a pleasure in criticising everything, and in perceiving faults where others think they see beauties.
I'd describe myself as a pragmatist tinged with idealism.
Philologists, who chase A painting syllable through time and space Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark, To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's Ark.
Plato offers the amazing idea that contemplation of the way things really are is, in itself, a purifying process that can bring human beings into the only divinity there is.
Plato's cave is full of freaks.
The theoretician believes in logic and believes that he despises dreams, intuition, and poetry. He does not recognize that these three fairies have only disguised themselves in order to dazzle him ... He does not know that he owes his greatest discoveries to them.
All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.
Reformers who are obsessed with purity and cannot see that their obsession is impure.
Philosophers.-We are full of things which take us out of ourselves.
Nowadays we would perhaps call Plato's state totalitarian.
The job of the architect becomes more difficult in this secular age. Where once he had a god to extol, he now has humans like himself; where once he had "he," he now has "she" and "they.
It would be idle, and presumptuous, to wish to imitate the achievements of a Morphy or an Alekhine; but their methods and their manner of expressing themselves are within the reach of all.
Our friends early appear to us as representatives of certain ideas, which they never pass or exceed. They stand on the brink of the ocean of thought and power, but they never take a single step that would bring them there.
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.
...and lovers of romance novels and dissident rebels and brothers in Christ and druids and shamans and aphrodisiac vendors and scriveners and purveyors of real fake passports and gun-runners and porters and bric-a-brac trades and mining prospectors short on liquid assets and Siamese twins...
A constellation of Utopians is a group which only seems a group to us because we seek familiar institutions in their government, as we use the shapes of beasts and heroes to make false sense of the sea of stars.
Who thinks all Science, as all Virtue, vain; Who counts Geometry and numbers Toys ...
Sceptic, mathematician, Christian; doubt, affirmation, submission.
Like mythology, Greek philosophy has a tendency to personify ideas. And the Sophist is not merely a teacher of rhetoric for a fee of one or fifty drachmae (Crat.), but an ideal of Plato's in which the falsehood of all mankind is reflected.
The Greeks were the first intellectualists. In a world where the irrational had played the chief role, they came forward as the protagonists of the mind.
All of Western philosophy is but a footnote to Plato.
Now people can generally be classified into two groups: the mediocre realists and the mediocre dreamers.
Those whose days are consumed in the low pursuits of avarice, or the gaudy frivolties of fashion, unobservant of nature's lovelinessof demarcation, nor on which side thereof an intermediate form should lie.
Romantics deified the imagination;
[O]ther thinkers have philosophised since the time of Plato, but that does not destroy the interest and beauty of his philosophy
Their [philosophers] thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a re-recognizing, a remembering, a return and a home-coming to a far-off, ancient common-household of the soul, out of which those ideas formerly grew: philosophizing is so far a kind of atavism of the highest order.
medhermeneutical
The scholar without good breeding is a pedant; the philosopher, a cynic.
Plato complains that whereas in simpler matters - like shoe-making - we think only a specially-trained person will serve our purpose, in politics we presume that every one who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state.
Idealist: a cynic in the making.
Ornate rhetorick taught out of the rule of Plato ... To which poetry would be made subsequent, or indeed rather precedent, as being less suttle and fine, but more simple, sensuous, and passionate.
It is the cruelest of all ironies that moderns imagine themselves to be (abstractly understood) "individuals," because in actuality moderns are "types," abstracted and self-abstractive victims of a process of stereotyping that afflicts even would-be rebels and anarchists.
An ideal's love-fraught, imperious call
That bides the spheres become articulate.
People have Plato's form in their mind of what a leader is, or what a C.E.O. is, and it is a bunch of elements that I really don't conform to at all. I've given this a lot of thought, and I came to the conclusion that I don't care.
What difference is there, do you think, between those in Plato's cave who can only marvel at the shadows and images of various objects, provided they are content and don't know what they miss, and the philosopher who has emerged from the cave and sees the real things?
Futilitarianism.
The philosopher caught in the nets of language.
In this twilight they were more imagined than seen, but I felt surrounded by the practitioners of a sacred mediocrity, an elegant mediocrity cloistering inaccessible tortures. I don't know quite how to put it. People, men, proud of their cliches yet full of helpless poetry.
It's the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country ...
We are dreamers, shapers, singers, and makers.We study the mysteries of laser and circuit, crystal and scanner, holographic demons and invocations of equations. These are the tools we employ and we know many things.
Close friends, or those in my pay, sometimes call me a literary polymath, while others say that I'm just a shallow dilettante, superficial and breezy, with a faux-naif style.
A fortress against ideas and against the
Shuddering insidious shock of the theory-vendors
The little sardine men crammed in a monster toy
Who tilt their aggregate beast against our crumbling Troy.
It is incomprehensible to me that any thinker can calmly call himself a modernist; he might as well call himself a Thursdayite.
