Top 7 Quotes & Sayings by Thomas McEvilley

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American novelist Thomas McEvilley.

Last updated on April 20, 2025.

Thomas McEvilley was an American art critic, poet, novelist, and scholar. He was a Distinguished Lecturer in Art History at Rice University and founder and former chair of the Department of Art Criticism and Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

American - Novelist | 1939 - March 2, 2013

Source: Wikipedia

Many modern scholars have found the asceticism expressed in Plato unacceptable; it does not sound like the advice of a reasonable man in the Cartesian tradition.

Thomas McEvilley

Art's primary social function is to define the communal self, which includes redefining it when the community is changing.

Thomas McEvilley

It is ... possible to read Plato as if he were only discussing reason and not mystical intuition in his writings but ... in that case he seems naively over-impressed by rather ordinary thought processes.

Thomas McEvilley

In the Republic Plato presents a theory of personality. ... He speaks of three faculties, the appetitive, the ambitious, and the rational. ... The most dangerous faculty according to Plato is the appetitive for it bonds the soul to the senses and the realm of sense objects.

Thomas McEvilley

Plato rarely if ever states anything about himself clearly.

Thomas McEvilley

Plato feels that ethical abstinences and austerities are essential preconditions for the cleansing and opening of the eye of the soul.

Thomas McEvilley