Renaissance Quotes

1. "...he was one of the great intellectuals of the 1940s who completedtheir higher studies in the West and returned to their country toapply what they had learned there—lock, stock, and barrel—withinEgyptian academia. For people like them, "progress" and "the West"were virtually synonymous, with all that that entailed by way of positiveand negative behavior. They all had the same reverence for thegreat Western values—democracy, freedom, justice, hard work, andequality. At the same time, they had the same ignorance of the nation'sheritage and contempt for its customs and traditions, which they consideredshackles pulling us toward Backwardness from which it wasour duty to free ourselves so that the Renaissance could be achieved."
Author: Alaa Al Aswany

2. "The medieval period based its scriptural exegesis upon the Vulgate translation of the Bible. There was no authorized version of this text, despite the clear need for a standardized text that had been carefully checked against its Hebrew and Greek originals. A number of versions of the text were in circulation, their divergences generally being overlooked. It was not until 1592 than an 'official' version of the text was produced by the church authorities, sensitive to the challenges to the authority of the Vulgate by Renaissance humanist scholars and Protestant theologians."
Author: Alister E. McGrath

3. "Every renaissance comes to the world with a cry, the cry of the human spirit to be free."
Author: Anne Sullivan

4. "The Renaissance is studded by the names of the artists and architects, with their creations recorded as great historical events."
Author: Arthur Erickson

5. "A Deap Vally renaissance is going to begin next year and will be our focus for the start of 2013. They will blow the cobwebs off a music scene that has become just a little bit stale."
Author: Ben Lovett

6. "The word Renaissance helps to impose a factitious unity on all the untidy and heterogeneous events which are going on in those centuries as in any others. Thus the "imaginary entity" creeps in. Renaissance becomes the name for some character or quality supposed to be immanent in all events, and collects very serious emotional overtones in the process. Then as every attempt to define this mysterious character or quality turns out to uncover all sorts of things that were there before the chosen period, a curious procedure is adopted. Instead of admitting that our definition has broken down, we adopt the desperate expedient that "the Renaissance" must have begun earlier than we had thought. (55)"
Author: C.S. Lewis

7. "Every last minute of my life has been preordained and I'm sick and tired of it.How this feels is I'm just another task in God's daily planner: the Italian Renaissance penciled in for right after the Dark Ages....The Information Age is scheduled immediately after the Industrial Revolution. Then the Postmodern Era, then the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Famine. Check. Pestilence. Check. War. Check. Death. Check. And between the big events, the earthquakes and the tidal waves, God's got me squeezed in for a cameo appearance. Then maybe in thirty years, or maybe next year, God's daily planner has me finished."
Author: Chuck Palahniuk

8. "Keep in my mind my dad didn't become a huge, huge mega actor until I was halfway through high school - so right around the time he's going through his big renaissance is right when I'm starting to do my high school revolting."
Author: Colin Hanks

9. "Normally, when you challenge the conventional wisdom—that the current economic and political system is the only possible one—the first reaction you are likely to get is a demand for a detailed architectural blueprint of how an alternative system would work, down to the nature of its financial instruments, energy supplies, and policies of sewer maintenance. Next, you are likely to be asked for a detailed program of how this system will be brought into existence. Historically, this is ridiculous. When has social change ever happened according to someone's blueprint? It's not as if a small circle of visionaries in Renaissance Florence conceived of something they called "capitalism," figured out the details of how the stock exchange and factories would someday work, and then put in place a program to bring their visions into reality. In fact, the idea is so absurd we might well ask ourselves how it ever occurred to us to imagine this is how change happens to begin."
Author: David Graeber

10. "Actually I like the idea of being a Renaissance hack. If tombstones were still in style, I would want to have the two words chiseled right under my name."
Author: Dennis Flanagan

11. "Our enthusiasm for digital technology about which we have little understanding and over which we have little control leads us not toward greater agency, but toward less...We have surrendered the unfolding of a new technological age to a small elite who have seized the capability on offer. But while Renaissance kings maintained their monopoly over the printing press by force, today's elite is depending on little more than our own disinterest."
Author: Douglas Rushkoff

12. "Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal."
Author: E. O. Wilson

