"Plato" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Ptolemy, following Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, acknowledged that the earth's figure was globular, and he demonstrated it by the same arguments that we employ at the present day. He also discerned how this mighty globe was isolated in space. He admitted that the diurnal movement of the heavens could be accounted for ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... my mind! Atlantis, that ancient land of Meropis mentioned by the historian Theopompus; Plato's Atlantis; the continent whose very existence has been denied by such philosophers and scientists as Origen, Porphyry, Iamblichus, d'Anville, Malte-Brun, and Humboldt, who entered its disappearance in the ledger of myths and folk tales; the country whose reality has nevertheless been accepted by ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... Creed, There is no Jesuit like Need. Then, too, 'twas cheap; he took it all, By force of Habit, from the Gaul. He showed (the Trick is nowise new) That Nothing we believe is true; But chiefly that Mistake is rife Touching the point of After-Life; Here all were wrong from PLATO down: His Price (in Boards) was Half-a-Crown. The Thing created quite a Scare:— He got a Letter from VOLTAIRE, Naming him Ami and Confrere; Besides two most attractive Offers Of Chaplaincies from ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... doctrine of retribution which is the groundwork of the masterpieces of the ancient Greek tragedies, the inspiration without which the world would never have known the Agamemnon or the immortal trilogy of Sophocles. It is the doctrine which made Plato describe punishment as going about with sin, "their heads tied together," and Hegel define it as "the other half of sin," while Emerson shows that "crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit which, unsuspected, ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... slumming and another to sniffing brandy through the nose; one had a table-cover made of woven roses, and another was wearing perfumed flannel at sixteen dollars a yard; one had inaugurated ice-skating in August, and another had started a class for the study of Plato. Some were giving tennis tournaments in bathing-suits, and playing leap-frog after dinner; others had got dispensations from the Pope, so that they might have private chapels and confessors; and yet others were ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... *study, explore *But if* that he th'intention and speech *unless Of philosophers understande can; And if he do, he is a lewed* man. *ignorant, foolish For this science and this conning,"* quoth he, *knowledge "Is of the secret of secrets pardie." Also there was a disciple of Plato, That on a time said his master to, As his book, Senior, will bear witness, And this was his demand in soothfastness: "Tell me the name of thilke* privy** stone." *that **secret And Plato answer'd unto him anon; "Take the stone ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... some of the dialogues of Plato, (dated June 3d, 1833,) in a letter returning the book, illustrates her downright way of asking world-revered authors to accept the test of plain common sense. As a finished or deliberate opinion, it ought not to be read; for it was not intended as such, but as a first ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the old poets, and comment on them, and to a certain degree enjoy them. But they will scarcely be able to conceive the effect which poetry produced on their ruder ancestors, the agony, the ecstasy, the plenitude of belief. The Greek Rhapsodists, according to Plato, could scarce recite Homer without falling into convulsions. The Mohawk hardly feels the scalping knife while he shouts his death-song. The power which the ancient bards of Wales and Germany exercised over their auditors seems to modern readers almost miraculous. Such feelings are ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... knows whom. Those communications, taking the best, are certainly not a whit of higher order than would be communications from living persons of fair talent and education; they are wondrously inferior to what Bacon, Shakespeare, and Plato said and wrote when on earth. Nor, what is more noticeable, do they ever contain an idea that was not on the earth before. Wonderful, therefore, as such phenomena may be (granting them to be truthful), I see much that philosophy may question, nothing that it is incumbent ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... Old books and new, white vellum and card-board, were herded together without any apparent order, and with no respect of bindings. Here a splendid morocco "Novum Organum" was pushed in beside a cheap and much worn edition of Marcus Aurelius; there Emerson and Plato and Shakespeare jostled each other on the same shelf, while, just below, "Don Quixote" was pressed into the uncongenial society of Carlyle on one side and Confucius on the other. As she pulled out one book after another, she noticed that the greater part of them had Charles's name in them. ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... Charmides and Laches, and several of the other Dialogues of Plato (compare especially the Protagoras and Theaetetus), no conclusion is arrived at. Socrates maintains his character of a 'know nothing;' but the boys have already learned the lesson which he is unable to teach ...
— Lysis • Plato
... Mrs. Abbey's willingness to have another artist take the theme of the Grove of Academe and carry it out as a mural decoration, Bok turned to Howard Pyle. He knew Pyle had made a study of Plato, and believed that, with his knowledge and love of the work of the Athenian philosopher, a good decoration would result. Pyle was then in Italy; Bok telephoned the painter's home in Wilmington, Delaware, to get his address, only to be told that an hour earlier word had been received ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... killed the Emperor. He should first have endeavored to discover the significance of the dream; most probably it was not what it seemed to be. And even if a dream of different content had the significance of this offense against majesty, it would still have been in place to remember the words of Plato, that the virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life. I am therefore of the opinion that it is best to accord freedom to dreams. Whether any reality is to be attributed to the unconscious wishes, and in what sense, I am not ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... the lecturer goes on, in his second and third lectures, to trace the history of Moral Philosophy, from Pythagoras to Mrs. Trimmer. Plato is praised for beauty of style, and blamed for mistiness of doctrine. Aristotle is contrasted, greatly to his disadvantage, with Bacon. "Volumes of Aristotelian philosophy have been written which, if piled one upon another, would ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... for taking a census; nor is the story without significance. To reckon numbers alone a success is a sin, and a blunder beside. Russia has sixty millions of people: who would not gladly swap her out of the world for glorious little Greece back again, and Plato and Aeschylus and Epaminondas still there? Who would exchange Concord or Cambridge in Massachusetts for any hundred thousand square miles of slave-breeding dead-level? Who Massachusetts in whole for as many ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... characterized by great intellectual activity; for he had, as his contemporaries, Pericles the famous statesman; the poets AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Pindar; the philosopher Socrates, with his disciples Xenophon and Plato; the historians Herodotus and Thucydides; and ...
— Fathers of Biology • Charles McRae
... flourished at that remarkable period when, under the polished tyrants Hipparchus and Polycrates, Athens and Samos were become the rival asylums of genius. There is nothing certain known about his family; and those who pretend to discover in Plato that he was a descendant of the monarch Codrus, show much more of zeal than of either ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... according to a natural law, I covet the faintest distinction on the ice more than immortal fame for the things in which nature has given me aptitude to excel. I envy that large friend of yours—Jane is her name, I think—more than I envy Plato. I came down here this morning, thinking that the skating world was all ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... whole, and in this rational process we always assume, and are bound to assume, some sort of Reality that transcends the fleeting and temporal, the caprice of the moment, the will of the subject, the here and the now. The mind that knows and knows that it knows must, as Plato centuries ago declared, rise from the welter and flux of momentary seemings to true Being, to the eternally Real,[24] and the knowledge process of binding fragments of experience into larger wholes and of getting articulate insight into the significance ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... it is this, that the mightiest intellects of the race, from Plato down to the present time, some of the rarest minds of Germany, France, and England, have successively yielded their assent to the fact, that woman is not, perhaps, identically, but equally endowed with man in all intellectual capabilities. It is generally the second-rate ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... an ideal standard, it is open to criticism. Aristotle and Plato, nay, Bacon, and perhaps Leibnitz, would have scouted it as a scientific abortion. Some men would draw disparaging comparisons between the mediaeval and the modern King. In the person of the first was normally embodied ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... Australian Socrates, clearly resembles his disciples, those great Cynics who in the Greek market-places were wont to preach and to practise a philosophy of stern simplicity, often akin to his own. The Athenians killed Socrates, but they produced a Plato to idealise and even to immortalise him. The Australians have drawn the line at killing Chidley. So ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... speaks of this romance as "generally, and I believe on good grounds, supposed to be the work of the celebrated Berkeley;" adding, "we are told, in the life of this celebrated man, that Plato was his favourite author: and, indeed, of all English writers Berkeley has most successfully imitated the style and manner of that philosopher. It is not impossible, therefore, that the fanciful republic of the Grecian sage ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 49, Saturday, Oct. 5, 1850 • Various
... glory, jest, and riddle of the world! Go, wondrous creature! mount where science guides, Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides; Instruct the planets in what orbs to run, Correct old time, and regulate the sun; Go, soar with Plato to th' empyreal sphere, To the first good, first perfect, and first fair; Or tread the mazy round his followers trod, And quitting sense call imitating God; As Eastern priests in giddy circles run, And turn their heads to imitate the sun. Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... her sorrow to the air, Stalking out of desolation came a being strange and rare— Plato's Man!—bipedal, featherless from mandible to rump, Its wings two quilless flippers and its tail a plumeless stump. First it scratched and then it clucked, as if in hospitable terms It invited her to banquet on imaginary worms. Then it strutted up before her with a ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... women that even when it demanded physical expression it was still the finest of all human relationship. This idea was, of course, widely held by the Greeks during the noblest epochs of their history, and Plato, though he does not, as is commonly believed, justify such expression as good in itself, evidently regards it as practically inevitable and, therefore, to be condoned. And though from this indulgent attitude there has been a very general revolt in modern times, the reaction ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... always kept fresh his interest in the classical studies of his youth. He did not depend on his communings with Origen and Eusebius for keeping up his Greek, but went back as often as he could find time to Plato and to the Tragedians. Macaulay has defined a Greek scholar as one who can read Plato with his feet on the fender. Dr. Cairns could fully satisfy this condition; indeed he went beyond it, for when he went from home he was in the habit of taking a volume of Plato or Aeschylus ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... of Agamemnon: as this shows how early his love of classic literature began. The allusion to Plato, at pages 19, 20, and 21, largely confirms this impression. The feeling for music asserts itself also at page 18, though in a less spiritual form than it assumes in his later works. But the most striking ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... the days of Plato there has been no life of more simple and imposing grandeur than ...
— Jukes-Edwards - A Study in Education and Heredity • A. E. Winship
... we put more ink on our hands and faces than we shed upon the white paper on our desks! Our conclusions generally agreed with those announced by the greatest moralists of the world. Socrates and Plato, Cicero and Seneca, Cudworth and Butler, could not have been more austerely moral than were we little rogues, as we relieved the immense exertion involved in completing a single short baby-like sentence, by shying ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... happiness to himself! You know how often I used to compare him, for the silent ease with which he mastered difficult subjects, and the versatility with which he turned his mind to the most opposite pursuits, to the youthful Theaetetus, as described in Plato's dialogue the movements of whose mind Theodorus compares to the "noiseless flow of ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... Stephanus, with his Greek Testament. Froben, with his Plato. Koberger, with his Nuremberg Chronicle. Caxton, ...
— Printing and the Renaissance - A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York • John Rothwell Slater
... the artistic graces of these celestial models. Perfection of form and manly strength were the pride of the wisest and most learned men of the nation, denoting that physical excellence was considered the necessary concomitant of moral or intellectual worth. Authentic annals tell us that Plato and Pythagoras appeared as wrestlers at the public games; and who shall say that these philosophical gymnasts did not derive much of their mental vigor from this exciting exercise? In this age it is easy to see that sculpture ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... especially that enthusiasm for classical antiquity which prevailed elsewhere. The aptitude of the Venetians, says Sabellico, for philosophy and eloquence was in itself not smaller than that for commerce and politics. George of Trebizond, who, in 1459, laid the Latin translation of Plato's Laws at the feet of the Doge, was appointed professor of philology with a yearly salary of 150 ducats, and finally dedicated his 'Rhetoric' to the Signoria. If, however, we look through the history of Venetian literature which Francesco Sansovino has appended ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... Nichols and Philis Nichols, Hannah Champlin, Plato Alderson, Raney Scott, Jack Jeffers, Thomas Gardner, Julius Holden, Violet Freeman, Cuffy Buffum, Sylvia Gardner, Hagar Blackburn, Dolly Peach, Polly ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... pretensions. What shall we say to those theologians who deny all power to man's reason, and consider the understanding as a receiver which does nothing but receive the liquid which is poured into it? to those theologians who, not content with despising Aristotle and Plato, think themselves obliged to vilify Socrates and calumniate Regulus? We will tell them that they depart from the grand Christian tradition, of which they believe themselves par excellence the representatives. We will add that they outrage their Master ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... KOINA PHIAON], where he reprehends Plato's notion of a political community of all things, are the ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... organized his ideal republic in the name of science, which, through modesty and euphemism, he called philosophy. Aristotle, a practical man, refuted the Platonic utopia in the name of the same philosophy. Thus the social war has continued since Plato and Aristotle. The modern socialists refer all things to science one and indivisible, but without power to agree either as to its content, its limits, or its method; the economists, on their side, affirm that social science in no wise differs from ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... rite, the poet musing in sadness on the mysteries of life, the philosopher imparting wisdom to the young, etc. etc. I believe Giorgione is simply giving us a poetical rendering of "The Golden Age," where, like Plato's philosopher-king, the seer all-wise and all-powerful holds sway, before whom the arts and sciences do homage; in this earthly paradise even strange animals live in happy harmony, and all is peace. Such a theme ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... Plato learned from the Egyptian priests. Atlantis has been slowly sinking for thousands of years, and all that's left now is the one great island that we're on. Nearly all the Atlanteans, the Cro-Magnon men, have ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... never. Moreover, the age of Demosthenes was, in my judgment, the age of highest development for arts dependent upon social refinement. That generation had fixed and ascertained the use of words; whereas, the previous generation of Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato, &c., was a transitional period: the language was still moving, and tending to a meridian not yet attained; and the public eye had been directed consciously upon language, as in and for itself an organ of intellectual delight, for too short a time, to have mastered ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... and no one was to be supposed under any sinister influence, except those who had the misfortune to be in disgrace at Court, which was to stand in lieu of all vices and all corruptions. A scheme of perfection to be realised in a Monarchy, far beyond the visionary Republic of Plato. The whole scenery was exactly disposed to captivate those good souls, whose credulous morality is so invaluable a treasure to crafty politicians. Indeed, there was wherewithal to charm everybody, except those few who ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... would soon grow more rude. I now renewed a reflection, which I have often seen occasion to make, that there is nothing so incongruous in nature as any kind of power with lowness of mind and of ability, and that there is nothing more deplorable than the want of truth in the whimsical notion of Plato, who tells us that "Saturn, well knowing the state of human affairs, gave us kings and rulers, not of human but divine original; for, as we make not shepherds of sheep, nor oxherds of oxen, nor ...
— Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon • Henry Fielding
... interpretations. They had resort to them for guidance in cases of difficulty, or great calamity. We do not claim for all dreams, a divine or reliable character, but that some are to be trusted, every individual of any experience can testify. Plato assumes that all dreams might be trusted, if men would only bring their bodies into such a state, before going to sleep, as to leave nothing that might occasion error or perturbation ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... most have influenced mankind Were not sent broadcast with the lightning's speed; Nor do the works of Plato lag behind The myriad books and ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... rock; aye, time has been when whole cities came utterly to an end: while for the sake of Freedom that is true, and sure, and unassailable, dost thou grudge to God what He gave, when He claims it? Wilt thou not study, as Plato saith, to endure, not death alone, but torture, exile, stripes—in a word, to render up all that is not thine own? Else thou wilt be a slave amid slaves, wert thou ten thousand times a consul; aye, not a whit the less, though thou climb the Palace steps. And thou shalt know how true the saying ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... alcohol always pernicious. Fiction, on the other hand, a good thing. Antiquity of fiction. In early days couched in verse. Civilisation prefers prose. Fiction, from the earlier ages, intended to convey Moral Instruction. Opinion of Aristotle defended against that of Plato. Morality in mediaeval Romance. Criticism of Mr. Frederic Harrison. Opinion of Moliere. Yet French novels usually immoral, and why. Remarks on Popery. To be avoided. Morality of Richardson and of Sir Walter Scott. Impropriety re-introduced by Charlotte Bronte. Unwillingness ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... be certain that Rousseau would have been one of those irresistible but most injurious persons whom, honorably crowned with fillets of well-spun wool and fresh-grown myrtle, Plato would have dismissed from the gates ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... looked over her shoulder. "Oh Miss Symons, I should have a margin if I were you; I know Professor Amery likes a margin for the corrections, he said so himself. Oh, and you don't mind my saying so, but Aristotle did not write a republic. Shall I just scratch that out? That was Plato. And I should have a new paragraph there; and I always find, I don't know if you will, that it makes it easier to underline ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... leave Plato alone!" cried the other. "'Tis not by that pagan's advice that you divest yourself of house ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... me with awe," replied the contemplative maiden: "In such an hour as this, Plato must have received the sublime thought, 'God is truth—and light ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... muzzle up your people in ignorance, with Aristotle, Plato, and the rest of the heathenish philosophers, and preach little if any thing of Christ rightly—I say unto you, that you will find you have sinned against God and beguiled your hearers, when God shall in the judgment-day lay the cause of the damnation of many thousands ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... to nothing short of absolute impossibility. After he had caused the breadth as well as the depth of the river to be measured, and had consulted with two of his most skilful engineers, Barocci and Plato, it was settled that the bridge should be constructed between Calloo in Flanders and Ordain in Brabant. This spot was selected because the river is here narrowest, and bends a little to the right, and so detains vessels a while by compelling them to tack. To cover the bridge strong ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... best men. And what cruel wretches, both executioners and judges, have been strictly just! how little have they cared what gentleness, what generosity, what genius, their sentence have removed from the earth! Temperance and beneficence contain all other virtues. Take them home, Plato; split them, expound them; do what thou wilt with them, if thou but ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... do, Mr. G. Bird?" I asked in despair, with a real sob in my throat as I looked toward the family coach, from which I could hear a happy and animated discussion of Plato's Republic going on between the two old gentlemen who had thirty years' arrears in argument and conversation to make up. I could see that no help would come from that direction. "I can't lose them forever," I said again, and this time there was the ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... understood, gives at once a history of religion, philosophy, art, literature, and science, in their relations to the outward universe. For instance, under the head of natural science among the Greeks, we have among other things an account of the doctrine of the Pythagoreans, Plato, and Aristotle; in treating the middle ages, Professor Schaller speaks of the Scholastics, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Giordano Bruno, and Paracelsus. One of the most interesting parts of the whole is that on the poetic view of ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... there any thing better in a State than that both women and men be rendered the very best? There is not."—PLATO. ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... the nurture and admonition of the Lord" (Ephesians 6:4; Colossians 3:21). When Christ was upon earth, "a father had the power of life and death over his offspring. A weak and sickly child might be abandoned to death; and this was approved by such eminent authorities as Plato and Aristotle." Jesus declared for the rights of the children. He not only opened His arms for them, but He gave them a new standing in the world (Mark 10: 14-16; Matthew 18:5). He said, "See that ye despise not one of these little ones; for in heaven ...
