Quotes about renaissance (131 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“[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 (1896–1980) British politician; founder of the British Union of Fascists

Excerpt from My Life by Oswald Mosley (1968), Ch.16.

Death , People , World

“I am awaiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder”

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919) American artist, writer and activist

“The apartments of the rich are cabinets of curiosities: a conglomeration of classical antiquity, gothic, renaissance; Louis XIII… Something from every century but our own, a predicament that has arisen in no other period… so that we seem to be subsisting on the ruins of the past, as if the end of the world were near.”

Alfred de Musset (1810–1857) French writer

This quotation is useful for explanations of the period of art nouveau, and the causes of the art movement.
Confession d'un Enfant du Siécle (1836)(translation)

World , Past

“The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"Meltdown" http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm (1994)

Intelligence , Learning

“I should not ask anything better, but when it is a question of several painters living in community life, I stipulate before everything that there must be an abbot to keep order, and that would naturally be Gauguin. That is why I would like Gauguin to be here [in Arles ] first... If I can get back the money already spent which you [Theo] have lent me for several years, we will launch out, and try to found a studio for a renaissance and not for a decadence.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Arles, Autumn 1888; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 544), p. 37
1880s, 1888

Life , Money , Communication , Question

“On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis. The split in the world is less terrible than the similarity of the disease plaguing its main sections.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Harvard University address (1978)

Life , World , Disease , Hope

“How long are the party cartel and the job carousel going to abuse our patience, when the flagship of renaissance is ready to set sail?”

Thierry Baudet (1983) Dutch writer and jurist

Quo usque tandem factionem cartellum et officiorum machina patientia nostra abutitur dum navis praetoria resurrectionis ad profiscendum parata est?
Hoelang stellen het partijkartel en de baantjescarrousel ons geduld nog op de proef terwijl het vlaggenschip van de renaissancevloot klaarligt?
60th Plenary Session of the Tweede Kamer. https://www.tweedekamer.nl/kamerstukken/plenaire_verslagen/detail/fe96bbcd-c77d-4e32-9f78-481d7921f379 Maiden speech in Parliament on 28 March 2017.
Modelled after the opening line of Cicero’s famous Catiline Orations: Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?
In English: “How long will you, Catiline, abuse our patience?”
Baudet makes several grammatical mistakes, namely, declining factio in the accusative singular factionem instead of the genitive plural factionum, conjugating abutor, abuti in the third-person singular present active indicative abutitur instead of the third-person plural present abutuntur or the third-person plural future abutentur, and declining proficiscor into the accusative gerund as *profiscendum instead of proficiscendum.
A grammatically correct version would read: Quo usque tandem factionum cartellum et officiorum machina patientia nostra abutuntur dum navis praetoria resurrectionis ad proficiscendum parata est?

Patience

“I can find inspiration from the Renaissance to the contemporary artists, but definitely the most influential movement in my career has been Street Art.”

Clandestine Culture (1970) American artist

The importance of Street Art comes from the fact that this art is available to everyone anywhere, is made from any media using any technique. Street Art lets you do whatever you want in the way you want and do it without asking anybody. This freedom is what makes Street Art unique.
http://artdistricts.com/clandestine-culture-between-street-art-and-social-activism/

Art

“To bringing about the scientific renaissance (In India) Sir Jagadish had influentially contributed. Indians are justly proud of the possession of a few men who have gained world-wide reputation in their particular fields of activity, and this pride reacts strongly on public opinion. At the Research Institute a group Indian post-graduate students devote their lives to research. The published Transactions of the Institute show that under the leadership of this eminent Bengali, Indian research is making substantial contribution to scientific knowledge, that in this field there is no fundamental difference between the Western and the Eastern mind, as was assumed when Sir Jagadish began his work.”

Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858–1937) Bengali polymath, physicist, biologist, botanist and archaeologist

By Times after the inauguration of the his research institute on 23rd November 1917.
Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose in Vijayaprasara

World , Making love , Knowledge , Men

“According to me, the influence of Sanskrit literature on our time will not be lesser than what was in the 16th century Greece's influence on Renaissance. One day, India's wisdom will flow again on Europe and will totally transform our knowledge and thought.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book The World as Will and Representation

preface of his The World as Will and Representation., quoted in Londhe, S. (2008). A tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and wisdom spanning continents and time about India and her culture. New Delhi: Pragun Publication.
The World as Will and Representation (1819; 1844; 1859)

Knowledge , Literature , Wisdom , Time

“Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.”

Edward O. Wilson (1929) American biologist

Painting , Cooking

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

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

Variant: I went to a restaurant that serves «breakfast at any time». So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.

Time

“I was looking for some sort of systematic way of getting down these subjective images and I had always admired, particularly admired the early Italian painters who proceeded the Renaissance and I very much liked some of the altarpieces in which there would be, for example the story of Christ told in a series of boxes... And it seemed to me this was a very rational method of conveying something. So I decided to try it. But I was not interested in telling, in giving something its chronological sequence. What I wanted to do was give something, to present what material I was interested in simultaneously so that you would get an instantaneous impact from it. So, I made boxes..”

Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974) American artist

Variant: I was looking for some sort of systematic way of getting down these subjective images and I had always admired, particularly admired the early Italian painters who proceeded the Renaissance and I very much liked some of the altarpieces in which there would be, for example the story of Christ told in a series of boxes... And it seemed to me this was a very rational method of conveying something. So I decided to try it. But I was not interested in telling, in giving something its chronological sequence. What I wanted to do was give something, to present what material I was interested in simultaneously so that you would get an instantaneous impact from it. So I made boxes..
Source: 1960s, Interview with Dorothy Seckler, 1967, p. 55-59.

Way , Christ , Box

“In that Renaissance (Cellini, Tintoretto, Titian..) there was an explosion of unique truthfulness, a love of painting and form... Then come the Jesuits and everything is formal; everything has to be taught and learned. It required a revolution for nature to be rediscovered; for Delacroix to paint his beach at Etratat, Corot his roman rubble, Gustave Courbet his forest scenes and his waves. And how miserable slow that revolution was, how many stages it had to go through!... These artists had not yet discovered that nature has more to do with depth than with surfaces. I can tell you, you can do things to the surface.... but by going deep you automatically go to the truth. You feel a healthy need to be truthful. You'd rather strip your canvas right down than invent or imagine a detail. You want to know.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), pp. 156-157, in: 'What he told me – I. The motif'

Love , Truth , Feeling , Imagination

“I admired and felt the anonymous structure of the work of Brancusi, Vantongerloo, Arp, and Taeuber-Arp [the wife of Hans Arp] whose studios I visited. [Kelly frequently visited Hans Arp and his wife in Paris and discussed his fresh-made art with them intensively]. Their work reinforced my own ideas for the creation of a Pré-Renaissance, European type art: its anonymous stone work, the object quality of the artifacts, the fact that the work was more important than the artist’s personality. Of the Europeans, I mostly admired the way Picasso, Klee and Brancusi 'made' their art. Contrary to what has been said about me, Mondrian and Matisse did not interest me when I was in Paris. Mondrian’s [paintings] could not be seen in Paris and when I did see them in Holland in 1953, I thought their structure too rigid and intellectual.”

Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) American painter, sculptor, and printmaker

Source: 1969 - 1980, In: "Ellsworth Kelly: Works on Paper," 1987, p. unknown : 'Notes from 1969'

Art , Way , Idea , Painting

“I'm undecided about the time we live in. This ongoing passage to oblivion. The disappearance of things you took for granted. Then there's the renaissance of things you never knew of, or presumed you'd never see again.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Friend of My Youth (2017)

Time

“In Islam's golden age, so much progress was made that it became the basis of the European Renaissance. We Muslims have to change ourselves, that's the main difference. We can't keep blaming America or Israel for our misery.”

Irshad Manji (1968) Feminist from Canada, author, journalist, activist

Süddeutsche Zeitung http://www.signandsight.com/intodaysfeuilletons/1346.html May 16, 2007

Age , Change

“Our time is Gothic in its spirit. Unlike the Renaissance, it is not dominated by a few outstanding personalities. The twentieth century has established the democracy of the intellect. In the republic of art and science there are many men who take an equally important part in the intellectual movements of our age. It is the epoch rather than the individual that is important. There is no one dominant personality like Galileo or Newton. Even in the nineteenth century there were still a few giants who outtopped all others. Today the general level is much higher than ever before in the history of the world, but there are few men whose stature immediately sets them apart from all others.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

1920s, Viereck interview (1929)

Men , Age , World , Art

“The very system of education which was deemed essential for forging bonds of unbroken alliance with the British power succeeded in unleashing revolutionary ideas and thoughts, which ultimately helped to throw off the yoke of alien rule in India. If we take a dispassionate view of what happened during the last one century, we must acknowledge that this has been an era in which good has been mixed with evil. The contact between the Indian mind and western thought and civilisation did not enslave the soul of India. In every domain of thought, in arts and architecture, in science, in history, philosophy and letters, in social services and in religious thought, great Indians gave their best, maintaining their stamp of originality as well as imbibing and assimilating fruits of western skill and knowledge. Though the number of Indians affected by such spread of knowledge was comparatively small, many of them assumed a much needed political leadership and became the instruments of agitation and mass movements, leading ultimately to the political liberation of their country. The cultural Renaissance preceded and created the silent Revolution.”

Syama Prasad Mookerjee (1901–1953) Indian politician

Speech delivered at Delhi University Convocation on 13th December 1952.

Education , Art , Soul , History

“The same Jewry now is seeking to smirch Germany's renaissance.”

Ernst Hanfstaengl (1887–1975) German businessman

Quoted in "Nazis in the News" - Mar 5, 1933

“The Renaissance discovery of nature was an invention of nineteenth-century liberalism which played off the Renaissance delight in nature against the Middle Ages, in order to strike a blow at the romantic philosophy of history. For when Burckhardt says that the ‘discovery of the world and of man’was an achievement of the Renaissance, this thesis is, at the same time, an attack on romantic reaction and an attempt to ward off the propaganda designed to spread the romantic view of medieval culture. The doctrine of the spontaneous naturalism of the Renaissance comes from the same source as the theory that the fight against the spirit of authority and hierarchy, the ideal of freedom of thought and freedom of conscience, the emancipation of the individual and the principle of democracy, are achievements of the fifteenth century. In all this the light of the modern age is contrasted with the darkness of the Middle Ages.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

Source: The Social History of Art', Volume II. Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque, 1999, Chapter 1. The Concept of the Renaissance

Age , World , Democracy , History

“Neither Watt's steam engine nor Whitney's standardized parts really started the Industrial Revolution, although each has been awarded that claim, in the past. The real start was the awakening of scientific and technological thoughts during the Renaissance, with the idea that the lawful behavior of nature can be understood, analyzed, and manipulated to accomplish useful ends. That idea itself, alone, was not enough, however, for not until the creation and evolution of blueprints was it possible to express exactly how power and parts were to be combined for each specific task at hand.”

Douglas T. Ross (1929–2007) American computer scientist

Source: Structured analysis (SA): A language for communicating ideas (1977), p. 16.

Law , Behavior , Idea , Nature

“All the art since the Renaissance seemed too men-oriented. I liked (the) object quality. An Egyptian pyramid, a Sung vase, the Romanesque church appealed to me. The forms found in the vaulting of a cathedral or even a splatter of tar on the road seemed more valid and instructive and a more voluptuous experience than either geometric or action painting.”

Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) American painter, sculptor, and printmaker

Source: 1969 - 1980, In: "Ellsworth Kelly: Works on Paper," 1987, p. 9 : 'Notes from 1969'

Men , Art , Painting

“Modern art has led me to the comprehension and appreciation of Indian painting and sculpture. It seems paradoxical but I know for certain that had we not come away to Europe, I should perhaps never have realised that a fresco from Ajanta or a small piece of sculpture in the Musee Guimet is worth more than a whole Renaissance.”

Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941) Hungarian Indian artist

In 1934 on her new art form
Sikh Heritage,Amrita Shergil

Art , Painting

“The ways of thinking implanted by electronic culture are very different from those fostered by print culture. Since the Renaissance most methods and procedures have strongly tended towards stress on the visual organization of knowledge.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

1990s and beyond, "The Agenbite of Outwit" (1998)

Way , Knowledge , Thinking

“And for me Michelangelo's greatest work is one that was in his studio partly finished, partly unfinished when he died 'The Rondanini Pietà'. I don't know of any other single work of art by anyone that is more poignant, more moving. It isn't the most powerful of Michelangelo's works – it's a mixture, in fact, of two styles…. the changing became so drastic that I think he knocked the head off the sculpture… So the figure must originally have been a good deal taller. And if we see also the proportion of the length of the body of Christ compared with the length of the legs, there's no doubt that the whole top of the original sculpture has been cut away. Now this to me is a great question. Why should I and other sculptors I know, my contemporaries – I think that Giacometti feels this, I know Marino Marini feels it – find this work one of the most moving and greatest works we know of when it's a work which has such disunity in it?… But that's so moving, so touching: the position of the heads, the whole tenderness of the top part of the sculpture, is in my opinion more what it is by being in contrast with the rather finished, tough, leathery, typical Michelangelo legs. The top part is Gothic and the lower part is sort of Renaissance.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Quote of Henri Moore in his interview with David Silvester, in 'The Sunday Times Magazine', 16 Febr. 1964, pp. 18, 20-22
1955 - 1970

Art , Feeling , Question , Thinking

“In the Renaissance there is much light, yes, and there is much in it with which Italians may share national pride. But there is much darkness. For the Renaissance is also the age of individualism, that through the splendid visions of poetry and art brought the Italian nation to the indifference, skepticism, and distracted cynicism of those who have nothing to defend, not in their family, their Fatherland, or in the world where every human personality conscious of its own value and personal dignity invest itself.”

Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944) Italian neo-Hegelian Idealist philosopher and politician

Che cosa è il fascismo: Discorsi e polemiche (“What is Fascism?”), Florence: Vallecchi, (1925) pp. 13-16

Age , World , Family , Art

“There is little in common between the organised parading of madness in the eighteenth century and the freedom with which madness came to the fore during the Renaissance. The earlier age had found it everywhere, an integral element of each experience, both in images and in real life dangers. During the classical period, it was also on public view, but behind bars. When it manifested itself it was at a carefully controlled distance, under the watchful eye of a reason that denied all kinship with it, and felt quite unthreatened by any hint of resemblance. Madness had become a thing to be observed, no longer the monster within, but an animal moved by strange mechanisms, more beast than man, where all humanity had long since disappeared.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Part One: 5. The Insane
History of Madness (1961)

Life , Age , Freedom , Animals

“The most beautiful discoveries since the Renaissance, indeed since the beginnings of all science, are the laws governing light, whether moving through a uniform medium, or being reflected from an opaque surface, or changing direction upon entering another transparent medium.”

Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759) French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters

Accord de différentes loix de la nature qui avoient jusqu’ici paru incompatibles (1744)

Law , Beauty , Light , Science

“Although German writers may sometimes have mispraised or overpraised their greatest mediaeval poet, it is certain that we find in Wolfram von Eschenbach qualities, which, in the thousand years between the Fall and the Renaissance of classical literature, can be found to anything like the same extent in only two known writers, the Italian Dante and the Englishman Langland; while if he is immensely Dante's inferior in poetical quality, he has at least one gift, humour, which Dante had not, and is far Langland's superior in variety and in romantic charm.”

Wolfram von Eschenbach (1170–1220) German knight and poet

George Saintsbury The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1897) p. 251.
Criticism

Literature

“The new vision of man and politics was never taken by its founders to be splendid. Naked man, gripped by fear or industriously laboring to provide the wherewithal for survival, is not an apt subject for poetry. They self-consciously chose low but solid ground. Civil societies dedicated to the end of self-preservation cannot be expected to provide fertile soil for the heroic and inspired. They do not require or encourage the noble. What rules and sets the standards of respectability and emulation is not virtue or wisdom. The recognition of the humdrum and prosaic character of life was intended to play a central role in the success of real politics. And the understanding of human nature which makes this whole project feasible, if believed in, clearly forms a world in which the higher motives have no place. One who holds the “economic” view of man cannot consistently believe in the dignity of man or in the special status of art and science. The success of the enterprise depends precisely on this simplification of man. And if there is a solution to the human problems, there is no tragedy. There was no expectation that, after the bodily needs are taken care of, man would have a spiritual renaissance—and this for two reasons: (1) men will always be mortal, which means that there can be no end to the desire for immortality and to the quest for means to achieve it; and (2) the premise of the whole undertaking is that man’s natural primary concern is preservation and prosperity; the regimes founded on nature take man as he is naturally and will make him ever more natural. If his motives were to change, the machinery that makes modern government work would collapse.”

Allan Bloom (1930–1992) American philosopher, classicist, and academician

“Commerce and Culture,” p. 284.
Giants and Dwarfs (1990)

Life , Wisdom , Men , World

“For a thousand years, the Bible was almost the only book people read, if they could read at all. The stories that were officially told and portrayed were Biblical and religious stories. That other fount of Western civilization as we know it today — the Greek classics — went largely unknown until the Renaissance. For our purposes, there's a noteworthy difference between these two literatures: in the Bible people are hardly ever said to be mad as such, whereas in Greek drama they go off their rockers with alarming frequency. It was the rediscovery of the classics that stimulated the long procession of literary madpeople of the past four hundred years.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For (1997)

People , Books , Literature , Reading

“There are two very attractive facts about Ghazwah-tal Hind. The first is that, a Muslim, who participates in it with Iman and sincerity, to support the Truth and to subdue falsehood, will be declared as free from Jahannam by Allah‑swt. If he is killed in it, he will be included in the most chosen of the Shuhada and if he lives, he will receive the certificate of freedom from Jahannam. Secondly; Although it will be a very intense and protracted war, it will end in victory for Islam and the Muslims. Pakistan will no longer remain a small Muslim country but the entire al-Hind will turn into an Islamic state. The Renaissance of Islam will commence here and Truth will prevail over the entire world.”

Ameer Muhammad Akram Awan (1934–2017) Pakistani Sufi leader

War , Truth , World , Support

“It seemed strange to me that someone who painted big, scary abstractions should have been so commonsensical in her literary tastes, though later I would discover that twelve-tone composers read Keats just as experimental poets listened to Glenn Miller — few people are avant-garde outside their own domain.I suppose that as Midwesterners, the children of chemical engineers and homemakers, we experienced the arts as so foreign, even so preposterously unreasonable, that once we’d decided to embrace them we did so with lots of conviction and little discrimination. Surely it was no accident that T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, the two great poetic synthesists of our day, the very men who had ransacked all of world culture and could refer in the same poem to the Buddha and to Sophocles or to Confucius and to Jefferson — it was no accident that they were both from the heartland. Public-library intellectuals, magpies of knowledge, like most autodidacts we were incapable of evaluating our sources. As a teen-ager, I tried to write verse like Milton’s; later, I wanted to write novels like Nabokov’s. In a novel I wrote in college, I imitated Evelyn Waugh. If someone had said to me, "But do you, the graceless son of a Cincinnati broker of chemical equipment, do you seriously imagine that you can just write a Renaissance Christian epic or something in the style of a Cambridge-educated Russian aristocrat or of the spokesman of the Bright Young Things of London circa 1925?"”

Edmund White (1940) American novelist and LGBT essayist

if someone had spoken like this to me, I wouldn’t even have understood his point.
My Women.The New Yorker https://archive.is/20121204150452/www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050613fa_fact 6 June 2005
Articles and Interviews

Men , Children , People , World

“Renaissance Italy became a kind of Hollywood collection of sets of antiquity, and the new visual antiquarianism of the Renaissance provided an avenue to power for men of any class.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 136

Men

“O'Connell: Which sporting nation would you like to see have a renaissance?”

Stuart Hall (1929–2014) sociologist and cultural theorist

BBC Fighting Talk (2005)

Sport

“[in Italian Renaissance] there was no 'subject-matter'. What we call subject matter now, was then painting itself. Subject matter came later on when parts of those works were taken out arbitrarily, when a man for no reason is sitting, standing or lying down. He became a bather, she became a bather; she was reclining; he just stood there looking ahead. That is when the posing in painting began… For really, when you think of all the life and death problems in the art of Renaissance, who cares if a Chevalier is laughing or that a young girl has a red blouse on.”

Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Dutch painter

The Renaissance and Order Trans/formation 1, 1951; as quoted in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 113.
1950's

Life , Death , Art , Girl

“There is not a canvas of that time that does not foreshadow the overthrow of the foundations on which the human race thought itself firmly established, where it felt itself secure. At the moment when the Ballets Russes were at their height, when the Neo-Impressionists and Fauves had dispensed with the drawing style of the Renaissance because it could not contain the purity of the colour - these humbly painted, angular, grey, ascetic pictures were, really, an unwelcome sight. It was not any upheaval of a geological nature that they prefigured, but a cataclysm in the human order. No tremor of the earth was registered, but a tremor of the spirit that disturbed the intellect of civilised man, too long the slave of his immobilised senses. At last he was beginning to suspect that something dangerous was approaching.”

Albert Gleizes (1881–1953) French painter

after 1920, The Epic, From immobile form to mobile form (1925)

Nature , Sense , Time , Drawing

“The basic hypothesis is that, while the total supply of entrepreneurs varies among societies, the productive contribution of the society's entrepreneurial activities varies much more because of their allocation between productive activities such as innovation and largely unproductive activities such as rent seeking or organized crime. This allocation is heavily influenced by the relative payoffs society offers to such activities. This implies that policy can influence the allocation of entrepreneurship more effectively than it can influence its supply. Historical evidence from ancient Rome, early China, and the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Europe is used to investigate the hypotheses.”

William J. Baumol (1922–2017) American economist

Source: "Entrepreneurship: Productive, unproductive, and destructive," 1996, p. 3

Age

“In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love and five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!”

Orson Welles (1915–1985) American actor, director, writer and producer

As the character Harry Lime in the film The Third Man (1949).

Love , Peace , Democracy

“Yes. There was a period when I tried to avoid looking at Greek – and Renaissance – sculpture of any kind; when I thought that the Greek and Renaissance were the enemy and that one had to throw all that over and start again from the beginning of primitive art. It's only in the last ten or fifteen years that I've begun to know how wonderful the elgin Marbles are.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Quote from 'Henry Moore', an interview by Donald, in 'Horizon', New York, Nov. 1960
1955 - 1970

Art

“When reading the Renaissance authors who spread their religious ideas by laughter rather than by thumbscrew and stake, we find that they do not limit themselves to the few places in Scripture where laughter is presented as desirable and good. Both theology and their own sense of fun lead them to find laughter from one end of the Bible to the other.”

Michael Andrew Screech (1926–2018)

Source: Laughter at the Foot of the Cross (1998), p. xxii

Idea , Sense , Laughter , Reading

“The Renaissance was a time of mercenary soldiers, ours is a time of mercenary labor.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Before the Sabbath (1979)

Time

“As far as women are concerned, they seem always to have been more clean than the men, except when men painted them in colors which men liked best. Perhaps society was actually cleaner in the thirteenth century than in the sixteenth, as Saint Louis was more decent than Francis I, and as the bath was habitual in the twelfth century and exceptional in the renaissance.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

Women , Men , Color , Painting

“In its most general form, confinement was explained, or at least justified, by a will to avoid scandal. It thereby signalled an important change in the consciousness of evil. The Renaissance had let unreason in all its forms come out into the light of day, as public exposure gave evil the chance to redeem itself and to serve as an exemplum.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Part One: 5. The Insane
History of Madness (1961)

Light , Evil , Change , Chance

“I do not believe that history is writ clear and unchallengeable. It doesn't just happen. History is made by people: its movement depends on small currents as well as great tides, on ideas, perceptions, will and courage, the ability to sense a trend, the will to act on understanding and intuition. It is up to us to give intellectual content and political direction to these new dissatisfactions with socialism in practice, with its material and moral failures, we must convert disillusion into understanding. If we fail, the tide will be lost. But if it is taken, the last quarter of our century can initiate a new renaissance matching anything in our island's long and outstanding history.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to the Zurich Economic Society “The New Renaissance” (14 March 1977) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/103336
Leader of the Opposition

People , History , Idea , Failure

“[On the question: 'What was your main stylistic influence up to this time']: The Renaissance chiefly - Piero, Mantegna, Uccello - but I was attracted also by the modern idioms - Léger, Picasso - and was close to the abstract painters on the project such as Stuart Davis, Burgoyne Diller, Arshile Gorky, Balcomb Greene, etc. At the time I did the Queens project, there was already a marked change in my work - it was becoming more concerned with cubist concepts of treating space.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

n.p.
1961 - 1980, Oral history interview with Philip Guston, 1965 January 29

Question , Change , Time

“History knew a midnight, which we may estimate at about the year 1000 A. D., when the human race lost the arts and sciences even to the memory. The last twilight of paganism was gone, and yet the new day had not begun. Whatever was left of culture in the world was found only in the Saracens, and a Pope eager to learn studied in disguise in their unversities, and so became the wonder of the West. At last Christendom, tired of praying to the dead bones of the martyrs, flocked to the tomb of the Saviour Himself, only to find for a second time that the grave was empty and that Christ was risen from the dead. Then mankind too rose from the dead. It returned to the activities and the business of life; there was a feverish revival in the arts and in the crafts. The cities flourished, a new citizenry was founded. Cimabue rediscovered the extinct art of painting; Dante, that of poetry. Then it was, also, that great courageous spirits like Abelard and Saint Thomas Aquinas dared to introduce into Catholicism the concepts of Aristotelian logic, and thus founded scholastic philosophy. But when the Church took the sciences under her wing, she demanded that the forms in which they moved be subjected to the same unconditioned faith in authority as were her own laws. And so it happened that scholasticism, far from freeing the human spirit, enchained it for many centuries to come, until the very possibility of free scientific research came to be doubted. At last, however, here too daylight broke, and mankind, reassured, determined to take advantage of its gifts and to create a knowledge of nature based on independent thought. The dawn of the day in history is know as the Renaissance or the Revival of Learning.”

Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi (1804–1851) German mathematician

"Über Descartes Leben und seine Methode die Vernunft Richtig zu Leiten und die Wahrheit in den Wissenschaften zu Suchen," "About Descartes' Life and Method of Reason.." (Jan 3, 1846) C. G. J. Jacobi's Gesammelte werke Vol. 7 https://books.google.com/books?id=_09tAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA309 p.309, as quoted by Tobias Dantzig, Number: The Language of Science (1930).

Life , World , Faith , Law

“The belief that science destroys culture is sometimes supported by historical statements that the arts have flourished only when the sciences have been neglected. This thesis is… directly contrary to history… [I]n the great age of Greece, art and science penetrate one another more closely than in any modern age. …The example of these men in science as much as in art set the modern world afire in the Renaissance. And the type and symbol of Renaissance man… remains Leonardo da Vinci, painter, sculptor, mathematician, and engineer. No man has shown more strikingly the universality and the unity of the intellect.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

"Sense and Sensibility"
The Common Sense of Science (1951)

Men , Age , World , Art

“The Sheikh has departed, may God have mercy on him, to his God as a martyr and we must continue on his path of jihad to expel the invaders from the land of Muslims and to purify it from injustice. Today, and thanks to God, America is not facing an individual or a group, but a rebelling nation, which has awoken from its sleep in a jihadist renaissance.”

