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

“You know what they say: Better one true friend than a hundred relatives.”
― Gina Buonaguro, The Virgins of Venice

“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

“Despite the convent walls, when I was writing, my mind was free.”
― Gina Buonaguro, The Virgins of Venice

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“We saw that the period of the Middle Ages was dominated by Scholasticism, that is, the reason which becomes autonomous, reason which is placed above faith. And this reason, as Kireyevsky very well saw, in the nineteenth century when he was criticizing the West from the Orthodox point of view, very quickly turned against Christianity. First it was supposed to be the handmaiden of faith and serve Christianity and prove all the dogmas of faith and prove a great many other things also based upon authority, the authority both of Scripture, of some early Fathers, mostly Augustine, and Aristotle, since it was believed that Aristotle had the true view of nature.

But in the age of the Renaissance, this reason turned against religion. Because if it’s [reason is] autonomous, it’s able to develop its own principles; there’s no reason why it should be bound to the religious content. And also we saw in the Middle Ages that the great movements — Francis and Joachim — were very monastically, ascetically oriented. But in the Renaissance, there was a complete reaction against that. And again, this simple matter of the context in which the new ideas arose changed; and therefore no longer were people interested in either monasticism or having reason serve theology. And so we find in this period that the idea of monasticism and asceticism is treated extremely negatively, because the interest in the world has now been awakened.”
― Seraphim Rose, Orthodox Survival Guide

“Quand je mourrai, je regretterai surtout de savoir que périssent les yeux qui l'ont vue et le cœur qui l'a contemplée.”
― Diego de San Pedro, Cárcel de Amor

“There is nothing that I should more fear, nor any kind of death that might threaten me, which would not be more supportable for me than to live without you and be separated by a great distance.

I would rather die or be eaten by fish in the sea or devored on land by cannibals than to consume myself in perpetual mourning and unceasing sorrow awaiting not my husband but his letters.”
― Hugh Thomas, Rivers of Gold: The Rise of the Spanish Empire from Columbus to Magellan

“Fastest Storm by Stewart Stafford

The fastest storm fell over us,
A rapid drop down a lift shaft,
The moon's spotlight blocked,
Wrapped tight in venomousness.

And under a wicked hand fallen,
The venal and honourable in flux,
A pantheon of money and might,
Gloved hand night clawed larceny.

The storm passed, fading into folklore,
Only by swift valour blocking knavery,
Clouds parted, cataracts cleared eyes,
A renaissance spark became an inferno.

© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“El amor también nos desvela. ¿ Quién quiere dormir cuando la vida nos da lo que soñamos ?”
― Laura Sarmiento Pallarés, Carlos, Rey Emperador

“Quizá no había mayor honor que no herir a quien se amaba.”
― Laura Sarmiento Pallarés, Carlos, Rey Emperador

“The Radiance Inna Sacred Globe Orifices The Rainbow Facet And The Sea Forges The Hourglass Inna Hexagonal Prism At Its Sandy Zenith”
― Jonathan Roy Mckinney Gero EagleO2

“The Radiance Inna Sacred Globe Orifices The Rainbow Facet And The Sea Forges The Hourglass At Its Sandy Zenith Inna Hexagonal Prism”
― Jonathan Roy Mckinney Gero EagleO2

“Bosch was not possessed by a deranged spirit but the possessor of a cool, calculating mind. His supreme mastery of the arts is proved by his ability to paint cerebrally constructed devils, of which the component parts each has its own meaning.”
― Dirk Bax, Hieronymus Bosch