— Studies in the Life of the Christian • Henry T. Sell
... and I find myself repeatedly asking myself why this valuable strain in the national breed should be sterilized. Unfortunately, the very women whom we should tempt to become mothers for the good of the race are the very last people to press their services on their country in that way. Plato long ago pointed out the importance of being governed by men with sufficient sense of responsibility and comprehension of public duties to be very reluctant to undertake the work of governing; and yet we have taken his instruction so little to heart that we are at present suffering acutely ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... in the palace of Lorenzo the Magnificent, who discovered the lad's talent and made him a favorite. "He sat at the same table with Ficino, Pico, and Poliziano, listening to dialogues on Plato, and drinking in the golden poetry of Greece. Greek literature and philosophy, expounded by the men who had discovered them, first moulded his mind to those lofty thoughts which it became the task of his life to express in form. At ...
— Michelangelo - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Master, With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... and thought of that century. The philosophical revolution inaugurated by Kant, with the general drift toward monism in the interpretation of the universe, separates from their forebears men who have lived since Kant, by a greater interval than that which divided Kant from Plato. The evolutionary view of nature, as developed from Schelling and Comte through Darwin to Bergson, divides men now living from the contemporaries of Kant in his youthful studies of nature, as those men were not divided from ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... that in reasoning Shelley never lost sight of the essential bearings of the topic in dispute, never condescended to personal or captious arguments, and was Socratically bent on following the dialogue wherever it might lead, without regard for consequences. Plato was another of their favourite authors; but Hogg expressly tells us that they only approached the divine philosopher through the medium of translations. It was not until a later period that Shelley studied ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... statesmen, lawgivers and patriots, stand Moses, David, Solon, Numa Pompilius, Zoroaster, Confucius, Justinian, Charlemagne, Cromwell, Washington and Lincoln. Eminent among the philosophers, rhetoricians and logicians stand Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, the two Catos, and Lord Bacon; among orators, Pericles, Demosthenes, Cicero, Mirabeau, Burke, Webster and Clay; among poets, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare; among painters and sculptors, Phidias, Parrhasius, Zenxis, ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... extensive knowledge to taste the sublimer pleasures of communicating their refined ideas to each other; but it is likewise necessary to the inferior happiness of every subordinate degree of society, down to the very lowest. For instance; we will suppose a conversation between Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and three dancing-masters. It will be acknowledged, I believe, that the heel sophists would be as little pleased with the company of the philosophers as ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... In defence of this cheating conduct of Jove, at which Plato was much scandalized, Coleridge, p. 154, observes: "The [Greek: oulos oneiros] was a lying spirit, which the father of gods and men had a supreme right to commission for the purpose of working ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... whom he addressed his instructions from obvious and irresistible data to the most unexpected and useful conclusions. There was something in his manner of teaching that drew to him the noblest youth of Athens. Plato and Xenophon, two of the most admirable of the Greek writers, were among his pupils. He reconciled in his own person in a surprising degree poverty with the loftiest principles of independence. He taught an unreserved submission to the laws of our country. He several times unequivocally ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... any case his training was neither Coptic nor monastic, but Greek and scriptural, as became a scholar of Alexandria. There may be traces of Latin in his writings, but his allusions to Greek literature are such as leave no doubt that he had a liberal education. In his earliest works he refers to Plato; in later years he quotes Homer, and models his notes on Aristotle, his Apology to Constantius on Demosthenes. To Egyptian idolatry he seldom alludes. Scripture, however, is his chosen and familiar study, and few commentators have ever shown ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... his strictures on Dionysius the Halicarnassian in the Rambler, and the opinions on Milton's versification, which in the Idler he has put into the mouth of a minute critic, only to ridicule them, though they are indeed founded in truth. Johnson was not one of those whom Plato calls the [Greek: philaekooi kai philotheamones], "who gladly acknowledge the beautiful wherever it is met with, in sounds, and colours, and figures, and all that is by art compounded from these;" much less had he ascended "to that abstract notion of beauty" which the same ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... at ten, and when seventeen, published an Essay on Mind, and Other Poems. The essay was after the manner of Pope, and though showing good knowledge of Plato and Bacon, did not find favor with the critics. It was dedicated to her father, who was proud of a daughter who preferred Latin and Greek to the novels of ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... the whole world were animated with a reasonable soul, as Plato thought it were, and if it had wit and understanding to mark and perceive everything, Lord God, how the ground on which a prince buildeth his palace would loud laugh its lord to scorn, when it saw him proud of his possession and heard him ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... and simplicity of definition of light, you will find no possibility of advancing beyond Plato's "the power that through the eye manifests color," but on that definition, you will find, alike by Plato and all great subsequent thinkers, a moral Science of Light founded, far and away more important to you than all the physical laws ever learned by vitreous revelation. ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... Hippocrates, Galen, Dioscorides, and Theophrastus, and was attended by two footmen and four pike-bearers. Last of the allegorical personages came Minerva, prancing in complete steel, with lance in rest, and bearing her Medusa shield. Aristotle and Plato, Cicero and Virgil, all on horseback, with attendants in antique armor at their back, surrounded the daughter of Jupiter, while the city band, discoursing eloquent music from hautboy and viol, came upon the heels of the allegory. Then followed ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Rickman, one of the clerks of the House of Commons. "He is a most pleasant hand" (writes Lamb), "a fine rattling fellow, who has gone through life laughing at solemn apes; himself hugely literate, from matter of fact, to Xenophon and Plato: he can talk Greek with Porson, and nonsense with me." "He understands you" (he adds) "the first time. You never need speak twice to him. Fullest of matter, with least verbosity." A year or two afterwards, when Rickman went to Ireland, Lamb wrote to ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... practical "results" as his guide and goal. Morality as, in Antigone's noble phrase, "the unwritten law of heaven" sinks down and disappears. There is no room here for the Job who abhors himself and repents in dust and ashes nor for Plato's One behind the Many; no perceptible room, in such a world, for any of the absolute values, the transcendent interests, the ethics of idealism, any eschatology, or for Christian theodicy. That which has ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... Of A Theodicy. Section I. The failure of Plato and other ancient philosophers to construct a Theodicy, not a ground of despair. Section II. The failure of Leibnitz not a ground of despair. Section III. The system of the moral universe not purposely involved in obscurity to teach us a lesson of humility. ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... the organ bellows in church, every inhabitant of the place who was gifted with any recognizable peculiarity was personated at one time or another by the wit of our school. The favourite imitation of all was supposed to be one of the Dialogues of Plato, "omitted by some strange over-sight in, the edition which graces the library of our learned and respected doctor," Weston would say with profound gravity. The Dialogue was between Dr. Jessop and Silly Billy—the idiot already ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... compelled to yield a pure or harmless sense, and may be explained as an innocent blunder, caused by mere verbal misunderstanding. Brahmans, Greeks, and Germans have equally found comfort in this hypothesis. In the Cratylus of Plato, Socrates speaks of the notion of explaining myths by etymological guesses at the meaning of divine names as "a philosophy which came to him all in an instant". Thus we find Socrates shocked by the irreverence which styled Zeus the son of Cronus, ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... for instance, were the use of telling Keats: "To thy surgery belong all the brass and plume of song"? He couldn't find it there, so he betook himself to Chapman and Lempriere. If you ask, "What right has a country postman to be handling questions that vexed the brain of Plato?"