Ayman al-Zawahiri (1951) Egyptian physician, Islamic theologian and leader of al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda posts fresh warning from al-Zawahiri to US, June 20, 2011, June 8, 2011, BBC News http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-13696051,

God , Sleep

“As for Lucrezia, there wasn't even a rumor in her own day that the strawberries at her Wednesday luncheons were dipped in sugar of lead and the other dishes tastefully sprayed with antimony, hellebore, corrosive sublimate, and deadly nightshade, all popular Renaissance flavors.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950), Part III: Strange Bedfellows, Lucrezia Borgia

“The culture-its excess-really suited me. I always liked Indian miniature painting much more than Renaissance painting. I didn't see what was so great about Rembrandt or Michelangelo. I liked paintings where there were 10,000 people in the scene and elephants and horses! I liked the carvings on Indian temples so much more than the simple architectural outlines.”

Wendy Doniger (1940) American Indologist

On the cultural aspect of India.
Q&A with Wendy Doniger, the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor and author of The Hindus

People , Horse , Painting

“In Romanticism, unlike the Renaissance, Amazons retain their power. Rousseau wants it both ways. Idolizing women is natural and right, a cosmic law. On the other hand, male recessiveness is blamed on female coercion. Either way, sadomasochistic dominance and submission are inherent in Rousseausism from the start.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 232

Women , Law , Way , Nature

“The renaissance of New York City has been built on a foundation of crime reduction, and for the last four years, Howard Safir has worked tirelessly to increase safety and the quality of life for all New Yorkers. The extent to which he's succeeded—on his watch, crime is down by 38%, and homicide by 44%—is not only remarkable, it's a testament to his skill and dedication. During Howard's tenure, the Department reduced crime by more than it has under any other Police Commissioner. Howard has enjoyed a long and distinguished career in law enforcement. I wish him the best as he begins this new chapter in his life.”

Howard Safir (1941)

Rudolph Giuliani, then-Mayor of New York City, announcing the resignation of Howard Safir as New York City Police Commissioner.
[Archives of the Mayor's Press Office, http://www.nyc.gov/html/om/html/2000b/pr307-00.html, Release #307-00 - MAYOR GIULIANI AND POLICE COMMISSIONER SAFIR ANNOUNCE THAT SAFIR IS LEAVING THE NEW YORK CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT, The City of New York, 2000-08-09, 2007-12-20]
About

Life , Law

“The renaissance of Jew-hate in America has effectively split the Jewish community between an overwhelmingly liberal majority and the pro-Trump minority. There are now just two kinds of Jews in America. And one of them voted for Trump.”

Bradley Burston israeli journalist

Trump's Win, the Greatest Victory for anti-Semitism in America Since 1941 (2016)

Hate , Communication

“Computers and music are converging in a new era of digital Renaissance as more and more musicians such as will. i. am are learning how to code while an increasing number of software programmers are learning how to play music.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Digital Da Vinci: Computers in Music, 2014

Music , Learning

“Spiritually we are at ground zero, sunk, bored to perdition. All our arts prove it. Since the renaissance, so mechanized, we repeat with almost futile variants the same hackneyed sentimentalities (we call them eternal values!) Love! Re-love No Love! More Love!”

Louis-ferdinand Céline (1894–1961) French writer

102
L'Ecole des cadavres (1938)

Love , Art

“The causes of Jewish renaissance and pluralism inform much of my work. My goal is to build a Jewish future by working to form a knowledgeable, proud and welcoming Jewish community throughout the world.”

Edgar Bronfman, Sr. (1929–2013) Canadian-American businessman

Giving Pledge.

World , Communication , Knowledge , Future

“It is from.... Renaissance that individualism in painting dates; and I do not believe there is any use in looking in this direction if we desire to bring into being a fresh mural art, one that shall be at once popular, collective and contemporary.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Quote from The New Realism goes on, F. Léger, Art Front, February 1937 pp. 7-8
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1930's

Art , Painting

“During the hundreds of years since the glorious age of Greece, various views have been held about the Modern Greeks. Europeans of the Middle Ages and Renaissance times may have assumed that the Modern Greeks were the descendants of the Ancients hut they were far from regarding this as implying any continuity of character, let alone imposing any obligation. To be Greek was to be a drunkard, a lecher, and, especially, a cheat, It never seems to have occurred to the men who issued the calls to join in the defence of Byzantium, for example, to suggest that they were aiding the descendants of Pericles. Nor as Christians did the Western Europeans (of whatever sect) feel any instinctive sympathy for the schismatic Christians of the Orthodox Church.”

William St Clair (1937) author

Source: That Greece Might Still be Free (1972), p. 15-16.

Men , Age , Feeling , Time

“.. these reproductions were in Zwemmer's bookshop [in the 1920's]. I can see them now. They were black. There was one on Negro sculpture, one on Mexican sculpture, one on an Egyptian sculpture, and so on. And all these I knew. And in one of them was this small reproduction of the Chac Mool [famous Toltec-Maya sculpture]. It was the pose that struck me – this idea of a figure being on its back and turned upwards to the sky instead of lying on its side, which is a different sort of idea from the Renaissance, or Greek reclining figure, which is usually on its side. And this gave me all sorts of chances of making variations on it.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Quote from The Donald Caroll interviews, Talmy Franklin, London 1973, p. 377
1970 and later

Lying , Idea , Chance

“lf l am not mistaken, the words "art" and "artist" did not exist during the Renaissance and before: there were simply architects, sculptors, and painters, practicing a trade.”

M. C. Escher (1898–1972) Dutch graphic artist

1950's, On Being a Graphic Artist', 1953

Art

“Development of Western Science is based on two great achievements, the invention of the formal logical system (in Euclidean geometry) by the Greek philosophers, and the discovery of the possibility to find out causal relationships by systematic experiment (Renaissance). In my opinion one has not to be astonished that the Chinese sages have not made these steps. The astonishing thing is that these discoveries were made at all.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Letter to J.S. Switzer (23 April 1953), quoted in The Scientific Revolution: a Hstoriographical Inquiry By H. Floris Cohen (1994), p. 234 http://books.google.com/books?id=wu8b2NAqnb0C&lpg=PP1&pg=PA234#v=onepage&q&f=false, and also partly quoted in The Ultimate Quotable Einstein edited by Alice Calaprice (2010), p. 405 http://books.google.com/books?id=G_iziBAPXtEC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA405#v=onepage&q&f=false
1950s

Science

“As indicated by its title "A History of Great Ideas in Abnormal Psychology", this book is not just concerned with the chronology of events or with biographical details of great psychiatrists and psychopathologists. It has as its main interest, a study of the ideas underlying theories about mental illness and mental health in the Western world. These are studied according to their historical development from ancient times to the twentieth century.
The book discusses the history of ideas about the nature of mental illness, its causation, its treatment and also social attitudes towards mental illness. The conceptions of mental illness are discussed in the context of philosophical ideas about the human mind and the medical theories prevailing in different periods of history. Certain perennial controversies are presented such as those between the psychological and organic approaches to the treatment of mental illness, and those between the focus on disease entities (nosology) versus the focus on individual personalities. The beliefs of primitive societies are discussed, and the development of early scientific ideas about mental illness in Greek and Roman times. The study continues through the medieval age to the Renaissance. More emphasis is then placed on the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, the enlightenment of the eighteenth, and the emergence of modern psychological and psychiatric ideas concerning psychopathology in the twentieth century.”