13. "Mr. Herriton, don't – please, Mr. Herriton – a dentist. His father's a dentist." Philip gave a cry of personal disgust and pain. He shuddered all over, and edged away from his companion. A dentist! A dentist at Monteriano. A dentist in fairyland! False teeth and laughing gas and the tilting chair at a place which knew the Etruscan League, and the Pax Romana, and Alaric himself, and the Countess Matilda, and the Middle Ages, all fighting and holiness, and the Renaissance, all fighting and beauty! He thought of Lilia no longer. He was anxious for himself: he feared that Romance might die."
Author: E.M. Forster

14. "Nobody can understand the greatness of the thirteenth century, who does not realize that it was a great growth of new things produced by a living thing. In that sense it was really bolder and freer than what we call the renaissance, which was a resurrection of old things discovered in a dead thing... and the Gospel according to St. Thomas... was a new thrust like the titanic thrust of Gothic engineering; and its strength was in a God that makes all things new."
Author: G.K. Chesterton

15. "The rise of the dramas in the thirteenth century, and the rise of the great novels in a later period, together with their frank glorification of love and the joys of life, may be called the Third Renaissance."
Author: Hu Shih

16. "New needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements... the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture."
Author: Jackson Pollock

17. "... in fact any good mind properly taught can think like Euclid and like Walt Whitman. The Renaissance, as we saw, was full of such minds, equally competent as poet and as engineers. The modern notion of "the two cultures," incompatible under one skull, comes solely from the proliferation of specialties in science; but these also divide scientists into groups that do not understand one another, the cause being the sheer mass of detail and the diverse terminologies. In essence the human mind remains one, not 2 or 60 different organs."
Author: Jacques Barzun

18. "Jimmie would forever be the Renaissance humanist, bearing his faith and optimism like a white light inside a chalice."
Author: James Lee Burke

19. "First there was Greek civilization. Then there was the Renaissance. Now we're entering the Age of the Ass."
Author: Jean Luc Godard

20. "From 1940 to the present, the art world - and particularly Los Angeles - has undergone a transformation not unlike the Italian Renaissance."
Author: Jeffrey Deitch

21. "In his 1923 review of James Joyce Ulysses, T. S. Eliot focused on one of his generation's recurrent anxieties--the idea that art might be impossible in the twentieth century. The reasons that art seemed impossible are many and complex, but they were all related to the collapse of ways of knowing that had served the Western mind at least since the Renaissance and that had received canonical formulation in the seventeenth century in the science of Newton and the philosophy of Descartes. In both science and philosophy, the crisis was essentially epistemological; that is, it was related to radical uncertainty about how we know what we know about the real world. This crisis, disorienting even to specialists, was at once a cause of despair and an incentive for innovation in the arts."
Author: Jewel Spears Brooker

22. "I only know about a few things, but I am quite good at bluffing. There are a whole range of subjects, including the Renaissance, which I am prepared to sound expert on."
Author: Jools Holland

23. "As the class went through the Greeks and the Romans and the Renaissance painters, (who were easy enough to remember if you'd ever seen Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) there was more dick on display than in a locker room."
Author: K.A. Mitchell

24. "In the early twelfth century century the Virgin had been the supreme protectress of civilisation. She had taught a race of tough and ruthless barbarians the virtues of tenderness and compassion. The great cathedrals of the Middle Ages were her dwelling places upon earth. In the Renaissance, while remaining the Queen of Heaven, she became also the human mother in whom everyone could recognise qualities of warmth and love and approachability...The stabilising, comprehensive religions of the world, the religions which penetrate to every part of a man's being--in Egypt, India or China--gave the female principle of creation at least as much importance as the male, and wouldn't have taken seriously a philosophy that failed to include them both...It's a curious fact that theall-male religions have produced no religious imagery--in most cases have positively forbidden it. The great religious art of the world is deeply involved with the female principle."
Author: Kenneth Clark

25. "I am awaitingperpetually and forevera renaissance of wonder"
Author: Lawrence Ferlinghetti

