The Renaissance Quotes

“To rulers religion, like almost everything else, is a tool of power.”
― Will Durant, The Renaissance

“Everywhere today in Europe and the Americas there are urbane and lusty spirits—comrades in the Country of the Mind—who feed and live on this legacy of mental freedom, esthetic sensitivity, friendly and sympathetic understanding; forgiving life its tragedies, embracing its joys of sense, mind, and soul; and hearing ever in their hearts, amid hymns of hate and above the cannon’s roar, the song of the Renaissance.”
― Will Durant, The Renaissance

“Liberalism is a luxury of security and peace.”
― Will Durant, The Renaissance

“Titian took the world as he found it, took men as he found them, took women when he found them, and enjoyed them all.”
― Will Durant, The Renaissance

“if a ruler must choose between being feared without love or being loved without fear, he must sacrifice the love.”
― Will Durant, The Renaissance

“Leonardo puzzles us, Michelangelo frightens us, Raphael gives us peace.”
― Will Durant, The Renaissance

“After perseverance, what is the best proof of love?” The answer was, “The sharing of joys and griefs.”
― Will Durant, The Renaissance

“I have lost the dearest heart in the world, a heart which tenderly watched over my life—which loved it and sustained it neglectful of its own; a heart so much the master of itself, so disdainful of vain embellishments and adornments, of silk and gold, of jewels and treasures of price, that it was content with the single and (so she assured me) supreme joy of the love I bore it. This heart, moreover, had for vesture the softest, gracefulest, daintiest of limbs; it had at its service pleasant features, and the sweetest, most graciously endowed form that I have ever met in this land.”
― Will Durant, The Renaissance

“French motto: “He who drinks and does not drink again does not know what drinking is.” In”
― Will Durant, The Renaissance

“When another pope proposed another crusade against the Turks Venice turned a deaf ear. She agreed with Europe that trade was more important than Christianity.”
― Will Durant, The Renaissance

“According to tradition he refused the last sacraments, saying that he preferred to see what would happen, in the other world, to an obstinately impenitent soul.”
― Will Durant, The Renaissance

“The proper study of mankind was now to be man, in all the potential strength and beauty of his body, in all the joy and pain of his senses and feelings, in all the frail majesty of his reason; and in these as most abundantly and perfectly revealed in the literature and art of ancient Greece and Rome. This was humanism.”
― Will Durant, The Renaissance

“The Renaissance was not a period in time but a mode of life and thought moving from Italy through Europe with the course of commerce, war, and ideas.”
― Will Durant, The Renaissance

“Large states promote order and power rather than liberty or art.”
― Will Durant, The Renaissance

“In 1469, or earlier, printing began in Venice and Milan. In 1471 Bernardo Cennini opened a printing establishment in Florence, to the dismay of Politian, who mourned that “now the most stupid ideas can in a moment be transferred into a thousand volumes and spread abroad”
― Will Durant, The Renaissance

“Democracy is a luxury of disseminated intelligence, security, and peace.”
― Will Durant, The Renaissance

“The timid weakness of individuals, the insecurity of groups, and the delusion of superiority generated perpetual fear, suspicion, dislike, and contempt of the different, the alien, and the strange.”
― Will Durant, The Renaissance

“What is it, then, that makes the work of Giotto in Padua and Assisi a landmark in the history of art? It is the rhythmic composition, drawing the eye from every angle to the center of interest; the dignity of quiet motion, the soft and luminous coloring, the majestic flow of the narrative, the restraint of expression even in deep feeling, the grandeur of the calm that bathes these troubled scenes; and, now and then, the naturalistic portraiture of men, women, and children not as studied in past art but as seen and felt in the movement of life. These were the components of Giotto’s triumph over Byzantine rigidity and gloom, these were the secrets of his enduring influence. For”
― Will Durant, The Renaissance

“all evidence is a selection.”
― Will Durant, The Renaissance

“energy directed by a unifying will is almost the definition of genius.”
― Will Durant, The Renaissance

“yet there is much in them that can please the soul mature enough to surmount its sophistication:”
― Will Durant, The Renaissance

“the meditations of numberless inactive days; as when an author on an evening’s stroll, or lying sleepless in the night, molds the next day’s chapter, page, or verse, or rolls on the mind’s tongue some savory adjective or bewitching phrase.”
― Will Durant, The Renaissance

“he is always charming and never profound.”
― Will Durant, The Renaissance

“The political history of Florence, like that of modern states, was first the victory of the business class over the old landowning aristocracy (1293), and then the struggle of the “working class” to acquire political power.”
― Will Durant, The Renaissance