Renaissance Italy Quotes & Sayings

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

Don't leave Christmas in the abstract. Your sin. Your conflict with the Devil. Your victory. He came for this. — John Piper

The Renaissance of Europe did not take place in the 15th century. Rather it began when Europe learned from the culture of the Arabs. The cradle of European awakening is not Italy. It is the Muslim Spain. — Robert Briffault

Andy noticed my disposition, rushed over and wrapped his arms round me. This provided Mario the perfect opportunity to use my Valet and me as an example for his monumental demonstration, "While relationships in ancient Greece involved boys from 12 to about 17 or 18, in Renaissance Italy, boys were typically between 14 and 19." He presented us to the cheering crowd as if we were in a forum. — Young

If Broadway shows charge preview prices while the cast is in dress rehearsal, why should restaurants charge full price when their dining room and kitchen staffs are still practicing? — Marian Burros

There's no big splashy renaissance in Italian films. We have good young actors and directors. What we lack are screenwriters. It's hard to write about Italy. — Valeria Golino

If God rewarded the righteous immediately, we would soon be engaged in business, not godliness ... we would be pursuing not piety,but profit. — Clement Of Alexandria

Too much knowing is misery. — Lorenzo De' Medici

Tired are my feet, that felt today the pavement;
Tired are my ears, that heard of tragic things-
Tired are my eyes, that saw so much enslavement;
Only my voice is not too tired. It sings. — Aaron Kramer

The brutalities of wolves are not for enjoyment and pleasure; they are all just for the survival. — M.F. Moonzajer

In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. — Yanko Tsvetkov

This political disorder found expression in Machiavelli Prince. In the absence of any guiding principle, politics becomes a naked struggle for power; The Prince gives shrewd advice as to how to play this game successfully. What had happened in the great age of Greece happened again in Renaissance Italy: traditional moral restraints disappeared, because they were seen to be associated with superstition; the liberation from fetters made individuals energetic and creative, producing a rare florescence of genius; but the anarchy and treachery which inevitably resulted from the decay of morals made Italians collectively impotent, and they fell, like the Greeks, under the domination of nations less civilized than themselves but not so destitute of social cohesion. — Bertrand Russell

The importance of selecting music and sequencing songs - making one song merge into another song. In retrospect, those are the most important lessons I got from DJs. — Hans-Peter Lindstrom

John Milton has, since his own lifetime, always been one of the major figures in English literature, but his reputation has changed constantly. He has been seen as a political opportunist, an advocate of 'immorality' (he wrote in favour of divorce and married three times), an over-serious classicist, and an arrogant believer in his own greatness as a poet. He was all these things. But, above all, Milton's was the last great liberal intelligence of the English Renaissance. The values expressed in all his works are the values of tolerance, freedom and self-determination, expressed by Shakespeare, Hooker and Donne. The basis of his aesthetic studies was classical, but the modernity of his intellectual interests can be seen in the fact that he went to Italy (in the late 1630s) where he met the astronomer Galileo, who had been condemned as a heretic by the Catholic church for saying the earth moved around the sun. — Ronald Carter

Ah, mais c'est Anglais ca," he murmured, "everything in black and white, everything clear cut and well defined. But life, it is not like that, Mademoiselle. There are things that are not yet, but which cast their shadow before. — Agatha Christie

At the end of the 1400s, the world changed. Two key dates can mark the beginning of modern times. In 1485, the Wars of the Roses came to an end, and, following the invention of printing, William Caxton issued the first imaginative book to be published in England - Sir Thomas Malory's retelling of the Arthurian legends as Le Morte D'Arthur. In 1492, Christopher Columbus's voyage to the Americas opened European eyes to the existence of the New World. New worlds, both geographical and spiritual, are the key to the Renaissance, the 'rebirth' of learning and culture, which reached its peak in Italy in the early sixteenth century and in Britain during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, from 1558 to 1603. — Ronald Carter

Love is the linchpin that connects the material world with higher levels of existence. — Julianne Davidow

The pride taken by the Italians in their gifted women is among the most important facts in the history of their Renaissance. — Walter Shaw Sparrow