—I ask in return, "What right had John Keats, who knew no Greek, to busy himself with Greek mythology?" And the answer is that each has a perfect right to follow his ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... suovetaurilia, the sacrifice of the hog, the ram, and the bull. Tiridates did the same by the sacrifice of a horse. Tacitus does not mention the river god, but the river itself, as propitiated (see [Annals,] book vi, chap. 37).[3] Plato makes Socrates condemn Homer for making Achilles behave disrespectfully towards the river Xanthus, though acknowledged to be a divinity, in offering to fight him,[4] and towards the river Sperchius, another acknowledged god, in presenting ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... upon mental vision. My intellectual horizon is infinitely wide. The universe it encircles is immeasurable. Would they who bid me keep within the narrow bound of my meagre senses demand of Herschel that he roof his stellar universe and give us back Plato's solid firmament of glassy spheres? Would they command Darwin from the grave and bid him blot out his geological time, give us back a paltry few thousand years? Oh, the supercilious doubters! They ever strive to clip the upward ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... miracle, I should have believed him also. Or, to represent the same thing under a third supposition; if Socrates had professed to perform public miracles at Athens; if the friends of Socrates, Phaedo, Cebes, Crito, and Simmias, together with Plato, and many of his followers, relying upon the attestations which these miracles afforded to his pretensions, had, at the hazard of their lives, and the certain expense of their ease and tranquillity, gone about Greece, after his death, to publish and ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... of the ancient philosophers, Plato, Cicero, and Epictetus, allowed, or rather enjoined, men to worship the gods of the country, and in the established form. See passages to this purpose collected from their works by Dr. Clarke, Nat. and Rev. Rel. p. 180. ed. v—Except ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... from more vulgar harbors in the noise and confusion of disembarking; in the delays of its custom-house; in the extortion and insolence of its boatmen. It is still, as in Plato's day, "the haunt of sailors, where good manners are unknown." But when we had escaped the turmoil, and were seated silently on the way to Athens, almost along the very road of classical days, all our classical ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... varied accomplishments of some of the New England clergy. The face of the Revolutionary preacher, Samuel Cooper, as Copley painted it, looks upon me with the pleasantest of smiles and a liveliness of expression which makes him seem a contemporary after a hundred years' experience of eternity. The Plato on this lower shelf bears the inscription: "Ezroe Stiles, 1766. Olim e libris Rev. Jaredis Eliot de Killingworth." Both were noted scholars and philosophers. The hand-lens before me was imported, with other philosophical instruments, by the Reverend John Prince ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... 1832 with characteristic spirit and energy. His ideal, like that of most literary thinkers on politics, was an aristocracy, not of caste, but of education, virtue, and public spirit. It was the old dream of lofty minds from Plato down to Turgot. Every page of Greg's political writing is coloured by this attractive vision. Though as anxious as any politician of his time for practical improvements, and as liberal in his conception of their scope and possibility, he insisted that they could only be brought about by an aristocracy ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... "Phaedon" of Plato are dialogues, but they are not dramatic. It may be, that, for a composition to claim this distinction, it must embody great character or deep feeling,—that it must express not only the individuality, but the strength ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... the field yield nourishment, and bread and water make a feast for a temperate man," says Plato; and indeed the healthfulness of fresh vegetables is well enough known in our day; we include under this term not only the edible roots, but the young shoots of succulent plants, rich in nitrates ...
— The Cooking Manual of Practical Directions for Economical Every-Day Cookery • Juliet Corson
... universal; it cannot be avoided. There must be an end to all temporal things, and why not to books? The same endless night awaits a Plato and a penny-a-liner. Our Eternities of Fame, like all else appertaining to humanity, will some day pass away. Even Milton and Shakspeare, our great staple international poets, who have been brought out whenever the American ambassador to England dined in public, are travelling the same downward ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... national courage, founded on the recollection of an illustrious past, which overthrew the might of the conqueror at the moment when he seemed about to dominate the world. Werther, as soft and melodious as Plato, was the first revelation to the world of that marvelous style which, in the hands of a master, compels a language which is as rich as Greek to be also ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... man of intellect? To be good after the manner of his mother, of his grandparents, of the good Thagaste servants, of all the humble Christian souls whose virtues he had been taught to respect, and at the same time to rival a Plato by the strength of thought—what a dream! Was it possible?... He tells us himself that the illusion was brief, and that he grew cool about the Hortensius because he did not find the name of Christ in it. He deceives himself, probably. At this time he was not so Christian. ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... were pursuing an idea," said the little man as they emerged into the narrow street. "Now ideas may be divided variously into classes, as, for instance, ideas which are good, bad, or indifferent. Or you may contrast the idea of Plato with ideas anything but platonic—take it as you please. Then there is my idea, which is in itself, good, interesting, and worthy of the embalming process; and there is your idea, which I am human enough to consider altogether bad, worthless, ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... name Thiudereik, yet we have no right to doubt, that the vowels were eo, and not iu. But again and again historians spell proper names, not as they were written by the people themselves, but as they appear in the historical documents through which they became chiefly known. We speak of Plato, because we have Roman literature between us and Greece. American names are accepted in history through a Spanish, Indian names through an English medium. The strictly Old High-German form of Carolus Magnus would be Charal, ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... Plato! you have paved the way, With your confounded fantasies, to more Immoral conduct by the fancied sway Your system feigns o'er the controulless core Of human hearts, than all the long array Of poets and romancers:—You 're a bore, ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... keynote of Plato's philosophy. Plato says: "Soul is older than body. Souls are continually born over again into this life." The idea of Reincarnation was spread widely in Greece and Italy by Pythagoras, Empedocles, Plato, Virgil and ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... adduced in any number. We might show how, in magic, negroes of Barbadoes make clay effigies of their enemies, and pierce them, just as Greeks did in Plato's time, or the men of Accad in remotest antiquity. We might remark the Australian black putting sharp bits of quartz in the tracks of an enemy who has gone by, that the enemy may be lamed; and we might point to Boris ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... If all men are by nature either Platonists or Aristotelians, fly-fishermen or worm-fishermen, how difficult it is for us to do one another justice! Differing in mind, in aim and method, how shall we say infallibly that this man or that is wrong? To fail with Plato for companion may be better than to succeed with Aristotle. But one thing is perfectly clear: there is no warrant for Compromise but in Success. Use a worm if you will, but you must have fish to show for it, if you would escape the finger of ...