Thaddus E. Weckowicz (1919–2000) Canadian psychologist

Introduction text.
A History of Great Ideas in Abnormal Psychology, (1990)

Health , Books , Age , World

“Recognition that art was located in an interactive system rather than residing in a material object… provid[ed] a discipline as central to an art of interactivity as anatomy and perspective had been to the renaissance vision.”

Roy Ascott (1934) British academic

“Interactive Art,” unpublished manuscript, 1994, p. 3; as cited in: Edward A. Shanken. " Cybernetics and Art: Cultural Convergence in the 1960s http://www.responsivelandscapes.com/readings/CyberneticsArtCultConv.pdf." 2002

Art

“Happy in the time of Jesus were those who wept! Happy, now, are those who can laugh, because laughter is the attribute of man, as the great prophet of the Renaissance, Rabelais, said. Laughter is forbearance; laughter is philosophy. The heavens clear when they laugh, and the great secret of divine omnipotence resides in an eternal smile!”

Eliphas Levi (1810–1875) French writer

Book Two: The Royal Mystery or the Art of Subduing the Powers, Chapter V: The Outer Darkness
The Great Secret: or Occultism Unveiled

Secret , Smile , Laughter , Time

“The great stoic Seneca repeatedly urged his fellow Romans to retire in order to “find themselves,” as we might put it. In the Renaissance, as in ancient Rome, it was part of the well-managed life. You had your period of civic business, then you withdrew to discover what life was really about and to being the long process of preparing for death. Montaigne developed reservations about the second part of this, but there is no doubt about his interest in contemplating life. He wrote: “Let us cut loose from all the ties that bind us to others; let us win from ourselves the power to live really alone and to live that way at our ease.””

Sarah Bakewell book How to Live

Source: How to Live, or, A Life of Montaigne in one Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (2010), p. 29.

Life , Death , Way , Business

“[O]ne reason there is no socialism in America is because of Lincoln. In the American context Lincoln imparted to liberal democracy a sense of nobility and purpose that it has not always had in other contexts. He makes democracy something transcendent, and especially at Gettysburg where he talks about the nation having this new birth of freedom. He ratchets the horizons of liberal democracy right up past the spires of Cologne Cathedral and he makes it this glowing attractive ideal that people are willing to make these tremendous sacrifices to protect. Because at the end of the day this is what the Civil War is about—it’s about the preservation of liberal democracy. In the 1860s the United States was the last Enlightenment experiment that was still standing. What you had in the climate of mid-19th century Europe was the renaissance of romantic aristocracy.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Interview with Tom Mackaman (2013)

War , People , Democracy , Birth

“There is little abstract art, today, and what there is is stammering and imperfect. It is an attempt to let the world speak for itself, instead of reporting the speech of mind excited by their picture of the world. The Greek, The Gothic, and the Renaissance artist set forth the world the way he saw it, felt it, and wished to have it; man wished above all to be nourished by art; he achieved his desire but sacrificed everything else to this one aim: to construct homunculus, to substitute knowledge for strength and skill for spirit. The ape aped his creator. He learned to put art itself to the ends of trade..”

Franz Marc (1880–1916) German painter

Source: 1915 - 1916, 100 Aphorisms', Franz Marc (1915), p. 445

World , Art , Way , Knowledge

“I was glad to get away from those students when I was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study in London. I found myself in the British Museum, at first content, reading English Renaissance literature. But then came the crisis: the domed silence; the dusty pages of books all around me; the days accumulating in lists of obsequious footnotes; the wandering doubts about the value of scholarship. My year in Britain came to an end and I rushed to ‘come home.’ Then quickly discovered that I could not. Could not cast off the culture I had assumed. Living with my parents for the summer, I remained an academic—a kind of anthropologist in the family kitchen, searching for evidence of our ‘cultural ties’ as we ate dinner together.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

Books , Family , Home , Search

“How wonderful the Doges' palace is! That pink and white marble must have been a bit cold at first, but it was magical for me, seeing it gilded by several centuries of sunlight! And the basilica of San Marco! That was what converted me from those cold Italian Renaissance churches.... as soon as one goes into San Marco one feels one is in a real place of worship – that gentle filtered light and those magnificent mosaics and the great Byzantine Christ with the grey aureole! If one hasn't been in San Marco it is impossible to imagine the beauty of heavy pillars and columns without any moulding!”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) French painter and sculptor

Source: 1880's, Renoir – his life and work, 1975, p. 161-162 : (1882), in a letter to Vollard

Beauty , Feeling , Imagination , Light

“To approach Bach, one has to realize that 100 years after Bach’s death, Bach and his music totally had been forgotten. Even while he was still alive, Bach himself believed in the polyphonic power and the resulting symmetric architectures of well-proportioned music. But this had been an artificial truth - even for him. Other composers, including his sons, already composed in another style, where they found other ideals and brought them to new solutions. The spirit of the time already had changed while Bach was still alive. A hundred years later, it was Mendelssohn who about 1850 discovered Bach anew with the performance of the St. Matthew Passion. Now a new renaissance began, and the world learned to know the greatness of Bach. To become acquainted with Bach, many transcriptions were done. But the endeavors in rediscovering Bach had been - stylistically - in a wrong direction. Among these were the orchestral transcriptions of Leopold Stokowski, and the organ interpretations of the multitalented Albert Schweitzer, who, one has to confess, had a decisive effect on the rediscovery of Bach. All performances had gone in the wrong direction: much too romantic, with a false knowledge of historic style, the wrong sound, the wrong rubato, and so on. The necessity of artists like Rosalyn Tureck and Glenn Gould - again 100 years later - has been understandable: The radicalism of Glenn Gould pointed out the real clarity and the internal explosions of the power-filled polyphony in the best way. This extreme style, called by many of his critics refrigerator interpretations, however really had been necessary to demonstrate the right strength to bring out the architecture in the right manner, which had been lost so much before. I’m convinced that the style Glenn Gould played has been the right answer. But there has been another giant: it was no less than Helmut Walcha who, also beginning in the 1950, started his legendary interpretations for the DG-Archive productions of the complete organ-work cycle on historic organs (Silbermann, Arp Schnitger). Also very classical in strength of speed and architectural proportions, he pointed out the polyphonic structures in an enlightened but moreover especially humanistic way, in a much more smooth and elegant way than Glenn Gould on the piano. Some years later it was Virgil Fox who acquainted the U. S. with tours of the complete Bach cycle, which certainly was effective in its own way, but much more modern than Walcha. The ranges of Bach interpretations had become wide, and there were the defenders of the historical style and those of the much more modern romantic style. Also the performances of the orchestral and cantata Bach had become extreme: on one side, for example, Karl Richter, who used a big and rich-toned orchestra; on the other side Helmut Rilling, whose Bach was much more historically oriented.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings on Bach

Death , Truth , World , Music

“You represent a large nation of believers that knows what the Bible is, and it is your duty to pass on the message that the Jewish people deserve a renaissance, and a little respect - to live in this land.”