The soul exists partly in eternity and partly in time. — Marsilio Ficino

Success is not final, failure is not fatal. It is the courage to carry on that counts.
Winston Churchill — H.A. Corby

Not only were science and religion compatible, they were inseparable
the rise of science was achieved by deeply religious Christian scholars. — Rodney Stark

All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or Ancient Egypt, is re-assimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonize past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality, in attractive and instantly appealing forms. — J.G. Ballard

At the Uffizi, I experienced a moment that was touching, painful, and almost embarrassing. We stopped in front of the famous Botticelli painting, The Birth of Venus. I gazed wistfully at her incomparably lovely, yet, as Vasari described, oddly distorted form emerging from the waves in a seashell, her long red-golden tresses blown by Zephyrs. No woman ever had so elongated a neck or such sinuous limbs. Botticelli contorted, and some might say deformed, the human shape to give us a glimpse of the sublime. — Gary Inbinder

Atop a Ferris wheel, Orson Welles told Joseph Cotten how Italy's thirty years of war and terror and bloodshed had produced the Renaissance and Michelangelo, and how Switzerland's five hundred years of democracy and peace had produced, goddamn, only the cuckoo clock. — Kevin Wilson

The filaments that connect the qualities and dynamics "inside" prisons to those on the "outside" remind those of us on the outside (or, as one former prisoner said to me, "in the outer prison") that, in spite of real differences, in a profound sense "the prisons are us." Even the most brutal among the imprisoned, as James Gilligan argues in his book Violence (where he draws on years of experience as a prison psychologist in a maximum security facility for violent offenders) are people who are confined there often because of their experience of brutality and terror in home and family, these latter embedded often in the structures of violence that are social, political, and economic in nature. — Mark Lewis Taylor

Terrible errors are rarely made all at once. Usually they are performed one small misstep at a time. — A. Lee Martinez

Ambivalence and contradiction energize nearly every figure Michaelangelo carved, from the adolescent Madonna of the Stairs onward...But the four allegories atop the sarcophagi raise them to a symphonic crescendo. Each is a battleground of conflicting emotions and motives, in which will and paralysis battle for supremacy. — Eric Scigliano

Temple grimaced, and twitched, and fidgeted with a frayed sleeve. 'What can we do, though?' 'Only follow our consciences.' Temple rounded on him angrily. 'For a mercenary you talk a lot about conscience!' 'Why concern yourself unless yours bothers you?' 'As far as I can tell, you're still taking Cosca's money!' 'If I stopped, would you?' Temple opened his mouth, then soundlessly shut it and scowled off at the horizon, picking at his sleeve, and picking, and picking. — Joe Abercrombie

I am an actress - I am paid to verbalize other people's words, not create my own. — Judy Greer

Peasant families ate pork, beef, or game only a few times a year; fowls and eggs were eaten far more often. Milk, butter, and hard cheeses were too expensive for the average peasant. As for vegetables, the most common were cabbage and watercress. Wild carrots were also popular in some places. Parsnips became widespread by the sixteenth century, and German writings from the mid-1500s indicate that beet roots were a preferred food there. Rutabagas were developed during the Middle Ages by crossing turnips with cabbage, and monastic gardens were known for their asparagus and artichokes. However, as a New World vegetable, the potato was not introduced into Europe until the late 1500s or early 1600s, and for a long time it was thought to be merely a decorative plant.

"Most people ate only two meals a day. In most places, water was not the normal beverage. In Italy and France people drank wine, in Germany and England ale or beer. — Patricia D. Netzley

Put yourself in the position of an up-and-coming artist living in early-sixteenth-century Italy. Now imagine trying to distinguish yourself from the other artists living in your town: Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, or Titian. Is it any wonder that the Italian High Renaissance lasted only 30 years? — Jerry Saltz

To us to-day this period of transition, with its mediaeval mixture of commerce, religion, and war, of emotion and logic, of admiration for St. Augustine and belief in the infallibility of Aristotle, looks extremely odd. We forget that our generation may be in danger of similar criticism. Odd or not, this was the state of Italy in the period preceding that great burst of the arts and intellectual life known as the Renaissance. FOOTNOTES: — Henry Dwight Sedgwick