Renaissance Quotes

“[how can anyone] be silly enough to think himself better than other people, because his clothes are made of finer woolen thread than theirs. After all, those fine clothes were once worn by a sheep, and they never turned it into anything better than a sheep.”
― Thomas More, Utopia

“While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.
-Leonardo Da Vinci”
― Oliver Bowden, Renaissance

“The next time somebody announces that he plans to get Medieval on your ass, tell him you're going to get Renaissance on his gonads.”
― James Morrow, The Last Witchfinder

“The soul exists partly in eternity and partly in time.”
― Marsilio Ficino

“Whose little boy are you?”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Why do we think love is a magician? Because the whole power of magic consists in love. The work of magic is the attraction of one thing by another because of a certain affinity of nature.”
― Marsilio Ficino

“Not without deep pain do we admit to ourselves that the artists of all ages have in their highest flights carried to heavenly transfiguration precisely those conceptions that we now recognize as false: they are the glorifiers of the religious and philosophical errors of humanity, and they could not have done this without their belief in the absolute truth of these errors. Now if the belief in such truth generally diminishes, if the rainbow colors at the outermost ends of human knowing and imagining fade: then the species of art that, like the Divina commedia, Raphael's pictures, Michelangelo's frescoes, the Gothic cathedrals, presupposes not only a cosmic, but also a metaphysical significance for art objects can never blossom again. A touching tale will come of this, that there was once such an art, such belief by artists.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

“Man is mortal. This is his fate. Man pretends not to be mortal. That is his sin. Man is a creature of time and place, whose perspectives and insights are invariably conditioned by his immediate circumstances.”
― Sylvan Barnet

“There was a time in the ancient world - a very long time - in which the central cultural problem must have seemed an inexhaustible outpouring of books. Where to put them all? How to organize them on the groaning shelves? How to hold the profusion of knowledge in one's head? The loss of this plenitude would have been virtually inconceivable to anyone living in its midst.
Then, not all at once but with the cumulative force of a mass extinction, the whole enterprise came to an end. What looked stable turned out to be fragile, and what had seemed for all time was only for the time being.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

“Just as not all butterflies produce a hurricane, not all outbreaks of bubonic plague produce a Renaissance.”
― Eric Weiner, The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley

“A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure - an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation - characterizes Montaigne's restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes's chronicle of his mad knight, Michelangelo's depiction of flayed skin, Leonardo's sketches of whirlpools, Caravaggio's loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ's feet.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

“Love is the linchpin that connects the material world with higher levels of existence.”
― Julianne Davidow

“In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

“I feed my heart with sighs, that's all it asks,
I live on tears, I think I'm born to weep;
I don't complain of that, since in my state
weeping is sweeter than you might believe.”
― Petrarch

“Such was also the case with Nietzsche, a volcanic genius if ever there was one. Here, too, there is passionate exteriorization of an inward fire, but in a manner that is both deviated and demented; we have in mind here, not the Nietzschian philosophy, which taken literally is without interest, but his poetical work, whose most intense expression is in part his ‘Zarathustra’. What this highly uneven book manifests above all is the violent reaction of an a priori profound soul against a mediocre and paralyzing cultural environment; Nietzsche’s fault was to have only a sense of grandeur in the absence of all intellectual discernment. ‘Zarathustra’ is basically the cry of a grandeur trodden underfoot, whence comes the heart-rending authenticity – grandeur precisely – of certain passages; not all of them, to be sure, and above all not those which express a half-Machiavellian, half-Darwinian philosophy, or minor literary cleverness. Be that as it may, Nietzsche’s misfortune, like that of other men of genius, such as Napoleon, was to be born after the Renaissance and not before it; which indicates evidently an aspect of their nature, for there is no such thing as chance.”
― Frithjof Schuon, To Have a Center

“The 'Renaissance' West Butchered the Rest.
If I had to choose between an erudite Aristotle and an unknown ‘soulless’ black slave I would choose the latter. The ascendancy of the West was on a heap of bodies of slaves and trampled humanity through colonization”
― Viktor Vijay Kumar, Mona Lisa does not smile anymore

“إن تكريم العقول الفذة، هو في إتاحة الفرصة لها لخلق أنظمتها المتفردة، لا في حكمها بأنظمة بالية، وملاحقتها بالقوانين الروتينية، واستنزافها في الأعمال غير الخلاقة.
لو شاء أحد أن يتتبع حجم الإهدار للعقول العربية الفذة، لما وسعته الحسرة، ولما وسعه سوى أن ينتحر من الكمد والأسى.
فتجد عالماً في الطاقة الذرية في سوريا يعمل مدرساً للرياضيات في مدرسة متواضعة.
وتجد أفضل عالم رياضيات في العالم بشهادة المؤسسات الغربية، والحائز على جوائز عالمية في مجاله، تفصله جامعة القاهرة بحجة عدم تجديد الإجازة.
وتجد مخترعاً في السعودية يحاول الانتحار لأنه لا يملك قوتاً لأولاده، ثم تظهره القنوات الفضائية كمادة إعلامية شيقة، ويصورونه على الهواء وهم يشترون له حاجيات بيته وأبناءه.

