The Renaissance Quotes

#1. In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Yanko Tsvetkov

#2. Can't decide which life or career path is right for you? Maybe you don't have to! In The Renaissance Soul, Margaret Lobenstine offers inspiration, advice, and practical tips for people with more than one burning passion.

Laurence Boldt

#3. The Greek conception of a life in harmony with nature found its most complete development in the rationalism of the Renaissance and of the centuries that followed it.

Elie Metchnikoff

#4. Now in the 21st century, the boundaries separating chemistry, physics, and medicine have become blurred, and as happened during the Renaissance, scientists are following their curiosities even when they run beyond the formal limits of their training.

Peter Agre

#5. Jimmie would forever be the Renaissance humanist, bearing his faith and optimism like a white light inside a chalice.

James Lee Burke

#6. 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

#7. Marxism is like a classical building that followed the Renaissance; beautiful in its way, but incapable of growth.

Harold Macmillan

#8. A stable social system is necessary, but every stable system hitherto devised has hampered the development of exceptional artistic or intellectual merit. How much murder and anarchy are we prepared to endure for the sake of great achievements such as those of the Renaissance?

Bertrand Russell

#9. The Renaissance is studded by the names of the artists and architects, with their creations recorded as great historical events.

Arthur Erickson

#10. In one particular chapter in Ulysses, James Joyce imitates every major writing style that's been used by English and American writers over the last 700 years - starting with Beowulf and Chaucer and working his way up through the Renaissance, the Victorian era and on into the 20th century.

Frederick Lenz

#11. I imagine it was much different in the 1970s. That was the Renaissance for black actors, albeit in blaxploitation movies. There was a much greater preponderance of work then than there is now.

Don Cheadle

#12. The 'Heirs of Alexandria' series mixes the Renaissance with magic and demons, based on a changed theological history.

Eric Flint

#13. The renaissance of Christian philosophy has been accompanied by a resurgence of interest in natural theology, that branch of theology that seeks to prove God's existence apart from divine revelation.

William Lane Craig

#14. The hallmark of the Renaissance was its holistic quality as all fields of art, engineering, science and culture shared the same exciting spirit and many of the same intellectual principles.

Joel Garreau

#15. We've been taught that the renaissance was one of the great golden ages of civilisation. The renaissance was not a golden age, it was the end of a golden age.

Douglas Rushkoff

#16. Our culture has kind of let the concept of the Renaissance Man die out. We don't really tell the kids that it's okay to bounce around the world, work odd jobs, and do six different things.

Ronan Farrow

#17. I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.

John Ruskin

#18. It's easy to say "This year in art sucked." After all, about 85 percent of all shows of contemporary art are bad. But 85 percent of all art made in the Renaissance was bad.

David Edelstein

#19. Everybody in mathematics had given up for 100 years or 200 years the idea that you could from pictures, from looking at pictures, find new ideas. That was the case long ago in the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, in later periods, but then mathematicians had become very abstract.

Benoit Mandelbrot

#20. Television preachers extract money from the poor to live in a style and to indulge in shameful acts which equal or outdo the worst of the Renaissance Popes.

J. Irwin Miller

#21. Starting with the Renaissance and running through the Enlightenment, there occurred what we might call "the great reversal." Suddenly, very suddenly, the Ascenders were out, the Descenders were in - and the transition was bloody, arguably the bloodiest cognitive transformation in European history.

Ken Wilber

#22. 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

#23. Our vision is to rediscover the spirit of the Renaissance, create a new discipline where engineering for cultural heritage is actually a symbol of blending art and science together.

Maurizio Seracini

#24. I went to a restaurant that serves "breakfast at any time" so I ordered French toast during the Renaissance.

Steven Wright

#25. I feel, sometimes, as the renaissance man must have felt in finding new riches at every point and in the certainty that unexplored areas of knowledge and experience await at every turn.

Polykarp Kusch

#26. America became a special source of attraction to people who were fleeing the aftereffects of the 30 Years War and the religious persecution that began to sweep through Europe in the period between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. And when people got here, very often they succeeded.

Mitch Horowitz

#27. We have entered, almost without noticing, an age of exploration and discovery unparalleled since the Renaissance.

Carl Sagan

#28. Shakespeare is, essentially, the emanation of the Renaissance. The overflow of his fame on the Continent in later years was but the sequel of the flood of the Renaissance in Western Europe. He was the child of that great movement, and marks its height as it penetrated the North with civilization.

George Edward Woodberry

#29. I'm not a critic. I'm not a journalist. I'm not a philosopher. Arguing that punk has run its course is like saying painting ran its course after the Renaissance. Punk is an idea. It's freedom. And it'll be around 200 years from now for the people who want it.

Patti Smith

#30. April 20, 1939 1' The [Nazi] movement for freeing the world from the Jews is a movement for the renaissance of human dignity. The all-wise and Almighty God is behind this movement. - Fr. Franjo Kralik in a Zagreb Catholic newspaper, 19412 RIDES THE BEAST

Dave Hunt

#31. Yet any time I opened up a book of medieval art, or walked into the Renaissance galleries in a museum, I was confronted with Mary.

Holly Ordway

#32. In the Renaissance world of arranged marriages, there were no romantic proposals on bended knee - only notaries and contracts.

Elizabeth Lev

#33. During the Renaissance, women were not allowed to attend art school. Everyone asks, where are the great women painters of the Renaissance?

Karen DeCrow

#34. The Renaissance ... was based on a new idea of the importance of the individual. But this was a fragile foundation, because individuals depended on constant applause and admiration to sustain them. There is a shortage of applause in the world, and there is not enough respect to go around.

Theodore Zeldin

#35. Pandora, meet my brothers, Leonardo and Michelangelo."
"Like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?" she couldn't resist asking.
"Like the Renaissance painters," Leo snapped. He exchanged a snarl with his twin brother. "I seriously hate those damned turtles.

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#36. 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

#37. The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by what it designed then by what it achieved.

Walter Pater

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. A mind so dark it made one wonder if the Renaissance had ever really taken place.

John Berryman

#42. 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

#43. (forks did not appear until the late fourteenth century and weren't commonly used until the Renaissance).

Sherrilyn Kenyon

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

John Fowles

#45. The Renaissance was a time of mercenary soldiers, ours is a time of mercenary labor.

Eric Hoffer

#46. 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

#47. Small pictures since the Renaissance are like novels; large pictures are like dramas in which one participates in a direct way.

Mark Rothko

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. First there was Greek civilization. Then there was the Renaissance. Now we're entering the Age of the Ass.

Jean-Luc Godard

#54. 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

#55. Warhol turned to photographs of stars, as the Renaissance turned to antiquities, to find images of gods.

David Sylvester

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. Implosion is no invention in the conventional sense, but rather the renaissance of ancient knowledge, lost over the course of time.

Viktor Schauberger

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. Aquinas brought an Aristotelian view of reason back into European culture, and lighted the way toward the Renaissance.

Ayn Rand

#62. No account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece.

Walter Pater

#63. Of the Greek authors who at the Renaissance brought a new life into the world Plato has had the greatest influence.

Plato

#64. [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

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. Every generation", Aby Warburg mused long ago, "gets the Renaissance of Antiquity that it deserves.

Anonymous

#68. I am not saying that the Renaissance in any way was a feminist movement - hardly. But the arts flourished, and in more social settings as opposed to being confined to the church.

Kathryn Lasky

#69. Our approach to education has remained largely unchanged since the Renaissance: From middle school through college, most teaching is done by an instructor lecturing to a room full of students, only some of them paying attention.

Daphne Koller

#70. People never know what's going on while it's happening. You think, during the Renaissance, people called it 'The Renaissance'?

Anne Meara

#71. I was lucky enough to be a child during the renaissance of Australian children's literature, when people like Ivan Southall, Colin Thiele, Lilith Norman and Wrightson were pumping out hugely inspiring stuff.

Catherine Jinks

#72. Since the Renaissance, people have had to get used to living their life on a random planet in the vast galaxy.

Jostein Gaarder

#73. the technology is not a single cause of a cultural transformation like the Renaissance, but it is, in many ways, just as important to the story as the human visionaries that we conventionally celebrate.

Steven Johnson

#74. 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

#75. Not much was really invented during the Renaissance, if you don't count modern civilization.

P. J. O'Rourke

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. Puritanism, he said, was a reaction to the loss of moral fiber that accompanied the Renaissance.

Barbara W. Tuchman

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

George Santayana

#83. (on asparagus) Europeans of the Renaissance swore by it as an aphrodisiac, and the church banned it from nunneries.

Barbara Kingsolver

#84. A Deap Vally renaissance is going to begin next year and will be our focus for the start of 2013. They will blow the cobwebs off a music scene that has become just a little bit stale.

Ben Lovett

#85. The parents used to drag the little ones, and now the kids are coming
and they're not little anymore. Things are evolving. Maybe there's a renaissance for our music.

Jonathan Cain

#86. From 1940 to the present, the art world - and particularly Los Angeles - has undergone a transformation not unlike the Italian Renaissance.

Jeffrey Deitch

#87. I like to say 'Reign' is the '24' of the pre-Renaissance. I think we're going to take a lot of liberties with history, as well as extend it over a longer period of time.

Megan Follows

#88. In the darkness, fear my light.

Susann Cokal

#89. 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

#90. Fascism was an explosion against intolerable conditions, against remediable wrongs which the old world failed to remedy. It was a movement to secure national renaissance by people who felt themselves threatened with decline into decadence and death and were determined to live, and live greatly.

Oswald Mosley

#91. Every renaissance comes to the world with a cry, the cry of the human spirit to be free.

Anne Sullivan

#92. How is the newcomer to deal with Rome? What is one to make of this marble rubble, this milk of wolves, this blood of Caesars, this sunrise of Renaissance, this baroquery of blown stone, this warm hive of Italians, this antipasto of civilization?

Shana Alexander

#93. Success is not final, failure is not fatal. It is the courage to carry on that counts.
Winston Churchill

H.A. Corby

#94. The socially pernicious, racially wasteful, and soul-withering consequences of the working of mothers outside the home must cease. And this can only come to pass, either through the programme of institutional upbringing, or through the intimate renaissance of the home.

Ellen Key

#95. The pride taken by the Italians in their gifted women is among the most important facts in the history of their Renaissance.

Walter Shaw Sparrow

#96. I've always had a very binge and then cleanse approach to casual sex for that very reason. We long for an intimate connection, but that longing makes us feel vulnerable. Therefore, we guard our hearts for self-preservation, which barricades that intimacy we are longing for.

Maggie Young

#97. I love the idea of renaissance. If my career is like painting a canvas, I want to have as many different colors in there as I can.

Nolan Gerard Funk

#98. Unless there is a spiritual renaissance, the world will know no peace.

Dag Hammarskjold

#99. But we live on the cusp of a Renaissance in consciousness of who we truly are and, thus, we can now begin to thrive in this exciting age of our humanity's journey toward a greater life and a more fundamentally intelligent evolution of our species.

Martha Char Love

#100. Right now, scientists are in exactly the same position as Renaissance painters, commissioned to make the portrait the patron wants done, And if they are smart, they'll make sure their work subtly flatters the patron. Not overtly. Subtly.

Michael Crichton