Top 100 Quotes About Renaissance
#1. Aquinas brought an Aristotelian view of reason back into European culture, and lighted the way toward the Renaissance.
Ayn Rand
#2. 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
#3. English has been this vacuum cleaner of a language, because of its history meeting up with the Romans and then the Danes, the Vikings and then the French and then the Renaissance with all the Latin and Greek and Hebrew in the background.
David Crystal
#4. When you read Boethius and some of the Renaissance philosophers, they talk a lot about the other spheres. There's a music of the spheres. There's a music that's actually in the universe, they believed, that's out there in different dimensions.
Frederick Lenz
#5. do they not tell us more of the real spirit of the Italian Renaissance, of the dream of Savonarola and of the sin of Borgia, than all the brawling boors and cooking women of Dutch art can teach us of the real spirit of the history of Holland?
Oscar Wilde
#6. It [the Harlem Renaissance] was a time of black individualism, a time marked by a vast array of characters whose uniqueness challenged the traditional inability of white Americans to differentiate between blacks.
Clement Alexander Price
#7. As they clean the walls with wet cloths and sponges, they uncover the earlier paints, most prevalent a stark blue that must have been inspired by Mary's blue robes. Renaissance painters could get that rare color only from ground lapis lazuli brought from quarries in what is now Afghanistan.
Frances Mayes
#8. For Guy Davenport--whom he told me John Barth once called the last modernist--modernism is 'a renaissance of the archaic'.
Lance Olsen
#9. For anyone who understood the essence of modernism based on and originating in the secularizing and humanistic tendencies of the European Renaissance, it was easy to detect the confrontation that was already taking place between traditional and modern elements in the Islamic world.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
#10. 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
#11. A mind so dark it made one wonder if the Renaissance had ever really taken place.
John Berryman
#12. If we believe in the rebirth of our civilization ... then clearly this renaissance must begin in the chambers of our own hearts ... We cannot wait for society to change, or for our institutions to be renewed. We, as individuals, must assume responsibility for our own personal transformation.
Georg Feuerstein
#14. Jonah peered critically up at the Renaissance masterpiece. "Man, those copies don't due it justice. This one's the truth!"
"Only a Janus," groaned Hamilton.
Gordon Korman
#15. (forks did not appear until the late fourteenth century and weren't commonly used until the Renaissance).
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#16. In essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters.
John Fowles
#17. The Renaissance was a time of mercenary soldiers, ours is a time of mercenary labor.
Eric Hoffer
#19. Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu , virtue free of moral acid).
Friedrich Nietzsche
#20. Small pictures since the Renaissance are like novels; large pictures are like dramas in which one participates in a direct way.
Mark Rothko
#21. People like to make fun of the fans who camp out but people have renaissance fairs; people do Civil War re-enactments; people do what they like. I'm tired of hearing people rage on the fans. If you don't like 'Twilight,' don't buy a ticket.
Anna Kendrick
#22. 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.
Jackson Pollock
#23. The renaissance knew of strange manners of poisoning - poisoning by a helmet and by a lighted torch, by an embroidered glove and a jeweled fan, by a gilded pomander and by an amber chain. Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book.
Oscar Wilde
#24. Florence is perhaps best known for being the seat of Renaissance art, and rightly so: A greatest-hits collection of artists passed through its streets - Michelangelo, Leonardo, Botticelli, and Brunelleschi among them.
Hanya Yanagihara
#25. 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.
Peter Lewis Allen
#26. I am here before you tonight to dedicate this administration to bringing a new renaissance of neighborhood life and community spirit, a renewal of confidence in the future of our city and a revival of opportunity for all Chicago.
Jane Byrne
#27. The story of Christian reformation, revival, and renaissance underscores that the darkest hour is often just before the dawn, so we should always be people of hope and prayer, not gloom and defeatism. God the Holy Spirit can turn the situation around in five minutes.
Os Guinness
#28. Just as bad money drives out good, the broad, deep, inclusive renaissance mind is being driven out by the narrow, specialized, technical mind.
Dee Hock
#29. 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.
Jools Holland
#30. A glorious place, a glorious age, I tell you! A very Neon renaissance - And the myths that actually touched you at that time - not Hercules, Orpheus, Ulysses and Aeneas - but Superman, Captain Marvel, and Batman.
Tom Wolfe
#31. I want to be a Renaissance Woman. I want to paint, and I want to write, and I want to act, and I just want to do everything.
Emma Watson
#32. The true Renaissance person is endowed with panoramic attention.... The habit of noticing the ensemble of everything and its constituent parts is a matter of will, not of innate aptitude. It involves the conscious noticing of things and the gaps that separate and connect them.
Christy Wampole
#33. I watched in silence as the parts of Matthew I knew and loved - the poet and the scientist, the warrior and the spy, the Renaissance prince and the father - fell away until only the darkest, most forbidding part of him remained. He was only the assassin now. But he was still the man I loved.
Deborah Harkness
#34. 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.
Peter Sloterdijk
#35. It was always something I knew I was capable of and from an early age my mother was involved in the film industry. She used to work at a production company. So I was exposed to a renaissance period of films in New Zealand back in the early 80's.
