The Wise King Quotes

“There is no pleasure in this world like the company of friends,” said the Mouse, “and no pain like losing them.”
― Simon R. Doubleday, The Wise King: A Christian Prince, Muslim Spain, and the Birth of the Renaissance

“But Alfonso was no mere historian. Living long before the modern divide into “two cultures”—the sciences and the humanities—he was a renaissance man avant la lettre, multifaceted and as committed to the sciences as to the arts, and it is here, above all, that the deepest roots of the image of the Wise King are revealed. Muslim models of rulership largely inspired his fascination with the “philosophy of nature,” especially with the related fields of astronomy, astrology, and magic. Some of these models were very old, harkening back to the golden days of the caliphate in Baghdad. There, in the ninth and tenth centuries, the caliphs of the Abbasid dynasty—anxious to soak up the ancient Greek learning of the Hellenistic world that they were conquering—had founded a school of translation that came to be known as the House of Wisdom.”
― Simon R. Doubleday, The Wise King: A Christian Prince, Muslim Spain, and the Birth of the Renaissance

“In learning, as in all things, he wrote, kings themselves resemble a mirror in which men view their own images. The new king saw himself as a Solomon to his father’s David—as the inheritor of a great royal lineage, bequeathing his wisdom to his subjects and to future generations. A king must be able to read, he stated, for reading is the key to secrecy and a means of self-mastery: as King Solomon observed, “He who places his secret in the power of another becomes his slave; and he who knows how to keep it is the master of his own heart.” Alfonso was also convinced that history held its own secrets. A king should learn from the wise men of the past, for by reading he will come to know “the remarkable events that transpire, from which he will learn many good habits and examples.” Alfonso saw in the recounting of the past a story that could also serve to bind his people together.”
― Simon R. Doubleday, The Wise King: A Christian Prince, Muslim Spain, and the Birth of the Renaissance

“Wisdom is the love of all loves, the water of all fountains, and the memory of all peoples.”
― Simon R. Doubleday, The Wise King: A Christian Prince, Muslim Spain, and the Birth of the Renaissance