— Fishing with a Worm • Bliss Perry
... religious organisation, with creeds and customs, with everything, in fact, that it lies within man's power to alter. That, indeed, is the cardinal assumption of all Utopian speculations old and new; the Republic and Laws of Plato, and More's Utopia, Howells' implicit Altruria, and Bellamy's future Boston, Comte's great Western Republic, Hertzka's Freeland, Cabet's Icaria, and Campanella's City of the Sun, are built, just as we shall build, upon that, upon the hypothesis of the complete emancipation ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... certainly not the point of view from which this book has been written. Plato and Rabelais, Campanella and More, have been among those who announced the principles of social hygiene here set forth. There must be a social order, all these great pioneers recognized, but the health of society, like the health of the body, is marked by expansion as much as by ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... look sharp that justice does not slip away and pass out of sight and get lost; for there can be no doubt that we are in the right direction. Only try and get a sight of her, and if you come within view first, let me know."—PLATO ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... be so.—Plato, thou reasonest well. Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire, This ...
— Familiar Quotations • Various
... that amongst all your objects, you presented us not with Plato's idea, or the sight of Nineveh,[266] Babylon, London, or some Stourbridge-fair monsters; they would have done passing well. Those motions, in ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... Testament has survived and increased in its influence among men. The glory of Athens and Sparta, the grandeur of the Imperial City, are a long-lost memory, but the poetry of Homer and Virgil, the oratory of Demosthenes and Cicero, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, abide with us forevermore. Whatever America holds that may be of value to posterity will ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... glory. One after the other the doors of the ancient temples were then closed. Then came the emperor Justinian (who built the church of Saint Sophia in Constantinople), who discontinued the school of philosophy at Athens which had been founded by Plato. ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... there, alone, leaning against a tree, listening to the monotonous voice of a poet who was reading from Plato. She felt the disinterested greatness of Sandro, she knew the grandeur of his intellect—she was filled with a desire to be of service to him. Certainly she did not love him—a social abyss separated them—but could not her beauty and power in some way be allied with his, so that the world ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... confines—is the noblest of all his faculties, even though for that very reason it is capable of being most ignobly perverted. What its bestowal tells us is that God does not call us into servitude, but to that service which is perfect freedom; He might have made us His playthings, as Plato suggested,[3] but by endowing us with the power to choose for ourselves He has made us His potential fellow-workers. May we not ask—Who, after all, would prefer the safety of automatism to the glory of ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... Salle-au-Comte. Kosciusko. Aubry the Butcher? J. J. R. Caius Gracchus. Right of revision. Dufond. Four. Fall of the Girondists. Derbac. Maubuee. Washington. Pinson. 1 pistol, 86 cartridges. Marseillaise. Sovereignty of the people. Michel. Quincampoix. Sword. Hoche. Marceau. Plato. Arbre-Sec. Warsaw. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... amusing person than that madman who took a post-chaise with us from —— to Carlisle, long years ago, when he and I were hastening with the speed of fugitive felons to catch the Edinburgh mail. His fancy and his extravagance, and his furious attacks on Sir Isaac Newton, like Plato's suppers, refreshed us not only for that day but whenever they recurred to us; and we were both grieved when we heard some time afterwards from a Cambridge man that he had met our clever friend in a stage coach under the care of a brutal keeper.—— Such a madness, if any, was the ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... of Shelley's life was not often broken by such adventures. Trelawny gives the following account of how he passed his days: he "was up at six or seven, reading Plato, Sophocles, or Spinoza, with the accompaniment of a hunch of dry bread; then he joined Williams in a sail on the Arno, in a flat-bottomed skiff, book in hand, and from thence he went to the pine-forest, or some ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... established in his mind that a considerable portion of the earth still remained to be discovered, his temper was too vigorous and persevering to suffer an idea of this importance to rest merely in speculation, as it had done with Plato and Seneca, who seem to have entertained conjectures of a similar nature. He determined therefore to bring his theory to the test of experiment. But an object of that magnitude required the patronage of a prince; ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... Greeks, seeing to be dissolved, do not believe [their resurrection]. But learn not to disbelieve it; for while you believe that the soul is created, and yet is made immortal by God, according to the doctrine of Plato, and this in time, be not incredulous; but believe that God is able, when he hath raised to life that body which was made as a compound of the same elements, to make it immortal; for it must never be said of God, that he is able to do some things, ...
