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“[how can anyone] be silly enough to think himself better than other people, because his clothes are made of finer woolen thread than theirs. After all, those fine clothes were once worn by a sheep, and they never turned it into anything better than a sheep.”
― Thomas More, Utopia

“While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.
-Leonardo Da Vinci”
― Oliver Bowden, Renaissance

“The next time somebody announces that he plans to get Medieval on your ass, tell him you're going to get Renaissance on his gonads.”
― James Morrow, The Last Witchfinder

“The soul exists partly in eternity and partly in time.”
― Marsilio Ficino

“Whose little boy are you?”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Why do we think love is a magician? Because the whole power of magic consists in love. The work of magic is the attraction of one thing by another because of a certain affinity of nature.”
― Marsilio Ficino

“Not without deep pain do we admit to ourselves that the artists of all ages have in their highest flights carried to heavenly transfiguration precisely those conceptions that we now recognize as false: they are the glorifiers of the religious and philosophical errors of humanity, and they could not have done this without their belief in the absolute truth of these errors. Now if the belief in such truth generally diminishes, if the rainbow colors at the outermost ends of human knowing and imagining fade: then the species of art that, like the Divina commedia, Raphael's pictures, Michelangelo's frescoes, the Gothic cathedrals, presupposes not only a cosmic, but also a metaphysical significance for art objects can never blossom again. A touching tale will come of this, that there was once such an art, such belief by artists.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

“Man is mortal. This is his fate. Man pretends not to be mortal. That is his sin. Man is a creature of time and place, whose perspectives and insights are invariably conditioned by his immediate circumstances.”
― Sylvan Barnet

“There was a time in the ancient world - a very long time - in which the central cultural problem must have seemed an inexhaustible outpouring of books. Where to put them all? How to organize them on the groaning shelves? How to hold the profusion of knowledge in one's head? The loss of this plenitude would have been virtually inconceivable to anyone living in its midst.
Then, not all at once but with the cumulative force of a mass extinction, the whole enterprise came to an end. What looked stable turned out to be fragile, and what had seemed for all time was only for the time being.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

“Just as not all butterflies produce a hurricane, not all outbreaks of bubonic plague produce a Renaissance.”
― Eric Weiner, The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley

“A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure - an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation - characterizes Montaigne's restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes's chronicle of his mad knight, Michelangelo's depiction of flayed skin, Leonardo's sketches of whirlpools, Caravaggio's loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ's feet.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

“Love is the linchpin that connects the material world with higher levels of existence.”
― Julianne Davidow

“In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

“I feed my heart with sighs, that's all it asks,
I live on tears, I think I'm born to weep;
I don't complain of that, since in my state
weeping is sweeter than you might believe.”
― Petrarch

“Such was also the case with Nietzsche, a volcanic genius if ever there was one. Here, too, there is passionate exteriorization of an inward fire, but in a manner that is both deviated and demented; we have in mind here, not the Nietzschian philosophy, which taken literally is without interest, but his poetical work, whose most intense expression is in part his ‘Zarathustra��. What this highly uneven book manifests above all is the violent reaction of an a priori profound soul against a mediocre and paralyzing cultural environment; Nietzsche’s fault was to have only a sense of grandeur in the absence of all intellectual discernment. ‘Zarathustra�� is basically the cry of a grandeur trodden underfoot, whence comes the heart-rending authenticity �� grandeur precisely �� of certain passages; not all of them, to be sure, and above all not those which express a half-Machiavellian, half-Darwinian philosophy, or minor literary cleverness. Be that as it may, Nietzsche’s misfortune, like that of other men of genius, such as Napoleon, was to be born after the Renaissance and not before it; which indicates evidently an aspect of their nature, for there is no such thing as chance.”
― Frithjof Schuon, To Have a Center

“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, Mona Lisa does not smile anymore

“إن تكريم العقول الفذة، هو في إتاحة الفرصة لها لخلق أنظمتها المتفردة، لا في حكمها بأنظمة بالية، وملاحقتها بالقوانين الروتينية، واستنزافها في الأعمال غير الخلاقة.
لو شاء أحد أن يتتبع حجم الإهدار للعقول العربية الفذة، لما وسعته الحسرة، ولما وسعه سوى أن ينتحر من الكمد والأسى.
فتجد عالماً في الطاقة الذرية في سوريا يعمل مدرساً للرياضيات في مدرسة متواضعة.
وتجد أفضل عالم رياضيات في العالم بشهادة المؤسسات الغربية، والحائز على جوائز عالمية في مجاله، تفصله جامعة القاهرة بحجة عدم تجديد الإجازة.
وتجد مخترعاً في السعودية يحاول الانتحار لأنه لا يملك قوتاً لأولاده، ثم تظهره القنوات الفضائية كمادة إعلامية شيقة، ويصورونه على الهواء وهم يشترون له حاجيات بيته وأبناءه.

