Platonists Quotes & Sayings

A Platonic friendship is perhaps only possible when one or other of the Platonists is in love with a third person. — Evelyn Beatrice Hall

But the Platonists never argued that evil's lack of ultimate reality meant that there was no moral evil in the world. Plato was well aware of wars, murders, and lies. Evil exists, but it exists as a lack of good, just as holes in a Swiss cheese exist only as lack of cheese. The evil of a lie is the absence of truth. Plato did not think that the nonbeing of evil removed evil from the world, only that it removed responsibility for evil from the creator. Evil arose not from the God, but from matter. — Jeffrey Burton Russell

The highest development was in the Egyptian and Cabalistic systems, and it was blended with Christian thought in the schools of the Neo-Platonists and the Gnostics ... Its studies were only kept alive during the Dark Ages among the Jews who were the chief exponents of its Cabalistic aspect ... and it is still alive today. — Dion Fortune

Hinduism does not rest on the authority of one book or one prophet, nor does it posses a common creed like the Kalma. — Mahatma Gandhi

Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young philosopher to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient "interest" in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so helplessly lost to all honourable ambition, as that in their secret souls they would rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are short-sighted; what us, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have left their opera glasses at home. — Herman Melville

Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage licence. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples. — Vaughn Walker

Our flesh, having been worn by the Most High Himself is the most noble mantle of all. The Manicheans and Buddhists and Platonists on the one hand, who belittle this flesh, and the gluttons and lechers and egoists on the other, who are slaves to it, are still living in division. — Mark Shea

I have lots of favorites movies. I say this only because it's a favorite movie because it's a sport I love. I'm a huge baseball fan. There are movies I like as much as this, but I sort of single this movie out because I'm a baseball nut, and that's 'Field of Dreams.' — Rick Santorum

The knowledge that is suited to our situation and powers, the whole compass of moral, natural, and mathematical science, was neglected by the new Platonists; whilst they exhausted their strength in the verbal disputes of metaphysics, attempted to explore the secrets of the invisible world, and studied to reconcile Aristotle with Plato, on subjects of which both these philosophers were as ignorant as the rest of mankind. — Edward Gibbon

Interpreters, and have in a short time considered themselves superior to their masters. This was the case with Ficinus, Picus, Dr, Plenry Moore, and other psucdo Platonists, their contemporaries, who, in order to combine Christianity with the doctrines of Plato, rejected some of his most important tenets, and perverted others, and thus corrupted one of these systems, and afforded no real benefit to the other. — Anonymous

GNOSTICS, n. A sect of philosophers who tried to engineer a fusion between the early Christians and the Platonists. The former would not go into the caucus and the combination failed, greatly to the chagrin of the fusion managers. — Ambrose Bierce

In a foreign country it is far from easy to study a scene at length when you know that at any minute someone may appear and ask what you are doing and that you can't answer, and you haven't many references, and you don't know the law. Neither is it easy to find and know the subjects for portraits or comfortable to make such picture when you cannot apply an anesthesia of small talk. — Robert Adams

In the schools of small Midwestern towns, the only aristocracies are of beauty, intelligence, and athletic prowess. — Ellen Gilchrist

The best revenge to get on your distractors is taking the high road. Avoid playing their game, following their murky rules. — Assegid Habtewold

There is nothing better for your family than for you to be at your best, for you to be at your own peace, for you to be showing them in every way who you are, and what you stand for. — Steve Maraboli

A woman only can understand a woman ... — Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Christian spirituality had been strongly influenced by Platonism, which sought to liberate the soul from the body, but in some circles in the early fourth century, people were beginning to hope that their hitherto despised bodies could bring men and women to the divine - or at least that it was not a reality separate from the physical, as the Platonists held.25 — Karen Armstrong

One Corinthians 15, one of Paul's longest sustained discussions and the climax of the whole letter, is about the creator God remaking the creation - not abandoning it, as Platonists of all sorts, including the gnostics, would have wanted. — N. T. Wright

I adore the designer B. Michael's curve-flattering gowns, but there is nothing better than jeans with a crisp white shirt. — Tamara Tunie

Perhaps it would sound too paradoxical to say that these two saints saved us from Spirituality; a dreadful doom. Perhaps it may be misunderstood if I say that St. Francis, for all his love of animals, saved us from being Buddhists; and that St. Thomas, for all his love of Greek philosophy, saved us from being Platonists. But it is best to say the truth in its simplest form; that they both reaffirmed the Incarnation, by bringing God back to earth. — G.K. Chesterton

The Platonists and their Christian successors held the peculiar notion that the Earth was tainted and somehow nasty, while the heavens were perfect and divine. The fundamental idea that the Earth is a planet, that we are citizens of the Universe, was rejected and forgotten. — Carl Sagan

With regards to political enemies Plato had a kill-and-banish principle ... In interpreting it , modern-day Platonists are clearly disturbed by it, even as they make elaborate attempts to defend Plato. — Karl Popper

Set a goal, and in small, consistent steps, work to reach it. Get support from your peers when you start flagging. Repeat. You will change. — Seth Godin

The reason most people get eating disorders is because they want to be skinny, but they do it stupidly, and they stop eating completely - nobody knows anything about nutrition or exercise. I think it should be a separate subject in school. — Kathryn Prescott

Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions? — Camille Paglia

His eyes were like galaxies, and everyone could get lost in them. How many stars flickered there, no one knew, but every time he glanced upon someone, a new star ignited, a new star was caught in the gravity of his stare. — Dean F. Wilson

Instead of Gnostics, we have Existentialists and God-is-dead theologians, instead of Neo-Platonists, devotees of Zen, instead of desert hermits, heroin addicts and Beats (who also, oddly enough, seem averse to washing), instead of mortification of the flesh, sado-masochistic pornography; as for our public entertainments, the fare offered by television is still a shade less brutal than that provided by the Amphitheatre, but only a shade and may not be so for long. — W. H. Auden

If you don't sow in your promise land, it won't give you anything. — Sunday Adelaja

The substance of all such paganism may be summarised thus. It is an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone; in its own field reason does not restrain it at all. It is vital to the view of all history that reason is something separate from religion even in the most rational of these civilisations. It is only as an afterthought, when such cults are decadent or on the defensive, that a few Neo-Platonists or a few Brahmins are found trying to rationalise them, and even then only by trying to allegorise them. But in reality the rivers of mythology and philosophy run parallel and do not mingle till they meet in the sea of Christendom. — G.K. Chesterton

The genius of the Platonists, is intoxicating to the student, yet how few particulars of it can I detach from all their books. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every soul and spirit has some degree of continuity with the universal spirit, which is recognized to be located not only where the individual soul lives and perceives, but also to be spread out everywhere in its essence and substance, as many Platonists and Pythagoreans have taught. — Giordano Bruno