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Link	Quote	Stars	Tags	Author
255210f	The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.			Stephen Greenblatt
16a2de9	The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone.			Stephen Greenblatt
fea45d2	The discussion itself is what most matters, the fact that we can reason together easily, with a blend of wit and seriousness, never descending into gossip or slander and always allowing room for alternative views.			Stephen Greenblatt
3dc384e	Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life.		swerve renaissance	Stephen Greenblatt
a8a1601	What human beings can and should do, he wrote, is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure of the world.			Stephen Greenblatt
53c9c3a	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 extincti..		renaissance	Stephen Greenblatt
2a064e0	The quintessential emblem of religion and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core is the sacrifice of a child by a parent. Almost all religious faiths incorporate the myth of such a sacrifice, and some have actually made it real. Lucretius had in mind the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father Agamemnon, but he may also have been aware of the Jewish story of Abraham and Isaac and other comparable Near Eastern stor..		sacrifice religion	Stephen Greenblatt
ce112e9	I began with the desire to speak with the dead.		shakespeare history education historians knowledge	Stephen Greenblatt
ff9cb11	Stability itself is nothing but a more languid motion.			Stephen Greenblatt
00326a6	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.		cervantes swerve renaissance montaigne	Stephen Greenblatt
f149097	We are terrified of future catastrophes and are thrown into a continuous state of misery and anxiety, and for fear of becoming miserable, we never cease to be so, always panting for riches and never giving our souls or our bodies a moment's peace. But those who are content with little live day by day and treat any day like a feast day.			Stephen Greenblatt
c9df8a3	In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.		renaissance auden	Stephen Greenblatt
c0e1e62	I am," Jefferson wrote to a correspondent who wanted to know his philosophy of life, "an Epicurean."			Stephen Greenblatt
d4e6d0e	Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.		war christianity faith religion	Stephen Greenblatt
78c8ece	What began as downsizing went on to wholesale abandonment. Schools closed, libraries and academies shut their doors, professional grammarians and teachers of rhetoric found themselves out of work. There were more important things to worry about than the fate of books.			Stephen Greenblatt
3ab05b1	The monk in the grip of acedia would find it difficult or impossible to read. Looking away from his book, he might try to distract himself with gossip but would more likely glance in disgust at his surroundings and at his fellow monks. He would feel that things were better somewhere else, that he was wasting his life, that everything was stale and pointless, that he was suffocating.			Stephen Greenblatt
30d98e3	The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion. The principal enemies of human happiness are inordinate desire--the fantasy of attaining something that exceeds what the finite mortal world allows--and gnawing fear. Even the dreaded plague, in Lucretius' account--and his work ends with a graphic account of a catastrophic plague epidemic in Athens--is most horrible not only for the suffering and death that it brings but also an..			Stephen Greenblatt
5b49c0d	Independence & self-reliance had no cultural purchase; indeed, they could scarcely be conceived, let alone prized...The best course was humbly to accept the identity to which destiny assigned you: the ploughman needed only to know how to plough, the weaver to weave, the monk to pray.			Stephen Greenblatt
1a4981d	I am committed by trade to urging people to attend carefully to the verbal surfaces of what they read.			Stephen Greenblatt
d2ca645	at Cambridge, a graduate in grammar in the late Middle Ages was required to demonstrate his pedagogical fitness by flogging a dull or recalcitrant boy.			Stephen Greenblatt
31cce19	Violators of the edict were threatened with eternal damnation and a fine of 10 ducats.			Stephen Greenblatt
18537e2	Falstaff something roughly similar--a gentleman sinking into mire--but darker and deeper: a debauched genius; a fathomlessly cynical, almost irresistible confidence man; a diseased, cowardly, seductive, lovable monster; a father who cannot be trusted.			Stephen Greenblatt
319f14e	The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain.			Stephen Greenblatt
3984222	What was ridiculous about Christianity, from the perspective of a cultivated pagan, was not only its language--the crude style of the Gospels' Greek resting on the barbarous otherness of Hebrew and Aramaic--but also its exaltation of divine humiliation and pain conjoined with an arrogant triumphalism.			Stephen Greenblatt
238a42c	Something happened in the Renaissance, something that surged up against the constraints that centuries had constructed around curiosity, desire, individuality, sustained attention to the material world, the claims of the body.			Stephen Greenblatt