لكي يتحقق الإبداع، وتتحقق النهضة، يجب أن نعمل على تهيئة المناخات الحاضنة للعقول المتفردة، وأن نخفف من عوامل الطرد الفكري، ونكثف جهودنا لوضع سياسات تضمن الحرية، والكرامة، لكل عقل عربي تظهر عليه آثار النبوغ في شتى المجالات، الفكرية والعملية، بدون ذلك، لن يكون لدينا نخبة تقود البلاد لطريق الحضارة.”
― محمد الشموتي

“During periods of root expansion things have always looked as confused and topsy-turvy and purposeless as they do now. The whole Renaissance is supposed to have resulted from the topsy-turvy feeling caused by Columbus’ discovery of a new world. It just shook people up. The topsy-turviness of that time is recorded everywhere. There was nothing in the flat-earth views of the Old and New Testaments that predicted it. Yet people couldn’t deny it. The only way they could assimilate it was to abandon the entire medieval outlook and enter into a new expansion of reason.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“Les naturels sanguinaires à l'endroit des bestes, tesmoignent une propension naturelle à la cruauté.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Nobility passes through by blood, not by law”
― Haluk Çay, MARIA ROMANOV: After 17 July 1918

“Compare with Greek art, modern classical art is lacking in warmth and immediacy; it has a derived, retrospective, and, even in the Renaissance, a more or less classicistic character. It It is the reflection of a society which, filled with reminiscences of Roman heroism and medieval chivalry, tries to appear to be something which it is not, by following an artificially produced social and moral code, and which stylizes the whole pattern of its life in accordance with this fictitious scheme. Classical art describes this society as it wants to see itself and as it wants to be seen. There is hardly a feature in this art which would not, on closer examination, prove to be anything more than the translation into artistic terms of the aristocratic, conservative ideals cherished by this society striving for permanence and continuity. The whole artistic fromalism of the Cinquecento merely corresponds to the formalized system of moral conceptions and decorum which the upper class of the period imposes on itself. Just as the aristocracy and the aristocratically minded circles of society subject life to the rule of a formal code, in order to preserve it from the anarchy of the emotions, so they also submit the expression of the emotions in art to the censorship of definite, abstract, and impersonal forms.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 2: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque

“An age in rapid transition is one which exists on the frontier between two cultures and between conflicting technologies. Every moment of its consciousness is an act of translation of each of these cultures into the other. Today we live on the frontier between five centuries of mechanism and the new electronics, between the homogeneous and the simultaneous. It is painful but fruitful. The sixteenth century Renaissance was an age on the frontier between two thousand years of alphabetic and manuscript culture, on the one hand, and the new mechanism of repeatability and quantification, on the other.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenbery Galaxy

“Mary Stuart and Elizabeth both aimed at toleration in an intolerant age, in the same ways that Catherine de’ Medici, the mother-in-law of one and the almost mother-in-law of another English queen, labored her whole life to heal the rift between Catholic and Protestant in France. All three of these queens worked as diligently and as astutely as they might to restrain the fratricidal wars of Christian against Christian. What they had to hold up against that violent seismic shift in human sensibility was the orderly traditions of monarchy. If they did not ultimately succeed, they slowed and tempered the disorder and violence.”
― Maureen Quilligan, When Women Ruled the World: Making the Renaissance in Europe

“If Jesus Himself gives me the shield of faith and the sword of the spirit as I enter this battle to fight for HIs honor, how can we not expect to win the victory? Just as David used his enemy's own sword to kill him, and as Jonathan forced his adversaries to turn their swords against themselves, so I hope in part to slay these gentiles, the philosophers, and in part to rouse them to an internecine war and their self-destruction, by the power of our faith, such as it is, and of God's word”
― Lorenzo Valla, "De vero falsoque bono"

“I think you're talking nonsense," said Cornelia, flushing. "I attend lectures every winter in Greek Art and the Renaissance, and I went to some on famous Women of History."

Mr. Ferguson groaned in agony: "Greek Art; Renaissance! Famous Women of History! It makes me quite sick to hear you. It's the future that matters, woman, not the past.”
― Agatha Christie, Death on the Nile

“It is but in our own day that men dare boast that they see the dawn of better things.... Now indeed, may every thoughtful spirit thank God that he has been permitted to be born in this new age, so full of hope and promise, which already rejoices in a greater array of nobly gifted souls than the world has seen in the thousand years which preceded it.”
― Matteo Palmieri, Della vita civile, trattato di Matteo Palmieri. 1825 [Leather Bound]

“As the men of the age were not accustomed to see any excellence or greater perfection than the things thus produced, they greatly admired them, and considered them to be the type of perfection, barbarous as they were. Yet some rising spirits, aided by some quality in the air of certain places, so far purged themselves of this crude style”
― Giorgio Vasari, [(The Lives of the Artists )] [Author: Giorgio Vasari] [Dec-2008]

“As the men of the age were not accustomed to see any excellence or greater perfection than the things thus produced, they greatly admired them, and considered them to be the type of perfection, barbarous as they were. Yet some rising spirits, aided by some quality in the air of certain places, so far purged themselves of this crude style…”
― Giorgio Vasari

“Authentic divination systems passed down by our ancestors are a special type of heritage bestowed upon the human family. From a practical standpoint, divination systems can often provide a fresh
perspective on the changing times and world, which is to our collective advantage. They also help us satisfy an ancient and instinctual need to better understand life and our place in the Universe.”
― Ayesha Ophelia, The New Romantics: The Art Of Musical Divination