— An Extract out of Josephus's Discourse to The Greeks Concerning Hades • Flavius Josephus
... Edward Verrall Lucas Aucassin and Nicolete Francis William Bourdillon Aucassin and Nicolette Edmund Clarence Stedman On the Hurry of This Time Austin Dobson "Good-Night, Babette" Austin Dobson A Dialogue from Plato Austin Dobson The Ladies of St. James's Austin Dobson The Cure's Progress Austin Dobson A Gentleman of the Old School Austin Dobson On a Fan Austin Dobson "When I Saw You Last, Rose" Austin Dobson Urceus Exit Austin Dobson A Corsage Bouquet ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... of this, reader, for men who know the world is trying to go backward, and who would give their lives if they could help it on! Well! The double had succeeded so well at the Board, that I sent him to the Academy. (Shade of Plato, pardon!) He arrived early on Tuesday, when, indeed, few but mothers and clergymen are generally expected, and returned in the evening to us, covered with honors. He had dined at the right hand of the chairman, and he spoke in high ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... He is teres et rotundas; strokes fly from the lubricity of his polish, and the shiftings of his circular formation. He who is insensible of the glory of his profession, who is open only to the profit, is no disciple of mine. I hold of knavery, as Plato hath said of virtue, "Could it be seen incarnate, it would beget a personal adoration!" None but those who are inspired by a generous enthusiasm will benefit by the above maxims, nor (and here I warn you solemnly from the sacred ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... arguments are drawn from topics of general knowledge; for this purpose, the peripatetic school [b] will supply the orator with ample materials. The academic philosopher [c] will inspire him with warmth and energy; Plato will give the sublime, and Xenophon that equal flow which charms us in that amiable writer. The rhetorical figure, which is called exclamation, so frequent with Epicurus [d] and Metrodorus, will add to a discourse those sudden breaks of passion, which ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... called forth by its soul. The latest re-embodiment of an ancient writer, fresh from the presses of Putnam or of Appleton, merits the honor belonging to the book given to the world so many centuries ago, and fed upon by successive generations. Thus I look at the Plato on my shelves. How venerable these writings! Over their great words, on which I rest my eyes, my fathers bent, as their fathers had done before them; generation after generation finding inspiration where still it flows fresh and full for me. Thus every reverently minded man ought to feel ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... which we may derive occasion for important reflections, was the attempt of these original settlers to establish among them that community of goods and of labor, which fanciful politicians, from the days of Plato to those of Rousseau, have recommended as the fundamental law of a perfect republic. This theory results, it must be acknowledged, from principles of reasoning most flattering to the human character. If industry, frugality, ...
— Orations • John Quincy Adams
... Of its dead masters. Ancient was the race; To trace the upward stem of proud Lusace Gives one a vertigo; descended they From ancestor of Attila, men say; Their race to him—through Pagans—they hark back; Becoming Christians, race they thought to track Through Lechus, Plato, Otho to combine With Ursus, Stephen, in a lordly line. Of all those masters of the country round That were on Northern Europe's boundary found— At first were waves and then the dykes were reared— Corbus in double majesty appeared, Castle on hill and town upon the plain; And one who ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... Cousin, the modern Plato, combating the materialism of the eighteenth century with mystic eloquence, and drawing around him, in his chair of philosophy at the Sorbonne, a crowd of enthusiastic young men, which reminded one of Abelard among his pupils in ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... "From Plato and Cicero I learn that there is one Supreme Deity whom it is my duty to obey. But how can I know him, and how shall I obey him? I learn, too, that I am immortal, and shall become a spirit when I die. How shall I be then? ...
— The Martyr of the Catacombs - A Tale of Ancient Rome • Anonymous
... social principle must naturally be weakest in those whose own mental stores are most abundant and self-sufficing, and who, rich in such materials for thinking within themselves, are rendered so far independent of any aid from others. It was this solitary luxury (which Plato called "banqueting his own thoughts") that led Pope, as well as Lord Byron, to prefer the silence and seclusion of his library to the most agreeable conversation.—And not only too, is the necessity ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... all ages, has expressed it in its most exquisite form, in a design of Ceres and her children, of whom their mother is no longer afraid, as in the Homeric hymn to Pan. The puck- noses have grown delicate, so that, with Plato's infatuated lover, you may call them winsome, if you please; and no one would wish those hairy little shanks away, with which one of the small Pans walks at her side, grasping her skirt stoutly; while the other, the sick or weary one, rides ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... strength, and grandeur, ib. Its orators, poets, and philosophers, 5 The influence of Rome upon the provinces, ib. The languages most extensively spoken, 6 The moral condition of the Empire, ib. The influence of the philosophical sects—the Epicureans, the Stoics, the Academics, and Plato, 7 The influence of the current Polytheism, 9 The state of the Jews—the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes, ib. Preparations for a great Deliverer, and expectation ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... its province. This preliminary declaration enables it to apply its habitual method of thought without any scruple, and thus, under pretense that it does not touch the absolute, to make absolute judgments upon everything. Plato was the first to set up the theory that to know the real consists in finding its Idea, that is to say, in forcing it into a pre-existing frame already at our disposal—as if we implicitly possessed universal knowledge. But this ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... prodigious gormandising we must set that noble gift, the Library presented to Oxford by Duke Humfrey of Gloucester. In the Catalogue, drawn up in 1439, we mark many books of the utmost value to the impoverished students. Here are the works of Plato, and the Ethics and Politics of Aristotle, translated by Leonard the Aretine. Here, among the numerous writings of the Fathers, are Tully and Seneca, Averroes and Avicenna, Bellum Trojae cum secretis secretorum, ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... with Christianity for suggesting (as I supposed) that whole ages and empires of men had utterly escaped this light of justice and reason. But then I found an astonishing thing. I found that the very people who said that mankind was one church from Plato to Emerson were the very people who said that morality had changed altogether, and that what was right in one age was wrong in another. If I asked, say, for an altar, I was told that we needed none, for men our brothers gave us clear oracles and one creed in their universal ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... years, continual additions would be making to the mass of human knowledge, and yet, perhaps, it may be a matter of doubt whether what may be called the capacity of mind be in any marked and decided manner increasing. A Socrates, a Plato, or an Aristotle, however confessedly inferior in knowledge to the philosophers of the present day, do not appear to have been much below them in intellectual capacity. Intellect rises from a speck, continues in vigour only for a certain period, and will not perhaps admit ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... notwithstanding these were all illustrious men of the same period, yet we know even the nurse of Alcibiades, that her country was Lacedaemon, and her name Amycla; and that Zopyrus was his teacher and attendant; the one being recorded by Antisthenes, and the other by Plato. ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... did not surrender its mythical faculty, to which it was impelled by its physical and psychological constitution, and the pure conception was unconsciously overshadowed by symbolic ideas. We can plainly see how far this symbolism, peculiar to the race, obscured the minds of Plato and Aristotle, and of almost all the subsequent philosophers. In the Semitic and Chinese races this inner symbolism of the mind, with reference to the interpretation of nature, was less tenacious, intense, and productive, and ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... first days of their acquaintance in camp he told Claude that this was a failing he couldn't help, and that it was called "anaesthesia." Sometimes this failing was confusing; when Fanning sententiously declared that he would like to be on hand when the Crown Prince settled his little account with Plato, Claude was perplexed until subsequent witticisms revealed that the ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... redness in a blush, and in rouge, and their differences;—of the whiteness in snow, and in almond-paste, and their differences;—of the blackness and brightness of night and day, or of smoke and gaslight, and their differences, etc., etc. But for the Perception of Beauty, I always used Plato's word, which is the proper word in Greek, and the only possible single word that can be used in any other language by any man who understands the subject,—'Theoria,'—the Germans only having a term parallel to it, 'Anschauung,' assumed ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... went about arranging his Robinson Crusoe household to suit his fancy. He piled up books that he had got in New York, little Reclams and other volumes, among them a copy of Schleiermacher's translation of Plato, which he had borrowed from Peter Schmidt. In front of an old Dutch sofa covered in leather, which Lamping, the druggist, had brought over from Leyden, his birthplace, stood a large, round table. Frederick covered the table ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... and foundation of all artistic inquiry lies here. What is beauty? And to this question God forbid that we Christians should give a narrower answer than Plato gave in the old times before Christ arose, for he directs the aspirant who would discover the beautiful to "consider of greater value the beauty existing in the soul, than that existing in the body." More gracefully he teaches the same doctrine when he tells us that "there are two kinds of Venus, ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... on Christ in you, the hope of glory. I can understand, 1. How Christ, in the sense of Christianity, or the doctrine of Christ, can be in us. We sometimes hear from people such expressions as: "He is full of Plato, or full of Seneca, or full of Shakespeare," when speaking of a man who has got his mind full of the sentiments of those writers. And I can understand well enough how Christianity, which brings life and immortality to light, ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... while its growth would involve retirement from civilisation during several weeks. But he reflected that it was fashionable to be clean-shaven, and that, in point of appearance, all that is fashionable is right, though Plato would have declared it to be removed in the third ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... by the example of Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Alcibiades, Cethegus, and Pompey, and yet so monstrous in the eyes of the vulgar, are based on the same feeling that prompted Louis XIV. to build Versailles, or that makes men rush into any ruinous enterprise—into ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... my profession of faith as regards that, I'll tell you that I don't believe there was any tragedy about it. And this is why. To my mind, love...both the sorts of love, which you remember Plato defines in his Banquet, served as the test of men. Some men only understand one sort, and some only the other. 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. 'I'm much obliged for the gratification, ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... from our mundane reality by the subtle "other-planetary" influence which is apparent to others, its complexity, its fullness, its variety, its busy and by no means unsystematic life and motion, cannot be denied. Why on earth cannot people be content with asking Platonism from Plato and Balzacity from Balzac? At any rate, it is Balzacity which will be the subject of the following pages, and if anybody wants anything ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... conversed with his friends (to whom his house was ever open), again walked out, and usually finished with reading to his wife till ten o'clock, when he went to bed. This was his daily existence. His book was generally Plato, or Homer, or one of the Greek tragedians, or the Bible, in which last he took a great interest. Out of twenty-four hours he frequently read sixteen. "He wrote his Prometheus," says Willis, "in the baths of Caracalla, near the Coliseum." It was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... from time into eternity, acquires a kind and grade of knowledge that is absolutely inaccessible to the wisest and subtlest philosopher while here on earth![1] The dead Hottentot knows more than the living Plato. ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... purpose is the sober judgment of Plato a century after the first Roman experience of her, who in the Phaedrus classes her among those who have wrought much good by their inspired utterances.[540] This passage may help us to understand how ready men were at that time to turn for aid in tribulation to what they believed to ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... Theophrastus the spurious "Proem," in which Theophrastus, emphasizing his ethical purpose, announces his intention of following up his characters of vice with characters of virtue. At one point Gally asserts that Theophrastus taught the same doctrine as Aristotle and Plato, but ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... he had imagined a magnificent theory, when he averred that every man had within him a spark of the divine flame. But, silly PLATO! he never considered how easily this spark might be blown out. At this moment, how many Englishmen are walking about the land utterly extinguished! Had men been made on the principle of the safety-lamp, they might have defied the foul breath of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 30, 1841 • Various
... of Homer, Plato, Sophocles, etc. Her library catalogue shows also a goodly list of "Latyn Buikis," and classics. In a letter to Cecil, dated St. Andrews, 7th April 1562, Randolph incidentally states that Queen Mary then read daily after dinner "somewhat of Livy" ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... forsooth! What sayest thou to Giorgione of Venice and his pupils, to this efflorescence of loveliness, to our statuaries and our builders, to our goldsmiths and musicians? Ah, we have rediscovered the secret of Greece. It is Homer that we love, it is Plato, it is the noble simplicity of Sophocles; our Dante lied when he said it was Virgil who was his guide. The poet of Mantua never led mortal to those dolorous regions. He sings of flocks and bees, of birds and running brooks, and the simple loves of shepherds; and we listen to him again and breathe ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... of interest was thus approved or tolerated by Greek and Roman law, it was at the same time reprobated by the philosophers of both countries. Plato objects to usury because it tends to set one class, the poor or the borrowers, against another, the rich or the lenders; and goes so far as to make it wrong for the borrower to repay either the principal or interest of his debt. He further considers ...
— An Essay on Mediaeval Economic Teaching • George O'Brien
... great men, who are so much boasted of in profane history, were so unhappy as not to know the true God, and to displease him; we should therefore be cautious and circumspect in the praises which we bestow upon them. St. Austin, in his Retractions, repents his having lavished so many encomiums on Plato, and the followers of his philosophy; "because these," says he, "were impious men, whose doctrine, in many points, was contrary to ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... these profound ideas of morality, as they are entertained by oriental nations, with the celebrated cardinal virtues of Plato, which have been recapitulated again and again—Justice, Valour, Temperance, and Wisdom—it is plain that the latter are not based on any clear, leading idea, but are chosen on grounds that are superficial and, in part, obviously false. Virtues must ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... prepossessed on one side by the reigning ideas of the philosophy of Pythagoras and Plato on the influences of mean intelligences, and on the other hand by the language of the holy books, which to conform to popular opinions often ascribed to the demon effects which were purely natural. We must then return to the doctrine of reason to decide ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... "you are a man of parts, with an education, very likely, of the best. But our schools and Universities now teach a man everything except the meaning and purpose of life. When I was in school we read our Plato and Xenophon as you now read your German and French; but what we learned, above the language itself, was the thought of that ancient time. You learn to earn money and to fight your way through life, but Socrates taught that ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge |
