97 Platonic Quotes

Following is our list of platonic quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about platonic love.

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Famous Platonic Quotes

PLATONIC, adj. Pertaining to the philosophy of Socrates. Platonic Love is a fool's name for the affection between a disability and a frost. — Ambrose Bierce

Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth. — Aristotle

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

Plato, quite decadently, wore an earring while young. — Sextus Empiricus

Said Aristotle unto Plato, 'Have another sweet potato?' Said Plato unto Aristotle, 'Thank you, I prefer the bottle.' — Owen Wister

Philosophy does not regard pedigree, she received Plato not as a noble, but she made him one. — Seneca

The usual picture of Socrates is of an ugly little plebeian who inspired a handsome young nobleman to write long dialogues on large topics. — Richard Rorty

The highest form of pure thought is in mathematics. — Plato

The philosopher is in love with truth, that is, not with the changing world of sensation, which is the object of opinion, but with the unchanging reality which is the object of knowledge. — Plato

While the expressive possibilities of Neoplasticism are limited to two dimensions (the plane), Elementarism realizes the possibility of plasticism in four dimensions, in the field of time-space. — Theo van Doesburg

Plato had defined Man as an animal, biped and featherless, and was applauded. Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it into the lecture-room with the words, "Behold Plato's man!" — Diogenes

Geometry will draw the soul toward truth and create the spirit of philosophy. — Plato

As a system of philosophy it is not like the Tower of Babel, so daring its high aim as to seek a shelter against God's anger; but it is like a pyramid poised on its apex. — Adam Sedgwick

Geometry is the archetype of the beauty of the world. — Johannes Kepler

Geometry is knowledge of the eternally existent. — Pythagoras

Short Platonic Quotes

  • I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of. — Charles Bukowski
  • Platonic friendship-the interval between the introduction and the first kiss. — Sophie Irene Loeb
  • Without the intervention of the civil authority what would our percepts become?- Platonic laws. — Philipp Melanchthon
  • Show me a genuine case of platonic friendship, and I shall show you two old or homely faces. — Austin O'Malley
  • I've arrived at the age where a platonic friendship can be sustained on the highest moral plane. — Charlie Chaplin
  • Even before I met you I was far from indifferent to you. — Oscar Wilde
  • She had a body that even I coveted in a strictly Platonic sense. — C.E. Murphy
  • The Platonic world of ideas corresponds to Thinking and Sensation on the mystical level. — Carl Jung
  • Surrender the vert platonic bond tying your soul to mine craft, the sky fades a pink shadow cast. — Bradley Chicho
  • Christianity is Platonism for the people. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Love Platonic Quotes

The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open. — Philip Roth

And those who only know the non-platonic love have no need to talk of tragedy. In such love there can be no sort of tragedy. — Leo Tolstoy

It’s not that I can’t fall in love. It’s really that I can’t help falling in love with too many things all at once. So, you must understand why I can’t distinguish between what’s platonic and what isn’t, because it’s all too much and not enough at the same time. — Jack Kerouac

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

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

They are a great essay in male friendship, which has gone now. Men's friendship has been debased. One of the lovely things about Holmes and Watson is that they do have this great platonic relationship. — Jeremy Brett

Theres different kinds of love, and Id never experienced that kind of totally platonic love. All the love Ive experienced has always been a kind of deal, and now, as I get older, I realise that theres this other love out there. — Tracey Emin

Music speaks of Platonic truth - the ideal river rather than the polluted reality, love as we dream it rather than we experience it, grief noble and uplifting rather than our distracted weeping. It is necessary to our survival and our sanity. — Pam Brown

I guess from my perspective, puppy love is more of an emotional crush or a platonic affection. So my best advice would probably be to be the big dog. If you want something real and lasting, slow down and look more for grown-up love. — Nancy O'Dell

Platonic love is platonic nonsense. — Samuel Richardson

Platonic Relationship Quotes

People instantly assume you can't have a platonic friendship with someone of the opposite sex. I think this may be specific to L.A.—or America. — Isabel Lucas

I can't even find someone for a platonic relationship, much less the kind where someone wants to see me naked. — Gilbert Gottfried

While I'm generally silent on the affairs of my biological mother, her recent tirade has taken a gross turn. I have never been approached by Dave Grohl in more than a platonic way. I'm in a monogamous relationship and very happy. Twitter should ban my mother. — Frances Bean Cobain

I'm pretty intense when it comes to relationships, platonic ones as well. If I feel a connection with someone, I'm willing to go there. — Alexander Skarsgard

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

I have a great pack of female friends, but I also have a lot of guy friends. I believe that platonic relationship is entirely possible. — Sayings

I have a lot of friends who are around. I'm having a wonderful time in my life now with my platonic relationships with men and women, because when that sexual tension is off the requirement of the interplay, then you get to who the people really are, and to yourself. — Shirley Maclaine

Plato Quotes

A wise man speaks because he has something to say; a fool because he has to say something. — Plato

