Sixteenth Century Quotes

#1. The hymns were born in the fifteenth or sixteenth century or earlier, and listening to them was like licking an icicle: the same chill, the same purity.

Mary Cantwell

#2. 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

#3. American Black Chamber, borrowing the name from the sixteenth-century cabinet noir, the secret letter-opening and resealing facility of King Henry IV of France.

Gabriel Schoenfeld

#4. There but for the grace of God,' said John Bradford in the sixteenth century, on seeing wretches led to execution, 'go I.' What this apparently compassionate observation really means--not that it really 'means' anything--is, 'There by the grace of God goes someone else.

Christopher Hitchens

#5. Under English law the penalty for eating meat on Friday was hanging. The law remained on the books until the sixteenth century, when Henry VIII broke with the Vatican.

Mark Kurlansky

#6. The inquiry into Nature having thus been pursued nearly two thousand years theologically, we find by the middle of the sixteenth century some promising beginnings of a different method the method of inquiry into Nature scientifically the method which seeks not plausibilities but facts.

Andrew Dickson White

#7. The idea of the Solar System dates back to 250 BC when Aristarchus of Samos suggested that the planets revolved around the Sun. This is called the heliocentric model, and was largely ignored until astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus confirmed it during the sixteenth century. The

IP Factly

#8. When a Mannerist artist breaks rules he does so on the basis of knowledge and not of ignorance. A considerable amount of North European architecture of the sixteenth century must be excluded for these reasons.

John Shearman

#9. It is called Giordano Bruno after the sixteenth-century Roman Catholic scholar who held that there are an infinity of worlds and that many are inhabited. For this and other crimes he was burned at the stake in the year 1600.

Carl Sagan

#10. Illiteracy was the usual condition in sixteenth-century England, to be sure. According to one estimate at least 70 percent of men and 90 percent of women of the period couldn't even sign their names. But as one moved up the social scale, literacy rates rose appreciably.

Bill Bryson

#11. Whatever the reason, the fact is that there was no widespread catechetical teaching for Christian children. Things were going to change. The growing awareness of the need for Christian education was one of the chief forces behind the desire in the sixteenth century to reform the rite of baptism.

Hughes Oliphant Old

#12. Sixteenth-century philosopher Michel de Montaigne once wrote, When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not playing with me rather than I with her?

Michio Kaku

#13. Vast flocks of fieldfares netted the sky, turning it to something strangely like a sixteenth-century sleeve sewn with pearls.

Helen Macdonald

#14. Erasmus of Rotterdam, a sixteenth-century priest who was committed to reforming the church from within, said, When faith came to be in writings rather than in hearts, contention grew hot and love grew cold. That which is forced cannot be sincere, and that which is not voluntary cannot please Christ.

Shane Claiborne

#15. Food history is as important as a baroque church. Governments should recognize cultural heritage and protect traditional foods. A cheese is as worthy of preserving as a sixteenth-century building.

Carlo Petrini

#16. In the middle of the sixteenth century, Spain was the incubus of Europe. Gloomy and portentous, she chilled the world with her baneful shadow.

Francis Parkman

#17. I go out every night with a homemade sextant and sight Deneb. It's kind of silly if you think about it. I'm in my space suit on Mars and I'm navigating with sixteenth-century tools. But hey, they work.

Andy Weir

#18. It is rather ironical that in the sixteenth century some people resisted advances in science because they seemed to threaten belief in God; whereas in the twentieth century scientific ideas of a beginning have been resisted because they threatened to increase the plausibility of belief in God.

John C. Lennox

#19. In the ancient city of London, on a certain autumn day in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, a boy was born to a poor family of the name of Canty, who did not want him.

Mark Twain

#20. Every saint has a past, the sixteenth-century poet had said, and every sinner has a future.

Jan Karon

#21. As Montaigne wrote, observing late-sixteenth-century life, To die of age is a rare, singular, and extraordinary death, and so much less natural than others: it is the last and extremest kind of dying.

Atul Gawande

#22. You can't automate in the arts. Since the sixteenth century there has been no change in the number of people necessary to produce Hamlet.

William T. Wiley

#23. Mennonites are so called because they followed Menno Simons, a sixteenth-century Dutch Catholic priest

Mark Kurlansky

#24. Florida is a paradox that way, one of the youngest states, yet with some of the oldest European settlements. And this particular section of the northeast shore was home to a couple of the earliest sixteenth-century Spanish and French fortifications.

Tim Dorsey

#25. Machiavelli is not an evil genius, nor a demon, nor a miserable and cowardly writer; he is nothing but the fact. And he is not only the Italian fact; he is the European fact, the fact of the sixteenth century. He seems hideous, and so he is, in the presence of the moral idea of the nineteenth.

Victor Hugo

#26. So I go out every night with a homemade sextant and sight Deneb. It's kind of silly if you think about it. I'm in my space suit on Mars and I'm navigating with sixteenth-century tools.

Andy Weir

#27. Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.

Marshall McLuhan

#28. The Reformation in the sixteenth century narrowed Reform. As soon as men began to call themselves names, all hope of further amendment was lost.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#29. Protest against Industrial Capitalism from one aspect or another is universal: so was the protest against the condition of European religion at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

Hilaire Belloc

#30. Until the early middle years of the sixteenth century, when King Henry VIII began to quarrel with Rome about the dialectics of divorce and decapitation, a short and swift route to torture and death was the attempt to print the Bible in English. It's

Christopher Hitchens

#31. Only an obstinate prejudice about this period (which I will presently try to account for) could blind us to a certain change which comes over the merely literary texts as we pass from the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century.

C.S. Lewis

#32. I said to him, "State your business, mortal!" There was no need for me to call him "mortal" or to speak like a sixteenth-century knight. It just sounded cool.

Alan Goldsher

#33. The closing period of the fifteenth century witnessed the slow but sure increase of the churches of the Brethren. Although far from being unmolested, they yet enjoyed comparative rest. At the commencement of the sixteenth century their churches numbered two hundred in Bohemia and Moravia.

Ezra Hall Gillett

#34. Pre-Industrial Europe: Where Enlightenment Died In the sixteenth century there was a religious and political upheaval in Europe. As part of the chaos of that time, the religious and political forces began to impose their agenda into every aspect of human life, especially

Stephan Aarstol

#35. The sixteenth-century schism was really a belated revolt of the thirteenth-century pessimists. It was a back-wash of the old Augustinian Puritanism against the Aristotelian liberality.

G.K. Chesterton

#36. The salt intake of Europeans, much of it in the form of salted fish, rose from forty grams a day per person in the sixteenth century to seventy grams in the eighteenth century.

Mark Kurlansky

#37. Potatoes came to Europe from the New World in the early sixteenth century. Sir Francis Drake is thought to have introduced the potato to England, and shortly afterward Sir Walter Raleigh tried planting them on his Irish estates. When

Ryan Hackney

#38. After landing his invasion forces on the shores of some country, the sixteenth-century Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes would immediately burn his own boats. He was sending his army a message: "We can't turn back. Either we succeed here or we die here." Excuses were not an option.

Lou Holtz

#39. It's a hard spell and an old spell, and it works only if you understand the Great Vowel Shift of the Sixteenth Century - and if you're stupidly in love.

Rainbow Rowell

#40. In a world threatened by pain and death, stories of miracle workers are a psychological necessity, because the alternative is unmitigated horror and despair.

Philip Ball