Platonic Ideals Quotes

The beauty of life is, therefore, geometrical beauty of a type that Plato would have much appreciated.

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

What ideal, immutable Platonic cloud could equal the beauty and perfection of any ordinary everyday cloud floating over, say, Tuba City, Arizona, on a hot day in June?

But I think it is a serious issue to wonder about the other platonic absolutes of say beauty and morality.

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

Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.

The study of the properties of numbers, Plato tells us, habituates the mind to the contemplation of pure truth, and raises us above the material universe. He would have his disciples apply themselves to this study, not that they may be able to buy or sell, not that they may qualify themselves to be shopkeepers or travelling merchants, but that they may learn to withdraw their minds from the ever-shifting spectacle of this visible and tangible world, and to fix them on the immutable essences of things.

Except I'm aware that as a writer you can't get away with as much writing for children as you can with adults. Children have much more finely tuned senses of justice, morals, and ethics. They are much more Platonic: children are symmetrical, before we begin to fragment them with our own nonsensical ideas and squelch their natural joy in knowledge.

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.

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.

Ideal goals are a menace in themselves, as much in more modern philosophers as in Plato.

The soul yearns to fly home on the wings of love to the world of ideas. It longs to be freed from the chains of the body.