لكي يتحقق الإبداع، وتتحقق النهضة، يجب أن نعمل على تهيئة المناخات الحاضنة للعقول المتفردة، وأن نخفف من عوامل الطرد الفكري، ونكثف جهودنا لوضع سياسات تضمن الحرية، والكرامة، لكل عقل عربي تظهر عليه آثار النبوغ في شتى المجالات، الفكرية والعملية، بدون ذلك، لن يكون لدينا نخبة تقود البلاد لطريق الحضارة.”
― محمد الشموتي

“During periods of root expansion things have always looked as confused and topsy-turvy and purposeless as they do now. The whole Renaissance is supposed to have resulted from the topsy-turvy feeling caused by Columbus�� discovery of a new world. It just shook people up. The topsy-turviness of that time is recorded everywhere. There was nothing in the flat-earth views of the Old and New Testaments that predicted it. Yet people couldn’t deny it. The only way they could assimilate it was to abandon the entire medieval outlook and enter into a new expansion of reason.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“Les naturels sanguinaires à l'endroit des bestes, tesmoignent une propension naturelle à la cruauté.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Nobility passes through by blood, not by law”
― Haluk Çay, MARIA ROMANOV: After 17 July 1918

“Compare with Greek art, modern classical art is lacking in warmth and immediacy; it has a derived, retrospective, and, even in the Renaissance, a more or less classicistic character. It It is the reflection of a society which, filled with reminiscences of Roman heroism and medieval chivalry, tries to appear to be something which it is not, by following an artificially produced social and moral code, and which stylizes the whole pattern of its life in accordance with this fictitious scheme. Classical art describes this society as it wants to see itself and as it wants to be seen. There is hardly a feature in this art which would not, on closer examination, prove to be anything more than the translation into artistic terms of the aristocratic, conservative ideals cherished by this society striving for permanence and continuity. The whole artistic fromalism of the Cinquecento merely corresponds to the formalized system of moral conceptions and decorum which the upper class of the period imposes on itself. Just as the aristocracy and the aristocratically minded circles of society subject life to the rule of a formal code, in order to preserve it from the anarchy of the emotions, so they also submit the expression of the emotions in art to the censorship of definite, abstract, and impersonal forms.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 2: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque

“There is perhaps nothing as true, as enduring, as fitting a tribute to the Renaissance as being so horny you could die on the streets of Florence.”
― Casey McQuiston

“An exciting minute-by-minute story of the English Civil War �� from the soldier’s point of view �� the historical accuracy is fantastic �� the storyline and writing style tremendously exciting.”
― Historical Novels Review

“Charles Cordell, a former soldier, writes with bravura confidence.”
― The Times

“The horse’s hooves crashed out on the stone floor, echoing in the arched entrance. Ahead, the nave stretched, vast, empty, bathed in colour; the winter sun streaming through stained glass between great arches. The horse snorted, its measured steps ringing out on the flagstones and tombs.”
― Charles Cordell, Desecration: Winchester 1642

“The gun stood on its platform, staring out over the breastwork of earth and timber, out across the steep valley to the hill beyond; a flat-topped hill, a great field of wheat laid over it, ripening and shimmering in the late afternoon sun; a cornfield filled with an army, a Cornish army, a superstitious, idolatrous army; an army of half-wild, barbarous heathens; a cornfield and an army to be cut down; a sacrifice to be reaped. 'For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”
― Charles Cordell, The Keys of Hell and Death

“Grenville's line of Cornishmen swayed and lurched, a low growl running through the ranks like a storm far out at sea, the boulders grinding as the waves built. And then it burst, men yelling, shaking their weapons in the air, the pikes clashing, thumping the ground, shouting, demanding, exclaiming, 'Kernow vedn keskerras!' Cornwall will march!”
― Charles Cordell, The Keys of Hell and Death

“But God knew how he missed the sea. He missed it in the sun, in the wind and the dark. He even missed the hiss of rain sweeping across it. He missed the dancing sunlight, its ever-shifting tint and hue, scudding cloud and shadow �� dappled, ruffled, heaving, waves ridden by white horses, spume streaked, fierce and shrieking. He missed its limitless, open call, its ungoverned, unchecked freedom, the pull of the horizon, an unknown shore, clarity and unfathomable deep. Most of all he missed the 'mordroz': the sound of the sea, its soothing whisper, its pounding drum, its howling fury. For the sea called to him still; it was in his blood, wanted him back, sucked at his soul, clawing, smothering, dragging him down, a restless lover, a shining temptress that could never be sated.”
― Charles Cordell, The Keys of Hell and Death

“Sometimes, when a community is comparatively homogenous and comparatively undisturbed over a long period, such a system of belief can continue, of course with development, long after material culture has progressed far beyond the level of savagery. It may then begin to turn into something more ethical, more philosophical, even more scientific; but there will be an uninterrupted continuity between this and its savage beginnings. Something like this, it would seem, happened in Egypt. That also is unlike the history of medieval thought.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image( An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)[DISCARDED IMAGE][Paperback]