Renaissance Quotes - page 3

For a thousand years, the Bible was almost the only book people read, if they could read at all. The stories that were officially told and portrayed were Biblical and religious stories. That other fount of Western civilization as we know it today - the Greek classics - went largely unknown until the Renaissance. For our purposes, there's a noteworthy difference between these two literatures: in the Bible people are hardly ever said to be mad as such, whereas in Greek drama they go off their rockers with alarming frequency. It was the rediscovery of the classics that stimulated the long procession of literary madpeople of the past four hundred years. (Margaret Atwood)

I feel that I have within me a medieval soul, and I believe that the soul of my country is medieval, that it has perforce passed through the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution - learning from them, yes, but without allowing them to touch the soul, preserving the spiritual inheritance which has come down from what are called the Dark Ages. And Quixotism is simply the most desperate phase of the struggle between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which was the offering of the Middle Ages.

Miguel de Unamuno

The Sheikh has departed, may God have mercy on him, to his God as a martyr and we must continue on his path of jihad to expel the invaders from the land of Muslims and to purify it from injustice. Today, and thanks to God, America is not facing an individual or a group, but a rebelling nation, which has awoken from its sleep in a jihadist renaissance.

Ayman al-Zawahiri

Although German writers may sometimes have mispraised or overpraised their greatest mediaeval poet, it is certain that we find in Wolfram von Eschenbach qualities, which, in the thousand years between the Fall and the Renaissance of classical literature, can be found to anything like the same extent in only two known writers, the Italian Dante and the Englishman Langland; while if he is immensely Dante's inferior in poetical quality, he has at least one gift, humour, which Dante had not, and is far Langland's superior in variety and in romantic charm.

Wolfram von Eschenbach

I'm very moved by Renaissance music, but I still love to play hard rock - though only if it's sophisticated and has some thought behind it.

Ritchie Blackmore

The ways of thinking implanted by electronic culture are very different from those fostered by print culture. Since the Renaissance most methods and procedures have strongly tended towards stress on the visual organization of knowledge.

Marshall McLuhan

Renaissance Italy became a kind of Hollywood collection of sets of antiquity, and the new visual antiquarianism of the Renaissance provided an avenue to power for men of any class.

Marshall McLuhan

The reduction of the tactile qualities of life and language constitute the refinement sought in the Renaissance and repudiated now in the electronic age.

Marshall McLuhan

The "interface” of the Renaissance was the meeting of medieval pluralism and modern homogeneity and mechanism – a formula for blitz and metamorphosis.

Marshall McLuhan

Applied knowledge in the Renaissance had to take the form of translation of the auditory into visual terms, of the plastic into retinal form.

Marshall McLuhan

Until the June 1967 war I was completely caught up in the life of a young professor of English. Beginning in 1968, I started to think, write, and travel as someone who felt himself to be directly involved in the renaissance of Palestinian life and politics. (Edward Said)

In essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters.

John Fowles

But when the artist abandons visible appearance, as in Mondrian's black grids on white grounds filled with balancing rectangles of colour, many people feel left behind. And yet the rhythms of Mondrian are those of nature. The harmonies are those which guided proportion in classical buildings and Renaissance churches. Rothko's glowing maroon Seagram Murals at the Tate may, like Turner's late canvases, appear to be "of nothing" but in their brooding depth Rothko suggests another world. As one four year old child said of the Rothko room at the Tate "it makes me think of God."

Nicholas Serota

The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.

George Santayana

In Islam's golden age, so much progress was made that it became the basis of the European Renaissance. We Muslims have to change ourselves, that's the main difference. We can't keep blaming America or Israel for our misery.

Irshad Manji

We're worth a lot of dough. Whatever you see is antiques. This thing here. This is from - I don't remember exactly. I think it's the Renaissance or the Magna Carta or something. But that's where it's from.

Woody Allen

In Romanticism, unlike the Renaissance, Amazons retain their power. Rousseau wants it both ways. Idolizing women is natural and right, a cosmic law. On the other hand, male recessiveness is blamed on female coercion. Either way, sadomasochistic dominance and submission are inherent in Rousseausism from the start.

Camille Paglia

Happy in the time of Jesus were those who wept! Happy, now, are those who can laugh, because laughter is the attribute of man, as the great prophet of the Renaissance, Rabelais, said. Laughter is forbearance; laughter is philosophy. The heavens clear when they laugh, and the great secret of divine omnipotence resides in an eternal smile!

Eliphas Levi

I like things that are kind of eclectic, when one thing doesn't go with another. That's why I love Rome. The town itself is that way. It's where Fascist architecture meets classic Renaissance, where the ancient bangs up against the contemporary. It has a touch of everything. That's my style, and that's what my work is about.

Giambattista Valli

I am awaiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I did not know how to paint a mural. I did not know how to prepare the surface. There was nobody from the Renaissance around who could advise me, and I did the best I could. (Maurice Sendak)

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

Pierre Schaeffer

The dramatic modernization of the Asian economies ranks alongside the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution as one of the most important developments in economic history.

Lawrence Summers

We may affirm, then, that the main drift of the later Renaissance was away from a humanism that favored a free expansion toward a humanism that was in the highest degree disciplinary and selective.

Irving Babbitt

On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis. The split in the world is less terrible than the similarity of the disease plaguing its main sections.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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