Marsilio Ficino quotes

Marsilio Ficino was an Italian philosopher, translator, and humanist, renowned for his role in the revival of Platonism during the Renaissance. As leader of the Florentine Platonic Academy, he contributed greatly to the spread of ancient Greek philosophy in Europe. He influenced generations of thinkers with his translations and commentaries on Plato’s works. Here are 14 of his quotes:

You are running to seek your friend. Let your feet run, but your mind need not.

Marsilio Ficino

Books that distribute things... with as daring a freedom as we use in dreams, put us on our feet again.

Marsilio Ficino

Artists in each of the arts seek after and care for nothing but love.

Marsilio Ficino

Who can wonder at the attractiveness... of the bar, for our ambitious young men, when the highest bribes of society are at the feet of the successful orator?

Marsilio Ficino

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

The soul exists partly in eternity and partly in time.

Marsilio Ficino

Saturn seems to have impressed the seal of melancholy on me from the beginning.

Marsilio Ficino

The people who have discovered something important in any of the more noble arts have principally done so when they have abandoned the body and taken refuge in the citadel of the soul.

Marsilio Ficino

The intellect is prompted by nature to comprehend the whole breadth of being. ... Under the concept of truth it knows all, and under the concept of the good it desires all.

Marsilio Ficino

The rational soul in a certain manner possesses the excellence of infinity and eternity. If this were not the case, it would never characteristically incline toward the infinite. Undoubtedly this is the reason that there are none among men who live contentedly on earth and are satisfied with merely temporal possessions.

Marsilio Ficino

The inquiry of the intellect never ceases until it finds that cause of which nothing is the cause but which is itself the cause of causes. This cause is none other than the boundless God. Similarly, the desire of the will is not satisfied by any good, as long as we believe that there is yet another beyond it. Therefore, the will is satisfied only by that one good beyond which there is no further good. What can this good be except the boundless God?

Marsilio Ficino

If someone asks us which of these is more perfect, intellect or sense, the intelligible or the sensible, we shall promise to answer promptly, if he will first give us an answer to the following question. You know, my inquiring friend, that there is some power in you which has a notion of each of these things-a notion, I say, of intellect itself and of sense, of the intelligible and the sensible. This is evident, for the same power which compares these to each other must at that time in a certain manner see both. Tell me, then, whether a power of this kind belongs to intellect or sense? ... Sense, as you yourself have shown, can perceive neither itself nor intellect and the objects of intellect; whereas intellect knows both. ... Therefore, intellect is not only more perfect than sense but is also, after perfection itself, in the highest degree perfect.

Marsilio Ficino