Quotes & Sayings About Medici

As they say in Italy, Italians were eating with a knife and fork when the French were still eating each other. The Medici family had to bring their Tuscan cooks up there so they could make something edible. — Mario Batali

What I have dreamed in an hour is worth more than what you have done in four. — Lorenzo De' Medici

You'll fare beer without love. We Medici always do. As soon as I spoke, I regretted it. I'd remembered Papa Clement's phrase exactly, used it to the same horrid purpose. I saw her flinch, take a small step back. I wanted to console her, to somehow ease the harsh reality of what I'd said. But I could not. I would not lie to her nor pretend the task I set before her was anything other than what it was: an act of submission, which could entail the loss of her youthful dreams. — C.W. Gortner

I have been intrigued by Catherine de Medici and the legends surrounding her for a long time. — Susan Carroll

I make not therefore my head a grave, but a treasure, of knowledge; I intend no Monopoly, but a community, in learning; I study not for my own sake only, but for theirs that study not for themselves. — Thomas Browne

Together he [Girolamo Savonarola] and his archenemy Lorenzo [de' Medici] would have been the stuff of gargoyles. One could almost imagine the diptych in which their profiles confronted each other, their noses as powerful as their personalities. — Sarah Dunant

I, Hasan the son of Muhammad the weigh-master, I, Jean-Leon de Medici, circumcised at the hand of a barber and baptized at the hand of a pope, I am now called the African, but I am not from Africa, nor from Europe, nor from Arabia. I am also called the Granadan, the Fassi, the Zayyati, but I come from no country, from no city, no tribe. I am the son of the road, my country is the caravan, my life the most unexpected of voyages. — Amin Maalouf

The Medici made me and the Medici destroyed me. — Leonardo Da Vinci

Too much knowing is misery. — Lorenzo De' Medici

Sultan Mehmet had good relations with the Medici family and other powerful Italian clans, especially in Venice and Florence, and at his request, they sent him artists and craftsmen by the dozen. — Stephen Kinzer

Catherine de Medici brought her cooks to France when she married, and those cooks brought sherbet and custard and cream puffs, artichokes and onion soup, and the idea of roasting birds with oranges. As well as cooks, she brought embroidery and handkerchiefs, perfumes and lingerie, silverware and glassware and the idea that gathering around a table was something to be done thoughtfully. In essence, she brought being French to France. — Ashley Warlick

I really like Kickstarter because you don't have to be a Medici to fund the arts and sciences or to get behind a big idea or a person that sparks your imagination. It's a type of microfunding directed toward creators. — Lisa Gansky

I don't want to take the women into the city until I know how things stand.' ' I'll tell you precisely how they stand,' Nicolo bitterly replied. 'The absolute ruler of this city is a Medici. The Pope is a Medici. People round here say that probably God is a Medici and as for the Devil, he's definitely one, beyond any doubt. — Salman Rushdie

It is foolish for Rubens to show her simpering. They were clearly guilty and did her much sorrow. — Jack Gilbert

The Medici created and destroyed me. — Leonardo Da Vinci

I think it might be nice if there was a Cosimo de' Medici around today, offering commissions to the poor, but talented artists. — Mary Pope Osborne

When I was girl by Nilus stream
I watched the deserts stars arise;
My lover, he who dreamed the Sphinx,
Learned all his dreaming from eyes.
I bore in Greece a burning name,
And I have been in Italy
Madonna to a painter-lad,
And mistress to a Medici.
And have you heard (and I have heard)
Of puzzled men with decorous mien,
Who judged - the wench knew far too much -
And burnt her on the Salem green? — Adelaide Crapsey

The truth is, not one of is innocent. We all have sins to confess. — C.W. Gortner

Michelangelo felt ill. He asked himself if what he was feeling was fear. Yet he knew that it was something more, something in his experience akin to the sacking of the Medici palace, the deterioration
of Piero, an awareness of the senseless destructiveness that lay inherent in time and space, ready to lash out and destroy. — Irving Stone

I will say with Lorenzo de Medici that those who do not hope for another life are always dead to this one. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Love is a treacherous emotion. You will fare better without it. We Medici always have. — C.W. Gortner