26. "Except Caitlyn. High school dating, drill team, school spirit—it all seemed silly to her. Why did it feel like high school was crushing her soul? Shehad nothing concrete she could point to. All she knew was that she didn't belong here.She preferred old, used clothes to new ones; her iPod was full of classical music; and photos of castles and reproductions of old European artcovered her bedroom walls, including a Renaissance painting of a young girl in white, named Bia. It should have been pop singers on her wall, ormovie stars"
Author: Lisa Cach

27. "Architecture traditionally has been the slowest of art forms. It was not unusual for great cathedrals to take centuries to complete, with stylistic changes from Romanesque to Gothic or Renaissance to Baroque as common as the addition of chapels or spires. But because the function remained the same, the form could be flexible and its growth organic."
Author: Martin Filler

28. "Right now, scientists are in exactly the same position as Renaissance painters, commissioned to make the portrait the patron wants done, And if they are smart, they'll make sure their work subtly flatters the patron. Not overtly. Subtly."
Author: Michael Crichton

29. "After I'd been in college for a couple years I'd read Shakespeare and Frost and Chaucer and the poets of the Harlem Renaissance. I'd come to appreciate how gorgeous the English language could be. But most fantasy novels didn't seem to make the effort."
Author: Patrick Rothfuss

30. "Medical research in the twentieth century mostly takes place in the lab; in the Renaissance, though, researchers went first and foremost to the library to see what the ancients had said."
Author: Peter Lewis Allen

31. "This much should be clear by now: the term 'renaissance' can only remain fruitful and demanding as long as it refers to a far-reaching idea: that it is the fate of Europeans to develop life and forms of life according to and alongside the Christian definitions of life and forms of life."
Author: Peter Sloterdijk

32. "The only hope is that our civilization will collapse at a certain point, as always happens in history. Then, out of barbarity, a renaissance."
Author: Pierre Schaeffer

33. "I feel, sometimes, as the renaissance man must have felt in finding new riches at every point and in the certainty that unexplored areas of knowledge and experience await at every turn."
Author: Polykarp Kusch

34. "All Renaissance drama, especially the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare, is profoundly concerned with shifting power relations within society. The individual was a new force in relation to the state. The threat of rebellion, of the overturning of established order, was forcefully brought home to the Elizabethan public by the revolt of the Earl of Essex, once the Queen's favourite. The contemporary debate questioned the relationship between individual life, the power and authority of the state, and the establishing of moral absolutes. Where mediaeval drama was largely used as a means of showing God's designs, drama in Renaissance England focuses on man, and becomes a way of exploring his weaknesses, depravities, flaws - and qualities."
Author: Ronald Carter

35. "No single English intellectual symbolises the idea of Renaissance man more than Bacon. He wrote on aspects of law, science, history, government, politics, ethics, religion and colonialism, as well as gardens, parents, children and health.The key work for appreciating the width of his interests is his Essays, originally published in 1597, and enlarged twice before his death. These meditations, often only a page long, give a remarkable insight into the thought of the period."
Author: Ronald Carter

36. "The Renaissance did not break completely with mediaeval history and values. Sir Philip Sidney is often considered the model of the perfect Renaissance gentleman. He embodied the mediaeval virtues of the knight (the noble warrior), the lover (the man of passion), and the scholar (the man of learning). His death in 1586, after the Battle of Zutphen, sacrificing the last of his water supply to a wounded soldier, made him a hero. His great sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella is one of the key texts of the time, distilling the author's virtues and beliefs into the first of the Renaissance love masterpieces. His other great work, Arcadia, is a prose romance interspersed with many poems and songs."
Author: Ronald Carter

37. "There is a remarkable degree of consistency in the way mediaeval literature affirms humanity. With all its faults, humanity emerges as more realistic than heavenly ideals.......Because the mediaeval period is seen from our own times as historically distant, 'behind' the Renaissance with all the changes which that period brought, it has been undervalued for its own debates, developments and changes. The fact that mediaeval times have been revisited, re-imagined and rewritten, especially in the Romantic period, has tended to compound the ideas of difference and distance between this age and what came after. But in many ways the mediaeval period presages the issues and concerns of the Renaissance period and prepares the way for what was to come."
Author: Ronald Carter