Karl Urban
#36. The coding was anachronistic, kind of like bokeh in a renaissance painting.
Sorin Suciu
#37. We have a great obligation not only to look after our own interests, but to engage and to make sure that this meeting is at the beginning of a renaissance of trust.
Klaus Schwab
#38. First there was Greek civilization. Then there was the Renaissance. Now we're entering the Age of the Ass.
Jean-Luc Godard
#39. Two factors explain our success. One, MIT's renaissance after World War II as a federally supported research resource. Two, the mathematical revolution in macro- and micro-economic theory and statistics. This was overdue and inevitable, MIT was the logical place for it to flourish.
Paul Samuelson
#40. [T]he more the public is confused, the easier it falls prey to doctrines of pseudo-science which may at some future date recieve the backing of politically powerful groups [ ... ]a renaissance of German quasi-science paralleled the rise of Hitler.
Martin Gardner
#41. There is a fascination with violence and power in all modernism, and I sort of saw classic modernism as being more similar to Wyndham Lewis than to the Renaissance. It's not about flow and the presence of humanism and all those things.
John Currin
#42. Warhol turned to photographs of stars, as the Renaissance turned to antiquities, to find images of gods.
David Sylvester
#43. As Maya Angelou, American author, poet, and self-described Renaissance Woman, wrote, Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.
L.R. Knost
#44. Muslims all over the world are looking with high expectations toward the ummah community in the United States and Canada. Its dynamism, fresh approach, enlightened scholarship and sheer growth is their hope for an Islamic renaissance worldwide.
Murad Wilfried Hofmann
#45. I'm a child of the Disney Renaissance, so the new classics are near and dear. I suppose this is a legend more than a fairy tale, but 'Mulan' is easily my favorite. Not only is it a fun, action-packed, beautiful movie, but it's so important for young girls to have.
Victoria Aveyard
#46. When you get a new worldview you get a new world. It's like the shift from medieval Christianity to the Renaissance and enlightenment.
Barbara Marx Hubbard
#47. My favorite alphabet is 'R'. It has got: Revenge, Racism, Reincarnation, Renaissance, Revival and Resurgence.
Bhavik Sarkhedi
#48. Christopher Lynch has made the best and the first careful translation of Machiavelli's Art of War. With useful notes, an excellent introduction, an interpretive essay, glossary, and index, it is a treasure for readers of military history and Renaissance thought as well as for lovers of Machiavelli.
Harvey Mansfield
#49. Because my master was this renaissance man, I wasn't just learning a fighting style, I was learning how kung fu permeates all aspects of life, from eating to healthy living to mental state.
Daniel Wu
#50. We will continue to count on your unwavering support and commitment to working with leaders of our continent in bringing about the desired renaissance of Africa.
Thabo Mbeki
#51. I certainly think there are things that impressed me as a child about the church. The smells and the sounds and the pagaentry of it remained with me. The aesthetic I really love. I think a lot of my sense of melody comes from singing those hymns and doing the renaissance music and stuff.
Jonathan Meiburg
#52. Implosion is no invention in the conventional sense, but rather the renaissance of ancient knowledge, lost over the course of time.
Viktor Schauberger
#53. Jefferson was among the greatest men who had ever lived, a Renaissance figure who was formidable without seeming overbearing, sparkling without being showy, winning without appearing cloying.
Jon Meacham
#54. If you're a guest [at my $113 million house], you'll be able to call up on screens throughout the house almost any image you like - presidential portraits, reproductions of High Renaissance paintings, pictures of sunsets, airplanes, skiers in the Andes, a rare French stamp, the Beatles in 1965.
Bill Gates
#55. It seems to me that the arts are rather flourishing. There's an awful lot of bad art about because of this, but that's true of every great era. I'm sure there was a lot dreadful art in the Renaissance that we fortunately don't see today.
Louis Auchincloss
#56. I came from a white middle class neighborhood. Was I expected to go back there and teach the woman next door about Renaissance sonnets? The embarrassing truth of the matter was that I was being chosen because Yale University had some peculiar idea about what my skin color or ethnicity signified.
Richard Rodriguez
#57. Last time I checked, there were no Americans at all in Renaissance art.
Camille Paglia
#58. Since the Renaissance, a concept called 'progress' has been baked into our society. Progress - founded on an accumulation of knowledge through experience (and in the case of science, through experiment). To build on the past rather than endlessly relive it. That's what separates us from the beasts.
Seth Shostak
#59. The golden era of the golden number was the Italian renaissance. The expression divine proportion was coined by the great mathematician Luca Pacioli in his book 'De divina proportione', written in 1509.
Midhat Gazale
#60. December 21, 2012 represents a unique opportunity for renaissance, renewal and reinvention that people have waited for for centuries.
Alberto Villoldo
#61. There were no mail-order catalogues in 1492. Marco Polo's journal was the wish book of Renaissance Europe. Then, Columbus sailed the ocean blue and landed in Sears' basement. Despite all the Indians on the escalator, Columbus' visit came to be known as a discovery.
Tom Robbins
#62. Fencing is a funny sport. Competitive fencing is not really very applicable to the stage world unless you're fighting with a rapier during the Renaissance, you know?
Kris Holden-Ried
#63. (on asparagus) Europeans of the Renaissance swore by it as an aphrodisiac, and the church banned it from nunneries.
Barbara Kingsolver
#64. The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
George Santayana
#65. Puritanism, he said, was a reaction to the loss of moral fiber that accompanied the Renaissance.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#66. Now there is in a way a renaissance of modern dance - suddenly, it is more respected and discovered.
Mikhail Baryshnikov
#67. I love television. I think we're in a renaissance of epic proportion in television now.
Dennis Lehane
#68. I went into Harvard one way and came out a different person ... It's the air at Harvard; it's like a Renaissance court.
Erich Segal
#69. 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
Viktor Vijay Kumar
#70. Artists with a capital 'A' are at ease working in all areas of art, whether it is a contemporary abstract painting or work requiring methods and techniques of the Renaissance Masters.
Igor Babailov
#72. What we need in America is a renaissance. We need to go forward by going backward.
Stanley Crouch
#73. I'm finishing my Ph.D. in Italian Renaissance history.
Peter Weller
#74. Leisure was the sine qua non of the full Renaissance. The feudal nobility, having lost its martial function, sought diversion all over Europe in cultivated pastimes: sonneteering, the lute, games and acrostics, travel, gentlemanly studies and sports, hunting and hawking, treated as arts.
Mary McCarthy
#75. In the West there has always been the attempt to try make the religious building, whether it's a Medieval or Renaissance church, an eternal object for the celebration of God. The material chosen, such as stone, brick, or concrete, is meant to eternally preserve what is inside.
Tadao Ando
#76. We are a family of professionals, especially doctors. Thanks to my father, I got exposed to a whole lot of things. I call him a Renaissance man.
Lillete Dubey
#77. Although I adore the Italian High Renaissance, I'd rather look at Mannerism. The former is ordered, integrated, otherworldly, and grandiose; it leaves you feeling hungry for something flawed and of-the-flesh.
Jerry Saltz
#78. It's a touchy subject, but as a Southerner, you can't ignore our history any more than a Renaissance painter can ignore the Virgin Mary. And it's impossible to drive down a road or eat a vegetable or pass a church without being reminded of slavery.
Sally Mann
#79. 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
#80. About the scientific revolution: it "outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes".
Herbert Butterfield
#81. Every era of renaissance has come out of new freedoms for peoples. The coming renaissance will be greater than any in human history, for this time all the peoples of the earth will share in it.
Pearl S. Buck
#82. But it has been a long process because I'm kind of a renaissance person.
Ronnie Montrose
#83. Just as a human soul that faces great difficulties also faces great opportunities for spiritual growth, so a human society that faces destruction also faces the opportunity to enter a period of renaissance. I think that, barring an accident, the wish to survive will keep us from a nuclear war.
Peace Pilgrim
#84. 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.
Colin Hanks
#85. The late 20th century had just enough communication abilities to allow superstar-ness and communality to happen. It was a musical renaissance that rivals the visual one that happened in the 1400s.
Daryl Hall
#86. I do not imagine that many people in the fifteenth century ever wondered if they were living in the Italian Renaissance.
Carl Sagan
#87. Just as not all butterflies produce a hurricane, not all outbreaks of bubonic plague produce a Renaissance.
Eric Weiner
#88. Because in the Renaissance, broadly integrative thought was at a premium; empirical method was in its infancy. Now, with the tools of measurement so highly refined, we produce lots of narrow specialists but fewer expansive thinkers." "Well,
Charles E. Gannon
#89. Not much was really invented during the Renaissance, if you don't count modern civilization.
P. J. O'Rourke
#90. It'd be nice to be what they call a Renaissance man.
George Takei
#91. I think there's some great stuff coming. I do feel that. I think we have reached our Harlem Renaissance.
Sandra Cisneros
#92. National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.
Frantz Fanon
#93. 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.
K.A. Mitchell
#94. Just as Renaissance artists provided narratives for the era they lived in, so do I. I'm always looking beyond the surface. I've done that ever since I first picked up a camera.
David LaChapelle
#95. If you see a Renaissance body, this is completely ugly in this time. Everybody has to be skinny. But the Renaissance body with incredible flow of the meat everywhere, it was beauty.
Marina Abramovic
#96. We are fascinated by Ramses as Renaissance Christians were by the American Indians, those (human?) beings who had never known the word of Christ.
Jean Baudrillard
#97. [During the Renaissance] the Italians said, "We are one in the Father: we will go back." The Northern races said, "We are one in Christ, we will go on.
D.H. Lawrence
#98. I'm looking to evolve the concept of the new renaissance artist, taking the world by storm through the art of public display and demonstration, with technical savvy, using cell phones and computers.
Perry Farrell
#99. Of the Greek authors who at the Renaissance brought a new life into the world Plato has had the greatest influence.
Plato
#100. 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.
Patrick Rothfuss
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