These platonic quotes will inspire you. Platonic is of, relating to, or having a close relationship in which there is no romance or confined to words, theories, or ideas, and not leading to practical action.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging platonic quotes, platonic sayings, and platonic proverbs.
Best Platonic Quotes
- “Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.” ~ Jorge Luis Borges
- “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
- “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
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“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
- “She had a body that even I coveted in a strictly Platonic sense.” ~ C.E. Murphy
- “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
- “I can’t even find someone for a platonic relationship, much less the kind where someone wants to see me naked.” ~ Gilbert Gottfried
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“Show me a genuine case of platonic friendship, and I shall show you two old or homely faces.” ~ Austin O’Malley
- “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
- “Passion and platonic friendliness, often contrary siblings, frequently wear similar faces to hide the great distance between them.” ~ Darin Strauss
- “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
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“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
- “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 , Platonic quotes friendship
- “Hanging out with women on a platonic level is like spending time with someone from Europe. It’s not better or worse, but it is different.” ~ Dov Davidoff
- “But I think it is a serious issue to wonder about the other platonic absolutes of say beauty and morality.” ~ Roger Penrose
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“Platonic love is platonic nonsense.” ~ Samuel Richardson
- “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
- “As far as life is concerned, there is no such thing as “Nature”. There are only homes. Home is that environment to which the individual has become adapted; and almost everything is unnatural outside his range of adaptation. Harmonious equilibrium with nature is an abstract concept with a Platonic beauty but lacking the flesh and blood of life. It fails, in particular, to convey the creative emergent quality of human existence.” ~ Rene Dubos
- “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
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“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
- “People make films about all kinds of relationships, but they won’t do these extremely intense platonic love affairs that happen between young girls. In a way, they are more intense than anything else you ever have, and that’s what I wanted to make a film about, though it was in the context of a horror film.” ~ Mary Harron , Platonic quotes love
- “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.” ~ Alan Bradley
- “She kissed her way into society. I don’t like her. But don’t misunderstand me: my dislike is purely platonic.” ~ Herbert Beerbohm Tree
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“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
- “There are laws of nature – of course, there are – even if they don’t exist in some sort of bizarre Platonic Heaven.” ~ L.A. Paul
- “Harry and Hermione are very platonic friends. But I won’t answer for anyone else, nudge-nudge-wink-wink!” ~ J. K. Rowling
- “A Platonic friendship is perhaps only possible when one or other of the Platonists is in love with a third person.” ~ Evelyn Beatrice Hall , Platonic quotes love
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“I would define morality as enlightened self-interest…That old Platonic ideal that there are certain pure moral forms just isn’t where we are.” ~ Andrew Young
- “There is nothing that has caused me to meditate more on Plato’s secrecy and sphinx-like nature, than the happily preserved petit fact that under the pillow of his deathbed there was found no ‘Bible,’ nor anything Egyptian, Pythagorean, or Platonic – but a book of Aristophanes. How could even Plato have endured life – a Greek life which he repudiated – without an Aristophanes!” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
- “For Plotinus, what really exists are the Platonic forms, so the true nature or form of things like justice, beauty, maybe numbers, things like that, and these he associates with the intellect because they’re the objects of intellect, they are things that intellect can think about.” ~ Peter Adamson
- “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
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“We do each have an intellect but there’s a universal intellect which is the same for everybody, as it were. And this single intellect is grasping the platonic forms.” ~ Peter Adamson
- “Certainly the central Platonic idea, which is the idea of the ideas, these archetypal forms which stand outside of time is one which is confirmed by the psychedelic experience.” ~ Terence McKenna
- “We were born in a Jewish world, as part of a Jewish faith tradition. We had to translate ourselves into the neo-Platonic thinking Greek world; that took us about 400 years. Then, finally a man named Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, recast Christianity in terms of neo-Platonic thought.” ~ John Shelby Spong
- “The classical allusions and the Platonic disquisitions on beauty are no longer a form of cover, but integral to Aschenbach’s complex sexuality. Moreover, the wandering around Venice in pursuit of Tadzio isn’t a prelude to some sexual contact for which Aschenbach is yearning.” ~ Philip Kitcher
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“There’s going to be this realm of Platonic forms and then there’s going to be this single mind, the ‘nous’, which grasps them.” ~ Peter Adamson
- “Wilhelmine Germany was hostile to the expression of same-sex love – and, of course, Mann would have known of the fate of Oscar Wilde. His early reading of Platen’s poetry, and, probably when he was in his early twenties, of Platen’s diaries, introduced him to a form of sexual expression he found profoundly congenial. It’s not quite Platonic.” ~ Philip Kitcher
- “Once one has realized, following the great English literary visionaries William Shakespeare and Thomas Nashe, that sexual puritanism, political disciplinarians, and abuse of the poor are the result of the refusal of true Christianity … one is led to articulate a more incarnate, more participatory, more aesthetic, more erotic, more socialized, even a more ‘Platonic’ Christianity.” ~ John Milbank
- “Um, the relationship between Thor and Sif in this movie is quite platonic. I mean, they’re good buddies, they’ve grown up with each other, they’re warriors, they fight side by side. We haven’t take it to the next level yet. I’m going to throw that in there. But yeah, she kind of thinks he’s a little bit pig-headed, but she loves him nevertheless, you know, she’s like that’s my buddy, I’ll do what I can for him.” ~ Jaimie Alexander , Platonic quotes relationship
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“The charm of the Platonic mode of thought … consisted precisely in the resistance to the obvious evidence of the senses.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
- “I don’t think you should ever expect forever in anything, in either platonic friendships or sexual friendships.” ~ Mary Tyler Moore
- “The Platonic world of ideas corresponds to Thinking and Sensation on the mystical level.” ~ Carl Jung
- “I’ve arrived at the age where a platonic friendship can be sustained on the highest moral plane.” ~ Charlie Chaplin
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“There’s different kinds of love, and Id never experienced that kind of totally platonic love. All the love I’ve experienced has always been a kind of deal, and now, as I get older, I realize that there’s this other love out there.” ~ Tracey Emin
- “Poetry is related to philosophy as experience is related to empirical science. Experience makes us acquainted with the phenomenon in the particular and by means of examples, science embraces the whole of phenomena by means of general conceptions. So poetry seeks to make us acquainted with the Platonic Ideas through the particular and by means of examples. Philosophy aims at teaching, as a whole and in general, the inner nature of things which expresses itself in these. One sees even here that poetry bears more the character of youth, philosophy that of old age.” ~ Arthur Schopenhauer
- “The only men who can turn my bloodstream into a condition resembling heavy surf are good-looking heels with characters as intricately unpleasant as the sewers of Paris. With decent and honorable gents, I come all over Platonic. Was ever a woman so perverse and wrongheaded?” ~ Margaret Halsey
- “One can hardly appreciate how academia has perverted its highest tasks and “ideals” without pondering long and hard the implications of Jacques Barzun’s House of Intellect and its Hegelian/Bergsonian contrast between rigidified “intellect” and always-growing “intelligence.” This fundamentally Hegelian distinction, needless to say, cuts to the quick of the contrast between Platonic and Aristotelian forms of philosophy.” ~ Kenny Smith
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“It certainly is an embarrassing fact, then, for certain classical scholars to have to face, that the Platonic Academy continued to function in Athens for over nine hundred years.” ~ Robert K. G. Temple
- “The exercise of letters is sometimes linked to the ambition to construct an absolute book, a book of books that includes the others like a Platonic archetype, an object whose virtues are not diminished by the passage of time.” ~ Jorge Luis Borges
- “For the Platonic or Aristotelian philosophy, it is of no importance whether Plato or Aristotle ever lived. For the mystical practice of an Indian, Persian, Chinese, or Neo-Platonic mystic it is a matter of indifference whether Rama, Buddha, Laotse, or Porphyrius are myths or not. The mystic has no personal relation to them. It is not here a question of somebody telling me the truth which of myself I cannot find, but of my finding an access to the depths of the world in the depths of my soul.” ~ Emil Brunner
- “Platonic England, house of solitudes, rests in its laurels and its injured stone” ~ Geoffrey Hill
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“As a filmmaker, I cannot make anything beautiful. I’m Platonic in that sense.” ~ Michael Glawogger
- “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
- “Do people believe in human rights because such rights actually exist, like mathematical truths, sitting on a cosmic shelf next to the Pythagorean theorem just waiting to be discovered by Platonic reasoners? Or do people feel revulsion and sympathy when they read accounts of torture, and then invent a story about universal rights to help justify their feelings?” ~ Jonathan Haidt
- “If the Christian religion, as I understand it, or as you understand it, should maintain its ground, as I believe it will, yet Platonic, Pythagoric, Hindoo, and cabalistic Christianity, which is Catholic Christianity, and which has prevailed for 1500 years, has received a mortal wound, of which the monster must finally die. Yet so strong is his constitution, that he may endure for centuries before he expires.” ~ John Adams
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“This the perception of the beautiful, A fine extension of the faculties, Platonic, universal, wonderful, Drawn from the stars, and filtered through the skies, Without which life would be extremely dull” ~ Lord Byron
- “It isn’t necessary to know exactly how your ideal life will look; you only have to know what feels better and what feels worse…Begin making choices based on what makes you feel freer and happier, rather than on how you think an ideal life should look. It’s the process of feeling our way toward happiness, not the realization of the Platonic ideal, that creates our best lives.” ~ Martha Beck
- “It’s the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.” ~ Alan Lightman
- “The Doxology … that testimonial to the Platonic Trinity, which divided the Roman Empire into at least eighteen quarreling sects, none of whom knew what they were fighting about, and which schisms contributed to the decline and fall of this greatest of states. Rome had thrived for one thousand years with pagan gods at the helm and expired after only one hundred and fifty years under the Christian banner.” ~ Ruth Hurmence Green
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“You were the living image of the entire Platonic shadow show, an illusion that could fill my emptiness with marvelous, imaginary things as long as, just as long as, the movie lasted, and then all would all vanish.” ~ Angela Carter
- “Without the intervention of the civil authority, what would our percepts become?- Platonic laws.” ~ Philipp Melanchthon
- “There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead.” ~ Bertrand Russell
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“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
- “… 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
- “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