38. "Pearl introduces an original story, in a form which was to become one of the most frequent in mediaeval literature, the dream-vision. Authors like Chaucer and Langland use this form, in which the narrator describes another world - usually a heavenly paradise - which is compared with the earthly human world. In Pearl, the narrator sees his daughter who died in infancy, 'the ground of all my bliss'. She now has a kind of perfect knowledge, which her father can never comprehend. The whole poem underlines the divide between human comprehension and perfection; these lines show the gap between possible perfection and fallen humanity which, thematically, anticipate many literary examinations of man's fall, the most well known being Milton's late Renaissance epic, Paradise Lost."
Author: Ronald Carter

39. "But it has been a long process because I'm kind of a renaissance person."
Author: Ronnie Montrose

40. "The anti-religious modernism which now threatens Islam and Muslims everywhere can be fully understood only by understanding the religion of the civilization in whose bosom modernism first developed, against which it rebelled, and whose tenets it has been challenging through constant battle since the birth of the modern world in the Renaissance."
Author: Seyyed Hossein Nasr

41. "From the Renaissance until today, Christianity, and also to some extent Judaism, in the West have had to carry out a constant battle against ideologies, philosophies, institutions and practices which are secular in nature and which challenge the authority of religion and in fact its very validity and legitimacy. These challenges to religion have varied from political ideas which are based on secularism to the denial of the religious foundation of morality and the philosophical denial of the reality of God and of the after life or of revelation and sacred scripture. The history of the West has been marked during the last few centuries by a constant battle between the forces of religion and secularism and in fact the gaining of the upper hand by secularism and consequently the denial of the reality of religion and its pertinence to various domains of life."
Author: Seyyed Hossein Nasr

42. "The coding was anachronistic, kind of like bokeh in a renaissance painting."
Author: Sorin Suciu

43. "What we need in America is a renaissance. We need to go forward by going backward."
Author: Stanley Crouch

44. "Every mode of violent death available to Renaissance man, including a lye pit, land mines, a trained falcon with envenom'd talons, is employed. It plays, as Metzger remarked later, like a Road Runner cartoon in blank verse"
Author: Thomas Pynchon

45. "The 'Renaissance' West Butchered the Rest.If I had to choose between an erudite Aristotle and an unknown ‘soulless' black slave I would choose the latter. The ascendancy of the West was on a heap of bodies of slaves and trampled humanity through colonization"
Author: Viktor Vijay Kumar

46. "Since the Renaissance, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Mozart, and a host of others have shown that this religious dimension can be experienced and communicated apart from any religious context. But that is no reason for closing my heart to Job's cry, or to Jeremiah's, or to the Second Isaiah. I do not read them as mere literature; rather, I read Sophocles and Shakespeare with all my being, too."
Author: Walter Kaufmann

47. "The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by what it designed then by what it achieved."
Author: Walter Pater

48. "..we have become wealthy, and wealth is the prelude to art. In every country where centuries of physical effort have accumulated the means for luxury and leisure, culture has followed as naturally as vegetation grows in a rich and watered soil. To have become wealthy was the first necessity; a people too must live before it can philosophize. No doubt we have grown faster than nations usually have grown; and the disorder of our souls is due to the rapidity of our development. We are like youths disturbed and unbalanced, for a time, by the sudden growth and experiences of puberty. But soon our maturity will come; our minds will catch up with our bodies, our culture with our possessions. Perhaps there are greater souls than Shakespeare's, and greater minds than Plato's, waiting to be born. When we have learned to reverence liberty as well as wealth, we too shall have our Renaissance."
Author: Will Durant

49. "Senegal needs a renaissance."
Author: Youssou N'Dour

50. "I have known many true connoisseurs, with excellent tastes that range across the humanities and the culinary arts--and they never fail to have a fatal effect on my self-esteem. When I find myself sitting at dinner next to someone who knows just as much about novels as I do but has somehow also found the mental space to adore and be knowledgeable about the opera, have strong opinions about the relative rankings of Renaissance painters, an encyclopedic knowledge of the English civil war, of French wines--I feel an anxiety that nudges beyond the envious into the existential. How did she find the time?"
Author: Zadie Smith

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