Platonic Idealism Quotes

It must be so, Plato, thou reason'st well!

... 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.

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.

I conceived 'All Is Song' as a modernised, loosely interpreted version of Socrates's life.

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.

The olive grove of Academe, Plato's retirement, where the Attic bird Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long.

The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the philosophical tradition that what we can see and measure in the world is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality.