Seventeenth Century Quotes

#1. What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth.

Bertrand Russell

#2. Until the seventeenth century there was no concept of evidence with which to pose the problem of induction!

Ian Hacking

#3. In seventeenth-century England, 150 out of every 1,000 newborns died during their first year, and a third of all children were dead before they reached fifteen.9 Today, only five out of 1,000 English babies die during their first year, and only seven out of 1,000 die before age fifteen.10

Yuval Noah Harari

#4. Doesn't the seventeenth-century use of the measurement yard for penis strike you as a bit of an exaggeration, unless the yard then was not the yard now?

Siri Hustvedt

#5. As late as the seventeenth century, monarchs owned so little furniture that they had to travel from palace to palace with wagon-loads of plate and bedspreads, of carpets and tapestries.

Aldous Huxley

#6. A so-called antimony war had been waged between French [Galenist] physicians and [alchemical, Paracelsian] iatrochemists since the beginning of the seventeenth century. What it lacked in bloodletting, this war made up for in bile.

Philip Ball

#7. I would be researching seventeenth-century garden design or I would be doing something with Pepys, but I just kept using all of it to write about Margaret Cavendish. It took me a long time to realize that I just wanted to write a book about her. Years.

Danielle Dutton

#8. As the seventeenth-century French philosopher Montaigne once said, "My life has been filled with terrible misfortune, most of which never happened.

Kristin Neff

#9. Roger Williams died sometime during the early months of 1683. Some of what he said and wrote during his lifetime belongs to the seventeenth century. But much of his historical and philosophical record speaks to us across the centuries.

Alan E. Johnson

#10. So Newton, like all good seventeenth-century intellectuals, wrote in Latin because that was the international language of science, philosophy and, I found out later, upmarket pornography.

Ben Aaronovitch

#11. the seventeenth-century saint, Margaret Marie Alacoque, a French nun of Parayle-Monial, who founded the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Margaret would deliberately eat cheese knowing that it made her vomit, and by her own admission she ate the vomit of sister nuns.

John Cornwell

#12. And it'd be very hard to make up something as strange as the Dutch tulipmania in the seventeenth century, for example. Or the mysterious case of Thomas Clapper. Or the entire civic history of Seattle, Washington.

Stephen Briggs

#13. The seventeenth-century baby slept, as his nineteenth-century descendant does, in a cradle. Nothing could be prettier than the old cradles that have survived successive years of use with many generations of babies.

Alice Morse Earle

#14. Rembrandt was an innovator not only in painting but also in commerce. He helped establish a full-fledged art market in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. "Rembrandt's obsession with the intricacies of the market system permeated his life and his work,

John McMillan

#15. Josh isn't in love with me and I'm not in love with him."
"Sell it to someone who's buying, Sunshine. Have you seen the way he looks at you?" I've seen the way he looks at me but I don't know what it means. "Like you're a seventeenth-century, hand-carved table in mint condition.

Katja Millay

#16. Two historical figures play prominent roles in this book: a pair of priests who lived centuries apart but who were tied together by fate. During the seventeenth century, Father Athanasius Kircher was known as the Leonardo da Vinci of the Jesuit Order.

James Rollins

#17. Allan thought it sounded unnecessary for the people in the seventeenth century to kill each other. If they had only been a little patient they would all have died in the end anyway. Julius said that you could say the same of all epochs

Jonas Jonasson

#18. No seventeenth-century pedagogue would have publicly advised his disciple, as did Erasmus in his Dialogues, on the choice of a good prostitute.

Michel Foucault

#19. In the seventeenth century, it was held by some that inside a human sperm there was a minute human being - a homunculus - that was planted inside the womb. Development consisted of the miniature homunculus enlarging and passing through birth and on to maturity-just like inflating a balloon.

John Tyler Bonner

#20. Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attibutable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.

Bertrand Russell

#21. Yet despite these advantages, England's empire remained unlaunched until the seventeenth century. The problem is a dog-in-the-night

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

#22. Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-century house, since most of America lacks seventeenth-century houses.

John Updike

#23. I'd found a seventeenth-century map of the rivers of London.

Ben Aaronovitch

#24. Facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth century invention.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#25. It was a strange combination to absorb - the everyday concerns of the town doctor stuck in the middle of a discussion of his early days in seventeenth-century London.

Stephenie Meyer

#26. Unable either to practice science without the Principia or to make that work conform to the corpuscular standards of the seventeenth century, scientists gradually accepted the view that gravity was indeed innate

Thomas S. Kuhn

#27. It is astonishing to realize that until Galileo performed his experiments on the acceleration of gravity in the early seventeenth century, nobody questioned Aristotle's falling balls. Nobody said, Show Me!

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#28. Most critics agree with the seventeenth-century printer who gave them to the world, that the Mutabilitie Cantos seem to be part of some following book of The Faerie Queene.

Janet Spens

#29. A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise.

John Updike

#30. In the seventeenth century, in less than forty years, twenty-six lakes were emptied.

Edmondo De Amicis

#31. In the seventeenth century, the science of medicine had not wholly cut asunder from astrology and necromancy; and the trusting Christian still believed in some occult influences, chiefly planetary, which governed not only his crops but his health and life.

Alice Morse Earle

#32. A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter porchlessness. Some of those houses have a second-story overhang, emphasizing their medieval look.

John Updike

#33. The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

David Hare

#34. My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, seventeenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson.

Jorge Luis Borges

#35. It was a strange experience to be looking out the window of an eighteenth-century Chinese house at a seventeenth-century colonial graveyard full of people in twenty-first-century Halloween costumes. Salem, guys.

J.W. Ocker

#36. The force of originality "that made Donne so potent an influence in the seventeenth century makes him now at once for us, without his being the less felt as of his period, contemporary - obviously a living poet in the most important sense." In "The Good-Morrow" Leavis said that

John Donne

#37. The "gravity train" was devised in the seventeenth century by British scientist Robert Hooke, who presented the idea in a letter to Isaac Newton. The idea has been seriously presented a few times, such as to the Paris Academy of Sciences in the nineteenth century.

Stephen Baxter

#38. It is as if, to every period of history, there corresponded a privileged age and a particular division of human life: "youth" is the privileged age of the seventeenth century, childhood of the nineteenth, adolescence of the twentieth.

Philippe Aries

#39. I have read or been told that in a book of etiquette of the seventeenth century the very first rule forbids you to tell your dreams to other people, since they cannot possibly be of interest to them.

Isak Dinesen

#40. When you think about Puritanism, you must begin by getting rid of the slang term 'Puritanism' as applied to Victorian religious hypocrisy. This does not apply to seventeenth-century Puritanism.

Leland Ryken

#41. In graduate school, I decide to write my doctoral thesis on how Italian architecture influenced English playwrights of the seventeenth century. I wonder why certain playwrights decided to set their tragedies, written in English, in Italian palaces.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#42. The great correspondent of the seventeenth century Madame de Sevigne counseled, "Take chocolate in order that even the most tireome company seem acceptable to you," which is also sound advice today!

Barrie Kerper

#43. But as the late- seventeenth-century philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz said, 'To be neutral is rather like someone who lives in the middle of a house and is smoked out from below and drenched with urine from above.

Eleanor Herman

#44. Back then, when I had that original idea to write about the seventeenth century, the whole thing was set in 1666. I was thinking of Margaret near the end of her life, and that was the voice I heard for her.

Danielle Dutton

#45. Starting in the seventeenth century, the general theory of extreme values - maxima and minima - has become one of the systematic integrating principles of science.

Richard Courant

#46. FALCKNER, DANIEL. Curieuse Nachricht from Pennsylvania. Translation by Julius F. Sachse. Lancaster, Pa.: 1905. Series of 103 questions and answers, on all aspects of Pennsylvania Conditions. Written at close of the seventeenth century. Several editions printed in Germany.

Anonymous

#47. In the seventeenth century the pound sterling was divided into twenty shillings (shortened to s.), and a shilling was divided into twelve pennies, or pence (shortened to d.). So an amount might be expressed as £2 10s 6d, or £2/10/6d.

Stephen Inwood

#48. Jeanne de Chantal, seventeenth-century founder of the Order of the Visitation, said, No matter what happens, be gentle with yourself.

Shane Claiborne

#49. It was the seventeenth-century English who gave corned beef its name - corns being any kind of small bits, in this case salt crystals.

Mark Kurlansky

#50. Constancy will always be the genius of love, the indication of that strength which constitutes the poet. A man should possess all women in his wife, like those squalid poetasters of the seventeenth century who made fair Irises and dazzling Chloes of their lowly Manons.

Honore De Balzac

#51. The men in those old days of the seventeenth century, when in constant dread of attacks by Indians, always rose when the services were ended and left the house before the women and children, thus making sure the safe exit of the latter.

Alice Morse Earle

#52. The categories within which the colonists thought about the social foundations of politics were inheritances from classical antiquity, reshaped by seventeenth century English thought.

Bernard Bailyn

#53. So many able historians have worked over seventeenth-century New England that one would think there was little left to be learned from the people who lived there - fewer than 100,000 at the end of the century. Seldom, apart perhaps from the Greeks and Romans, have so few been studied by so many.

Edmund Morgan

#54. A weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth-century England

Richard Saul Wurman

#55. The modern scientific method in which experiments form part of a structured system of hypothesis, experimentation, and analysis is as recent as the seventeenth century; the problem-solving technology of cooking goes back thousands of years.

Bee Wilson

#56. You're so seventeenth century.

Susan Catalano

#57. I am in Boston right now, in fact, to do work at the New England Historical Genealogical Library, where I'm trying to finish up tracing my lineage back to the seventeenth century.

Rick Moody

#58. Few can contemplate without a sense of exhilaration the splendid achievements of practical energy and technical skill, which, from the latter part of the seventeenth century, were transforming the face of material civilization, and of which England was the daring, if not too scrupulous, pioneer.

E.F. Schumacher

#59. To modern educated people, it seems obvious that matters of fact are to be ascertained by observation, not by consulting ancient authorities. But this is an entirely modern conception, which hardly existed before the seventeenth century.

Bertrand Russell

#60. When the war started, religion and superstition (whatever the difference is) permeated the lives of ordinary soldiers, who lived in a thought world not too far removed from the seventeenth century.

Philip Jenkins

#61. A seventeenth-century painting can be "modern" because the living eye finds it fresh and new. A "modern" painting can be outdated because it was a product of the moment and not of time.

Marya Mannes

#62. Hold onto your periwigs, I'm going to start you off with a whirlwind tour of the history of Stuart Britain; a time that encompassed the vast majority of the seventeenth century and the first fourteen years of the eighteenth.

Andrea Zuvich

#63. Elias Ashmole, a seventeenth-century book collector and alchemist whose books and papers had come to the Bodleian from the Ashmolean Museum in the nineteenth century, along with the number 782.

Deborah Harkness

#64. The seventeenth century witnessed the birth of modern science as we know it today. This science was something new, based on a direct confrontation of nature by experiment and observation. But there was another feature of the new science-a dependence on numbers, on real numbers of actual experience.

I. Bernard Cohen

#65. Before the seventeenth century, a child passed directly into the adult world between the ages of five and seven ... then came the industrial revolution ... so the child-centered home was born.

Billy Graham

#66. A scrap of seventeenth-century sunlight compressed into dots and pixels,

Donna Tartt

#67. On sober reflection, I find few reasons for publishing my Italian version of an obscure, neo-Gothic French version of a seventeenth century Latin edition of a work written in Latin by a German Monk toward the end of the fourteenth century ... First of all, what style should I employ?

Umberto Eco

#68. I was very much into buying contemporary art, but I've just decided I want to get rid of it all. Not that it's not great art, but all of a sudden my mood has changed, and I want to go back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century masters.

Sylvester Stallone

#69. The origins of the modern West are often seen in the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, but the roots of the Enlightenment can be found in habits of mind cultivated in Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem, and the institutions that grew from them.

Ibn Warraq

#70. I am Calumny Spinks.
Between me and the satin blue sky hangs the hempen noose.
It has swung there in the faintest of breezes, waiting for me, all my life.

Piers Alexander