No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth. — Plato

Learning to live ought to mean learning to die - to acknowledge, to accept, an absolute mortality - without positive outcome,or resurrection, or redemption, for oneself or for anyone else. That has been the old philosophical injunction since Plato: to be a philosopher is to learn how to die. — Jacques Derrida

the old axiom that 'all power corrupts' has doubtful validity, because it derives from our neglect of Plato's advice to find men carefully and train them by methods which make them fit for heroes. — Oswald Mosley

I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language. — Werner Heisenberg

Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder. — Ray Bradbury

He is unworthy of the name of man who is ignorant of the fact that the diagonal of a square is incommensurable with its side. — Plato

The measure of a man is what he does with power. - Plato

The measure of a man is what he does with power. — Plato

Socrates became a trendsetter. Other philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle and Gus, quickly followed suit, dropping their last names too. And, for centuries after that there would be countless imitators including oltaire, Michelangelo, and, much later, Cher. — Demetri Martin

The only good thing that we owe to Plato and Aristotle is that they brought forward many arguments which we can use against the heretics. Yet they and other philosophers are now in hell. — Girolamo Savonarola

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More Platonic Quotes

There are two distinct visits to tackle-shops, the visit to buy tackle and the visit which may be described as Platonic when, being for some reason unable to fish, we look for an excuse to go in, and waste the tackle dealer's time. — Arthur Ransome

For, according to the teachings of Islam, moral knowledge automatically forces moral responsibility upon man. A mere Platonic discernment between Right and Wrong, without the urge to promote Right and to destroy Wrong, is a gross immorality in itself, for morality lives and dies with the human endeavour to establish its victory upon earth. — Muhammad Asad

Any legend, any creature, any symbol we ever stumble on, already exists in a vast cosmic reservoir where archetypes wait. Shapes looming outside our Platonic cave. We naturally believe ourselves clever and wise, so advanced, and those who came before us so naïve and simple...when all we truly do is echo the order of the universe, as it guides us. — Guillermo del Toro

I believe we have two ideas about how movies are made in our heads. Idealizations. Platonic ideals. One of them is of a movie that is completely uncontrolled, and another is a movie that is completely controlled. The auteur theory vs. cinéma vérité. — Errol Morris

The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

In science there is and will remain a Platonic element which could not be taken away without ruining it. Among the infinite diversity of singular phenomena science can only look for invariants. — Jacques Monod

Harry and Hermione are very platonic friends. But I won't answer for anyone else, nudge-nudge wink-wink! — J. K. Rowling

... I have developed, over the years, some sense of the difference between real horseshit that you can step in and Ideal Platonic Horseshit that exists, evidently, only in the contemplation of those who worship such abstractions; and I continue to notice that Natural Law bears an uncanny resemblance to ideal Platonic Horseshit. — Robert Anton Wilson

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

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? — Edward Abbey

That's another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it's as if things were coming together in my mind. It's like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature, and when you feel that nature articulated, it's it's like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together. — Jordan Peterson

Recite to yourself some of the traditional attributes of the word 'spiritual': mythic, magical, ethereal, incorporeal, intangible, nonmaterial, disembodied, ideal, platonic. Is that not a definition of the electronic-digital? — Timothy Leary

It is sufficiently humiliating to our nature to reflect that our knowledge is but as she rivulet, our ignorance as the sea. On points of the highest interest, the moment we quit the light of revelation we shall find that Platonism itself is intimately connected with Pyrrhonism, and the deepest inquiry with the darkest doubt. — Charles Caleb Colton

Both the Freudian and the Platonic metaphors emphasize the considerable independence of and tension among the constituent parts of the psyche, a point that characterizes the human condition. — Carl Sagan

I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known as ‘The Masses’. Both abstractions, so dear to the demagogue, I disbelieve in. I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

Normally, in anything I do, I'm fairly miserable. I do it, and I get grumpy because there is a huge, vast gulf, this aching disparity, between the platonic ideal of the project that was living in my head, and the small, sad, wizened, shaking, squeaking thing that I actually produce. — Neil Gaiman

Certainly neo-Platonism, Plotinus and Porphyry and that school are psychedelic philosophers. Their idea of an ascending hierarchy of more and more rarefied states is a sophisticated presentation of the shamanic cosmology, which is the cosmology that one experientially discovers when they involve themselves with psychedelics. — Terence McKenna

The idea is that to grasp an idea like equality or justice, you can't look at the equal and just or unjust things in the world around you, you have to somehow ascend to or maybe remember some kind of idea of equality and justice and this would be a Platonic form, and it would be different from the things that partake in the form. — Peter Adamson

Passion and platonic friendliness, often contrary siblings, frequently wear similar faces to hide the great distance between them. — Darin Strauss

The faith engaged with Platonism in the ancient world, with Aristotle in the medieval world, with nominalism in the Reformation era, and with rationalism in the modern world. Now the church must engage with the emergence of a postmodern, post- Christian, neo-pagan world. — Robert E. Webber

She kissed her way into society. I don't like her. But don't misunderstand me: my dislike is purely platonic. — Herbert Beerbohm Tree

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

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