They have a grand mausoleum in Florence, which they built to bury our Lord and Saviour and the Medici family in. — Mark Twain

Even French pilferage has not relegated Italian culinary genius to the darker corners of gastronomy. Marie de' Medici brought Italian cookery to France, where Gallic duplicity quickly undermined the integrity of good ingredients with unctuous sauces. The French will always confuse egregious decorative effects with creative integrity. They have a genius for appearances. Trompe l'oeil will do for a Frenchman, but not for an Italian. — Roland Delicio

Physicians attend to the business of physicians, and workmen handle the tools of workmen.
[Lat., Quod medicorum est
Promittunt medici, tractant fabrilia fabri.] — Horace

Lorenzo de' Medici seeks highly skilled, aesthetically oriented individual to conceive and implement several major public projects. You are a generalist with sound training in structural engineering, synthesis of pigments and Christian iconography. Some climbing involved — Michelangelo

Art is a barren route, of which glory is the oasis. — Henri Murger

No one else spoke to him as she did, with as much frankness and . . . could he call it affection? Yes, he decided, exasperated affection, but affection all the same. "Will you ever stop suspecting me of ulterior motives?" "Yes, when you stop harboring as many of them as a Medici pope." "Then whom will you suspect for fun?" he answered cheerfully. He usually enjoyed himself around people. Her company, however, he adored. — Sherry Thomas

The Confessions of Catherine de Medici is a dramatic, epic novel of an all-too-human woman whose strength and passion propelled her into the center of grand events. Meticulously-researched, this engrossing novel offers a fresh portrait of a queen who has too often been portrayed as a villain. Bravo Mr. Gortner! — Sandra Gulland

I already began to inspire the men with love. My breast began to take its right form, and such a breast! white, firm, and formed like that of the Venus de' Medici; my eyebrows were as black as jet, and as for my eyes, they darted flames and eclipsed the luster of the stars, as I was told by the poets of our part of the world. My maids, when they dressed and undressed me, used to fall into an ecstasy in viewing me before and behind; and all the men longed to be in their places. — Voltaire

Well, get the coffer out," said Tobie roundly. "You find his clean clothes and I'll cut his hair round his cap and wash his ears out. Then, when we get to the Palazzo Medici, you imitate his voice and I'll sit him on my knee and move his arms up and down. Where is the problem? — Dorothy Dunnett

I wish that death had spared me until your library had been complete. — Lorenzo De' Medici

There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts. The age of Pericles was also the age of Phidias. The age of Lorenzo de Medici was also the age of Leonardo da Vinci. The age Elizabeth also the age of Shakespeare. And the New Frontier for which I campaign in public life, can also be a New Frontier for American art. — John F. Kennedy

The average American worker enjoys amenities for which Croesus, Crassus, the Medici, and Louis XIV would have envied him. — Ludwig Von Mises

So far as female beauty is concerned, the Circassian women have no superiors. They have preserved in their mountain home the purity of the Grecian models, and still display the perfect physical loveliness, whose type has descended to us in the Venus de Medici. — Bayard Taylor

Visually Agincourt is a pre-Raphaelite, perhaps better a Medici Gallery print battle - a composition of strong verticals and horizontals and a conflict of rich dark reds and Lincoln greens against fishscale greys and arctic blues. — John Keegan

I admire most of all The Renaissance Man, and if it can be said without pretentiousness, I like to think of myself as one, at least in some small measure. Not a Michelangelo, mark you, but perhaps a poor man's Cellini or a road company Cosimo de' Medici ... the Renaissance Man did a number of things, many of them well, a few beautifully. He was no damned specialist. — Lucius Beebe

Doctors cure the more serious diseases with harsh remedies. Curtius Medici graviores morbos asperis remediis curant — Quintus Curtius Rufus

The kind of system Kickstarter uses has been used for hundreds of years. Unlike Medici-style patronage, where the richest people in town give large amounts of money, Kickstarter's system relies on the general public for funding projects, and rewards those backers. — Perry Chen

For a moment his rage was so great that he literally could not speak. The blood beat loudly in his ears. It was like getting a call from some twentieth-century Medici prince ... no portraits of my family with their warts showing, please, or back to the rabble you'll go. I subsidize no pictures but pretty pictures. — Stephen King