The reason I don't like realist, photorealist, neorealist, or whatever, is that I am as interested in the artificial as I am in the real.
An annibaptist is a thing I am not a member of:I am a Pisplikan just now & a Prisbeteren at Kercaldy my native town which thugh dirty is clein in the country.
It was modesty that invented the word "philosopher" in Greece and left the magnificent overweening presumption in calling oneselfwise to the actors of the spirit
the modesty of such monsters of pride and sovereignty as Pythagoras, as Plato.
It is interesting to observe what the Cynic teaching became when it was popularized. In the early part of the third century B.C., the cynics were the fashion, especially in Alexandria. They published little sermons pointing out how easy it is to do without material possessions,
In the Phaedrus, Plato argued that the new arrival of writing would revolutionize culture for the worst. He suggested that it would substitute reminiscence for thought and mechanical learning for the true dialect of the living quest for truth by discourse and conversation.
Plato may have denied the existence of ideal forms in this world, but Plato never saw a Viking ship.
(Scientific American, February, 1998)
The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.
In Henry Adams, I discovered not only the prototype of the modern thinker but also someone who is more interesting: a viper-toothed, puling, supercilious crank, thwarted in ambition, aging gracelessly, mad at the cosmos, and ashamed of his own jejune ideals. He is nevertheless very dear to me.
People with imagination
Plato was the first to envisage the idea of timeless existence and to emphasize it - against reason - as a reality, more [real] than our actual experience ...
Plato and Hitler were both the same kind of consistent socialists who planned also for the production of future socialists, the breeding and education of future members of society.
Something which, for want of a more definite term at present, I must be permitted to be called queer; but which Mr. Coleridge would have called mystical, Mr. Kant pantheistical, Mr. Carlyle twistical, and Mr. Emerson hyperquizzitistical.
Plato said: 'He who approaches the temple of the Muses without inspiration in the belief that craftmanship alone suffices, will remain a bungler and his presumptuous poetry will be obscured by the songs of the maniacs.'
They are people who literally enter books.
The architect who combines in his being the powers of vision, of imagination, of intellect, of sympathy with human need and the power to interpret them in a language vernacular and time
is he who shall create poems in stone.
Those whose hearts are fixed on Reality itself deserve the title of Philosophers.
Some philosophers see into themselves, and some into their times; still others forge an alliance with the future.
The men of yesterday are spectres; those of to-morrow are forms. The eye of the spirit distinguishes them but obscurely. The embryonic work of the future is one of the visions of philosophy.
Many modern artists, philosophers, and theologians reject the knowledge of the past. Thus they must continually start over again from ground zero, their vision restricted to their own narrow perspectives, making themselves artificially primitive.
Had there been no Plato, the Christians would have had a harder time selling the idea that all God really wanted from us was fraternal love.
There is a certain way of searching for the truth in mathematics that Plato is said first to have discovered. Theon called this analysis.
Most people do not understand until old age what Plato tells them when they are young.
They love truth flourishing, who do not love it when it is confuting. They dare handle and look on the sword with delight when in a rich scabbard, who would run away to see it drawn.
A cynic is a frustrated idealist.
The activities of these parasites and degenerates gave rise to Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism, Pointillism, Constructivism, Orphism, Surrealism, Dada, and also Impossibleism, Supersurrealism, Dynamic Double-Dog Realism, Ishkabibbleism, and Mama, which is like Dada only nicer.
I've always written about people who have very abstracted in a certain way. I write about scientists and artists and musicians. I write about people who live in their heads who are very obsessed about a certain set of details in the physical world.
If the upper realm is, as Plato suggested, the sphere of perfect love, truth, justice, and beauty, then the artist seeks to call down the magic of this world and to create, by dint of labor and luck, the closest-to-sublime simulacra of those qualities that he or she can.
We are pantheists as natural scientists, polytheists as poets, and monotheists as moral beings.
Here even the various mind-pleasing blossoming flowers, and attractive shining supreme golden houses, have no inherently existent maker at all. They are set up through the power of thought. Through the power of conceptuality the world is established
Scratch the surface of most cynics and you find a frustrated idealist - someone who made the mistake of converting his ideals into expectations.
In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.
In Plato's republic, poets were considered subversive, a danger to the republic. I kind of relish that role. So I see my present role as a gadfly, to use my soapbox to promote my various ideas and obsesions.
they propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds.
We are only geometricians of matter; the Greeks were, first of all, geometricians in the apprenticeship to virtue.
Philistine - a word which I understand properly to denote indifference to the higher intellectual interests. The word may also be defined, however, as the name applied by prigs to the rest of their species.
Since Plato, we have been considering the nature of knowledge, the meaning of meaning and the status of the physical world.
Philistinism! - We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing.
Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary.
Pythagoras, Locke, Socrates - but pages might be filled up, as vainly as before, with the sad usage of all sorts of sages, who in his life-time, each was deemed a bore! The loftiest minds outrun their tardy ages.