Kindle Notes & Highlights
Let us lay it down as an incontrovertible rule that the first impulses of nature are always right.
“The man who eats in idleness what he has not earned is a thief.”
If the life and death of Socrates are those of a philosopher, the life and death of Christ are those of a God.
More weeks, and they are betrothed. Rousseau insists that this shall be a formal and solemn ceremony; every measure must be taken—by ritual and elsewise—to exalt, and fix in memory, the sanctity of the marriage bond.
conclude that the morals of your savage are as pure as his mind is illogical.
“I am a Christian, sincerely Christian, according to the doctrine of the Gospel; not a Christian as a disciple of the priests, but as a disciple of Jesus Christ.”
This difference between what we believe and what we preach is at the heart of the corruption in modern civilization.
The author is accused of not believing in Christ; he believes in Christ, but in a different way from his accusers:
“Anciently the Prophets made fire descend from the sky at their word; today children do as much with a little piece of [burning] glass.” Joshua made the sun stop; any almanac maker can promise the same result by calculating a solar eclipse.50 And as Europeans who perform such wonders among barbarians are thought by these to be gods, so the “miracles” of the past—even those of Jesus—may have been natural results misinterpreted by the populace as divine interruptions of natural law.51 Perhaps Lazarus, whom Christ raised from the dead, had not really been dead.—
The long quarrel between Voltaire and Rousseau is one of the sorriest blemishes on the face of the Enlightenment.
Love reason, let all your writings take from reason their splendor and their worth”;
Reformers listened to Voltaire; revolutionists heard Rousseau.
“this world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel,”
Rousseau spoke of theologians as “gentlemen” who “provide a new explanation of something, leaving it as incomprehensible as before.”
“There is no expiation for evil except good.”
“This,” he adds, “I retain as a true eulogium of my humanity.”
“beyond my power, though not beyond my zeal”;
He has only felt, during the whole course of his life; and in this respect his sensibility rises to a pitch beyond what I have seen any example of, but it still gives him a more acute feeling of pain than of pleasure. He is like a man who were stript not only of his clothes but of his skin, and turned out in that situation to combat with the rude and boisterous elements, such as perpetually disturb this lower world.
Originally opera was the plural of opus, and meant works; in Italian the plural became singular, still meaning work; what we now call opera was termed opera per musica— a musical work; only in the eighteenth century did the word take on its present meaning.
There is something wistfully attractive in a society in decay.
Venice was ruled by an oligarchy. In the flotsam of diverse stocks—Antonios, Shylocks, Othellos—with a populace poorly educated, slow to think and quick to act, and preferring pleasure to power, democracy would have been chaos enthroned.
The people accepted religion as an almost unconscious habit of ritual and belief, but they played more often than they prayed.
“In the morning a little Mass, after dinner a little gamble, in the evening a little woman.”
No one here talked of revolution, for every class, besides its pleasures, had its stabilizing customs, its absorption in accepted tasks.
Every class had its clubs, every street its caffè;
carne-vale, farewell to flesh food.
“Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem redieris” (Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return).
he told de Brosses that he could “compose a concerto faster than a copyist could copy it.”
“Fatto in cinque giorni”— Done in five days.
A clever satirist said that Vivaldi had not written six hundred concertos, but had written the same concerto six hundred times;
Like most artists, Vivaldi suffered from the sensitivity that fed his genius. The power of his music reflected his fiery temper, the tenderness of his strains reflected his piety.
Throughout the nineteenth century Vivaldi was almost forgotten except by scholars tracing the development of Bach. Then in 1905 Arnold Schering’s Geschichte des Instrumentalkonzerts restored him to prominence; and in the 1920s Arturo Toscanini gave his passion and prestige to Vivaldi’s cause. Today the Red Priest takes for a time the highest place among the Italian composers of the eighteenth century.
“Done without spectacles.”
Like most artists, whose moral code melts in the heat of their feelings, he was at heart a pagan;
he paints a picture in less time than it takes another artist to mix his colors.”
brush in the villa itself. He chose subjects from the Iliad, the Aeneid, the Orlando furioso, the Gerusalemme liberata. He gave his airy
He had exhausted life thirty years before his death
Goldoni is one of the most lovable men in literary history; and despite this exordium his virtues included modesty—a quality uncongenial to scribes.
He too wrote Memoirs— the white paper of his wars.
trivial themes, and by using only the traditional
inaccurate, imaginative, illuminating, entertaining; Gibbon thought them “more truly dramatic than his Italian comedies.”
“humanity is everywhere the same, jealousy displays itself everywhere, and everywhere a man of a cool and tranquil disposition in the end acquires the love of the public, and wears out his enemies.”
His wit was almost as keen as Voltaire’s, but it did not prevent him from being a careful administrator and a far-seeing diplomat.
“we must rather ask whether men believe in God than whether they accept the bull.”
“Should you not refrain from reporting to me the audacities of fools?”
“Know that the pope has a free hand only to give blessings.”
The popes found it almost as difficult to govern Rome as to rule the Catholic world.
Carnival over, Rome resumed its uneven tenor of piety and crime.
Venice had more artists than money, Rome had more money than artists;
But that is the dreary logic-chopping of history,
