Ideal Forms Quotes

My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty

Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.

The idea of beauty is the fundamental idea of everything. In the world we see only distortions of the fundamental idea, but art, by imagination, may lift itself to the height of this idea. Art is therefore akin to creation.

The charm of the Platonic mode of thought ... consisted precisely in the resistance to the obvious evidence of the senses.

To sum up the whole, we should say that the aim of the Platonic philosophy was to exalt man into a god.

Aristotle and Plato are reckoned the respective heads of two schools. A wise man will see that Aristotle platonizes.

The visible world was only an imperfect reflection of the Ideal, which the Philosopher sought to transcend.

The light dove, in free flight cutting through the air the resistance of which it feels, could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space. Likewise, Plato abandoned the world of the senses because it posed so many hindrances for the understanding, and dared to go beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of pure understanding.