1f5349d	Acediosus, sometimes translated as "apathetic," refers to an illness, specific to monastic communities, which had already been brilliantly diagnosed in the late fourth century by the Desert Father John Cassian. The monk in the grip of acedia would find it difficult or impossible to read. Looking away from his book, he might try to distract himself with gossip but would more likely glance in disgust at his surroundings and at his fellow monk..			Stephen Greenblatt
bc65898	Everyone understood that Latin learning was inseparable from whipping. One educational theorist of the time speculated that the buttocks were created in order to facilitate the learning of Latin.			Stephen Greenblatt
8d472bb	For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner," one of these curses runs, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to his agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his ..			Stephen Greenblatt
29e5ae6	On occasion monasteries tried to secure their possession by freighting their precious manuscripts with curses. "For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner," one of these curses runs, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to his agony till he sing in dis..			Stephen Greenblatt
4f671d0	books give delight to the very marrow of one's bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy. Copying,			Stephen Greenblatt
ab1f7cc	The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain. Life should be organized to serve the pursuit of happiness. There is no ethical purpose higher than facilitating this pursuit for oneself and one's fellow creatures. All the other claims--the service of the state, the glorification of the gods or the ruler, the arduous pursuit of virtue through self-sacrifice--are secondary, misguided, or fraudulent. Th..			Stephen Greenblatt
cd3627d	A sentence is but a cheverel glove to a good wit," quips the clown Feste in Twelfth Night,"			Stephen Greenblatt
9a37ce7	without prizing either learning or debate, monks nonetheless became the principal readers, librarians, book preservers, and book producers of the Western world.			Stephen Greenblatt
d7a10f3	On the other side of anger at those who either peddled false visions of security or incited irrational fears of death, Lucretius offered a feeling of liberation and the power to stare down what had once seemed so menacing. What human beings can and should do, he wrote, is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure of			Stephen Greenblatt
86c5826	Eve is a figure for the soul that each human should love. The commandment to be fruitful and multiply did not originally refer to the flesh but to "a spiritual brood of intellectual and immortal joys filling the earth."			Stephen Greenblatt
f69afba	I am his Highness' dog at Kew; Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?			Stephen Greenblatt
4ea6c7c	Venus and Adonis is a spectacular display of Shakespeare's signature characteristic, his astonishing capacity to be everywhere and nowhere, to assume all positions and to slip free of all constraints. The capacity depends upon a simultaneous, deeply paradoxical achievement of proximity and distance, intimacy and detachment.			Stephen Greenblatt
39834a1	Flaubert: "Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone."			Stephen Greenblatt
e6b5583	book by the Spanish friar Luis de Granada, Of Prayer and Meditation. Printed in Paris in 1582, the book opened with a letter by the translator, Richard Harris, lamenting the rise of Schism, Heresy, Infidelity, and Atheism in England. These evils were dark signs that the world was nearing its end, Harris argued, and that Satan was frantically struggling to make a last demonic triumph.			Stephen Greenblatt
5a70e3d	place of the philosopher the singer is called in, and in place of the orator the teacher of stagecraft, and while the libraries are shut up forever like tombs, water-organs are manufactured and lyres as large as carriages.			Stephen Greenblatt
34c02e4	In the enraptured audiences that have flocked to the play for more than four hundred years, Juliet in effect gets her wish that after death, night should take Romeo and cut him out in little stars And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night. (III.ii.22-24)			Stephen Greenblatt
0659849	Most teachers of the humanities lived itinerant lives, traveling from city to city, giving lectures on a few favorite authors, and then restlessly moving on, in the hope of finding new patrons.			Stephen Greenblatt
96e83d0	To spend your existence in the grip of anxiety about death, he wrote, is mere folly. It is a sure way to let your life slip from you incomplete and unenjoyed. He gave voice as well to a thought I had not yet quite allowed myself, even inwardly, to articulate: to inflict this anxiety on others is manipulative and cruel.			Stephen Greenblatt
be9a5ee	The key point, as Epicurus' disciple Lucretius wrote in verses of unrivalled beauty, was to abandon the anxious and doomed attempt to build higher and higher walls and to turn instead toward the cultivation of pleasure.			Stephen Greenblatt

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