Shlomo Amar (1948) Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem

To Pope Benedict XVI. http://web.archive.org/web/20090514024448/http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1084958.html (12/05/2009)

People

“I have now reached the point where I can look over the great art of antiquity and its Renaissance. But, for myself, I cannot find any artistic connection with our own times. And to want to create something outside of one's own age strikes me as suspect. Great perplexity. This is why I am again all on the side of satire. Am I to be completely absorbed by it once more? For the time being it is my only creed. Perhaps I shall never become positive? In any case, I will defend myself like a wild beast.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote (1901), # 294, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, translation: Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y. Zachary and Max Knight; publisher, University of California Press, 1964
1895 - 1902

Age , Art , Time

“Modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age we're living in... All cultures have had means and techniques of expressing their immediate aims – the Chinese, the Renaissance, all cultures. The thing that interests me is that today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. Most modern painters work from a different source, they work from within.”

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) American artist

Source: 1950's, Interview by William Wright, Summer 1950, p. 140

Age , Art

“I was attracted to Romanesque sculptures, to the complete re-invented figures and the freedom with which the Romanesque artist constructed them. He does not copy, he creates in a totally anti-Renaissance fashion can say that in Romanesque sculpture I have found a starting point for distortion.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Kunst und Zeugnis, Dora Vallier, Zürich 1967, p. 67
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1960's

Fashion , Freedom

“In the writings of such "pagan" philosophers as Plutarch and Porphyry we find a humanitarian ethic of the most exalted kind, which, after undergoing a long repression during medieval churchdom, reappeared, albeit but weakly and fitfully at first, in the literature of the Renaissance, to be traced more definitely in the eighteenth century school of "sensibility." But it was not until after the age of Rousseau, from which must be dated the great humanitarian movement of the past century, that Vegetarianism began to assert itself as a system, a reasoned plea for the disuse of flesh-food.”

Henry Stephens Salt (1851–1939) British activist

The Humanities of Diet

Age , School , Food , Literature

“We're worth a lot of dough. Whatever you see is antiques. This thing here. This is from — I don't remember exactly. I think it's the Renaissance or the Magna Carta or something. But that's where it's from.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

Small Time Crooks (2001).

Thinking

“Algebra in the Renaissance period received its first serious consideration in Pacioli's Sūma (1494)… which characterized in a careless way the knowledge… thus far accumulated. By the aid of the crude symbolism then in use it gave a considerable amount of work in equations.
The noteworthy work… and the first to be devoted entirely to the subject, was Rudolff's Coss (1525). This work made no decided advance in the theory, but it improved the symbolism for radicals and made the science better known in Germany. Stiffel's edition of this work (1553-1554) gave the subject still more prominence.
The first epoch-making algebra to appear in print was the Ars Magna of Cardan (1545). The next great work… to appear in print was the General Trattato of Tartaglia…”

David Eugene Smith (1860–1944) American mathematician

Source: History of Mathematics (1925) Vol.2, p. 384; Ch. 6: Algebra

Way , Knowledge , Appearance , Science

“The results of Socrates' martyrdom and Plato's unexcelled prose that followed are nothing less than the whole world of Western man as we know it. If the idea of truth had been allowed to perish unrediscovered by the Renaissance it's unlikely that we would be much beyond the level of prehistoric man today. The ideas of science and technology and other systematically organized efforts of man are dead-centered on it. It is the nucleus of it all.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29

Truth , World , Idea , Effort

“I was reading about and looking at Mantegna [Italian early-Renaissance painter]. I can sense how good he is for me. His enormous plasticity - it has such powerful substance. That is just what is lacking in my things. I could do something about that if I could add his substantiality to the greatness of form I'm struggling for. At present I see before my eyes very simple and barely articulated things. My second major stumbling is my lack of intimacy. Mackensen's [her former teacher] way of portraying the people here is not great enough for me, too genre like. Whoever could, ought to capture them in runic script..”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

excerpt of her Journal, Worpswede 1898; as quoted in Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 197
1898

People , Way , Sense , Teachers

“Among the ancient painters, the Tuscan's are the ones that interest me more: above all Giotto and Massacio [in early Renaissance]. Of the modern painters I think that Corot, Courbet, Fattori, and Cezanne are the most legitimate heirs to the glorious Italian tradition.”

Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) Italian painter

Quote from an article in the Bolognese fascist magazine 'L'Assalto', 18 Febr. 1928; as cited in 'Morandi 1894 – 1964', published by Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, ed: M. C. Bandera & R. Miracco - 2008; p. 107
1925 - 1945

Thinking

“It is indeed a striking thought that the same region of central Italy twice, in the shape of ancient Etruria and modern Tuscany, been the source of civilization in Italy. Since the seventh century BC and from the fifteenth century onwards, in the dawn of antiquity as well as at the beginning of modern times, the same region of the peninsula has been distinguished by exceptional qualities. The birth and re-birth or Renaissance of Italy had the same cradle.”

Jacques Heurgon (1903–1995) French historian and classical philologist

Source: Daily life of the Etruscans (1964), p. 9

Birth , Time

“I can only explain to some artists, who would be my collaborators and not my pupils, the method by which, in my opinion, one becomes a painter, by which I myself have tried to become one since my earliest days, leaving to each person the complete control of his individuality, the full liberty of his own expression in the application of this method. To achieve this aim, the organization of a communal studio, recalling those extremely fruitful collaborations of the studios of the Renaissance, could certainly be useful and contribute to the opening of the era of modern painting.”

Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) French painter

1860s, Realist Manifesto' - an open letter, 1861

Communication , Painting , Personality

“The whole Renaissance tradition is antipathic to me. The hard-and-fast rules of perspective which it succeeded in imposing on art were a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress; Cézanne and after him Picasso and myself can take a lot of credit for this.... scientific perspective forces the objects in a picture to disappear away from the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach as painting should.”

Georges Braque (1882–1963) French painter and sculptor

1946 - 1963, interview with John Richardson' (1957)

Art , Painting

“In Italy, for thirty 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 five hundred years of democracy and peace - and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Graham Greene book The Third Man

The Third Man (1949)

Love , Peace , Democracy

“But when the artist abandons visible appearance, as in Mondrian's black grids on white grounds filled with balancing rectangles of colour, many people feel left behind. And yet the rhythms of Mondrian are those of nature. The harmonies are those which guided proportion in classical buildings and Renaissance churches. Rothko's glowing maroon Seagram Murals at the Tate may, like Turner's late canvases, appear to be "of nothing" but in their brooding depth Rothko suggests another world. As one four year old child said of the Rothko room at the Tate "it makes me think of God."”

Nicholas Serota (1946) British curator

The Dimbleby Lecture 2000

God , People , World , Feeling

“Ever since the French revolution there has developed a vicious, cretinizing tendency to consider a genius (apart from his work) as a human being more or less the same in every sense as other ordinary mortals. This is wrong. And if this is wrong for me, the genius of the greatest spiritual order or our day, a true modern genius, it is even more wrong when applied to those who incarnated the almost divine genius of the Renaissance, such as Raphael.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 1

Sense

“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 (1900–1979) British historian

The origins of modern science, 1300-1800, Bell (1949).

“Pagan renaissance is overdue. It is necessary for Europe to heal its psyche. Under Christianity, Europe learned to reject its ancestors, its past, which cannot be good for its future also. Europe became sick because it tore apart from its own heritage, it had to deny its very roots. If Europe is to be healed spiritually, it must recover its spiritual past--at least, it should not hold it in such dishonor…. For self-recovery, these countries have to revive their old gods. But this is a task which cannot be done mechanically. They have to recapture the consciousness which expressed itself in the language of many gods… In my book, The Word as Revelation: Names of Gods, I spoke of a new kind of pilgrimage: a return to the time of the Gods. Meanwhile, European scholars can do a lot. They should write a history of Europe from the Pagan point of view, which would show how profoundly persecuted Paganism was. They should compile a directory of Pagan temples destroyed, Pagan groves and sacred spots desecrated. European Pagans should also revive some of these sites as their places of pilgrimage.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

Interview in the June, 1996, issue of Antaios, http://web.archive.org/web/20080407092807/https://www.hinduismtoday.com/archives/1999/7/1999-7-07.shtml

God , Books , History , Learning

“For millennia, the dialectic of vilification and deification and, more generally, of invalidation and validation—excluding the individual from the group as an evil outsider or including him in it as a member in good standing—was cast in the imagery and rhetoric of magic and religion. … With the decline of the religious world view and the ascent of the scientific method during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the religious rhetoric of validation and invalidation was gradually replaced by the scientific. One of the most dramatic results of this transformation is the lexicon of psychiatric diagnoses functioning as a powerful, but largely unacknowledged, rhetoric of rejection and stigmatization.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

"The Sane Slave: Social Control and Legal Psychiatry," American Criminal Law Review, vol. 10 (1971), p. 333.

World , Religion , Evil

“Depth, in a pictorial, plastic sense, is not created by the arrangement of objects one after another toward a vanishing point, in the sense of the Renaissance perspective, but on the contrary (and in absolute denial of this doctrine) by the creation of forces in the sense of push and pull. Nor is depth created by tonal gradation (another doctrine of the academician which, at its culmination, degraded the use of color to a mere function of expressing dark and light).”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 44
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

Color , Sense , Light

“I thought of praying for divine guidance in line with the great spiritual renaissance of our time. But I am all thumbs in that kind of deciduous conversation. I asked myself, did I, as God's creature under the stars, have the right to evade an event, a factual occurrence, to parry an experience or even a small peradventure.”

Grace Paley (1922–2007) American writer and activist

"An Irrevocable Diameter" (1959)

God , Star , Time

“Whereas it might be erroneous to claim that the literature, art, and music of the Harlem Renaissance revolutionized the practice of democracy in the United States, it would not be an error to point out that the ideas they championed did impact America's understanding, and subsequently its application, of democracy.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

(Author's Note, p. xvii).
Book Sources, Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (2003)

Art , Music , Error , Democracy

“The reduction of the tactile qualities of life and language constitute the refinement sought in the Renaissance and repudiated now in the electronic age.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 272

Life , Age

“I strongly feel that, if we are successful, our program will mark the beginning of a renaissance for manned space flight. This might even be similar to that wonderful time period between 1908 and 1912 when the world went from a total of ten airplane pilots to hundreds of airplane types and thousands of pilots in 39 countries. We need affordable space travel to inspire our youth, to let them know that they can experience their dreams, can set significant goals and be in a position to lead all of us to future progress in exploration, discovery and fun. Thanks to the X PRIZE [Foundation] for the inspiration.”

Burt Rutan (1943) American aerospace engineer

From website: The Ansari X PRIZE (http://www.xprize.org/teams/mojave_aerospace_ventures.php ). Retrieved Nov. 23, 2004.

Youth , World , Dreams , Travel

“We seek the freedom to compete without the undue burden of high taxes and bureaucratic regulations, which make us less competitive. We seek opportunities to build better communities, better businesses, and better lives for ourselves, our children, and our children's children. And most of all, we cherish both the freedom and opportunity to decide our future. And today, we celebrate that freedom and opportunity. What I envision for Maryland is not just an economic and fiscal recovery, but a rebirth of our spirit, and a renewed commitment to our common purpose. … One hundred years from now, I want Marylanders to say, "This was when Maryland's renaissance began."”

Larry Hogan (1956) American politician

… Let us appeal to the better angels of our nature so that we can achieve the great and shining promise of Maryland.
" Inaugural Address http://governor.maryland.gov/2015/01/21/inaugural-address-governor-larry-hogan/" (21 January 2015)

Children , Angels , Communication , Business

“I feel that I have within me a medieval soul, and I believe that the soul of my country is medieval, that it has perforce passed through the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution — learning from them, yes, but without allowing them to touch the soul, preserving the spiritual inheritance which has come down from what are called the Dark Ages. And Quixotism is simply the most desperate phase of the struggle between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which was the offering of the Middle Ages.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), Conclusion : Don Quixote in the Contemporary European Tragi-Comedy

Age , Feeling , Soul , Learning

“Glasnost was a phenomenal, renaissance period in the history of Russia and taught me much about importance of freedom of information. The only real way to improve conditions of civilizations is to provide open access to information for education and culture, and to be honest about the past. Otherwise we spend our lives siloed from each other and we repeat the mistakes of our grandparents.”

Lila Tretikov (1978) Russian–American engineer, manager and former executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation

Lila Tretikov (2014) as quoted by [Jemima Kiss and Samuel Gibbs, Wikipedia boss Lila Tretikov, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/06/wikipedia-lila-tretikov-glasnost-freedom-of-information, The Guardian, 2014-08-06] and repeated in the closing statement in [Facebook Nation: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), http://www.worldcat.org/title/facebook-nation-total-information-awareness/oclc/885416529, Springer Science+Business Media, 2014-10-17, 361]

Education , Way , History , Freedom

“For really, when you think of all the life and death problems in the art of the Renaissance, who cares if a Chevalier is laughing or that a young girl has a red blouse on.”

Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Dutch painter

The Renaissance and Order (1950) Trans/formation, vol. 1, no.2, 1951, pp. 85-87.
1950's

Life , Death , Art , Girl