The Elizabethan World Picture Quotes

“Nothing exists without music; for the universe itself is said to have been framed by a kind of harmony of sounds, and the heaven itself revolves under the tones of that harmony.”
― Eustace Mandeville Wetenhall Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture: A Study of the Idea of Order in the Age of Shakespeare, Donne and Milton

“To know yourself was not egotism but the gateway to all virtue... It is the great condition of success in the spiritual warfare. For the chief enemy is within ourselves and if we do not understand him we cannot be victorious.”
― E.M.W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture: A Study of the Idea of Order in the Age of Shakespeare, Donne and Milton

“Our own age need not begin congratulating itself on its freedom from superstition till it defeats a more dangerous temptation to despair.”
― E.M.W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture: A Study of the Idea of Order in the Age of Shakespeare, Donne and Milton

“If we well consider man in the first estate that God created him, it is the chief and principal of God’s work, to the end that in him he might be glorified as in the most noblest and excellentest of all his creatures. But if we consider him in the estate of the general corruption spread all over the posterity of Adam, we shall see him nuzzled in sin, monstrous fearful deformed, subject to a thousand commodities, void of beattitude, unable ignorant variable and hypocrite.... But if we will consider afterward as being made all new by the immortal seed of God’s word ye shall see him restored not only in all his first honors and goods but much more greater; for there whereas sin is poured out for to let and hinder him, the grace of God is more abundantly poured out for to succor him, making him a new creature.”
― E.M.W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture: A Study of the Idea of Order in the Age of Shakespeare, Donne and Milton

“It not in our power not to be stirred mentally by our appetites but it is in our power to translate them or not to translate them into actions.”
― Eustace Mandeville Wetenhall Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture: A Study of the Idea of Order in the Age of Shakespeare, Donne and Milton

“there was another subject of understanding which, all were agreed, was paramount; and that was yourself. Here again was a peculiar human task: irrelevant to the angels because they knew themselves already and to the beasts because it was utterly beyond them. Far from being a sign of modesty, innocence, or intuitive virtue, not to know yourself was to resemble the beasts, if not in coarseness at least in deficiency of education. To know yourself was not egoism but the gateway to all virtue.”
― Eustace Mandeville Wetenhall Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture: A Study of the Idea of Order in the Age of Shakespeare, Donne and Milton