[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,...

Nobody can understand the greatness of the thirteenth century, who does not realize that it was a great growth of new things produced by a living thing. In that sense it was really bolder and...

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...

We’ve never heardAbout a marvel quite so great,For all the heroes who have livedIn history can’t measure upIn bravery against the Maid.

PASSIONS are likened best to floods and streams:The shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb;

The Dark Ages gradually ended six centuries ago with the Renaissance, which seeded new ideas for a different world. The Renaissance ideal dominated our culture until three centuries ago, from the 14th to the 18th...

…the pride taken by the Italians in their gifted women is among the most important facts in the history of their 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.

Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one’s psychic life.

We expect (contributions in) 2006 to be larger than ever before. People are recognizing that Southern Nevada has certain cultural, educational and community institutions that are vibrant players in philanthropy. We’re seeing a philanthropic renaissance...

In Venice, things not always as they first appear. I contemplate this observation from my post on the aft deck of one of Master Fumagalli’s gondolas, taking in the panorama of bridges, domes, bell towers,...

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,...

What’s remarkable here is this process of planet formation, which we associate with the birth of stars, seems to also be able to occur at the end of the stellar lifetime, sort of a renaissance...

Love is the linchpin that connects the material world with higher levels of existence.

In short, it became possible – never easy, but possible – in the poet Auden’s phrase to find the mortal world enough.

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...

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...

It is only rather recently that science has begun to make peace with its magical roots. Until a few decades ago, it was common for histories of science either to commence decorously with Copernicus’s heliocentric...

leap upstairs” against their reason and try to find something which gives meaning to life, even though to do so they have to deny their reason.This was a solution Leonardo da Vinci and the men...

The soul exists partly in eternity and partly in time.

It is certain that the labors of these early workers in the field of natural knowledge were brought to a standstill by the decay and disruption of the Roman Empire, the consequent disorganisation of society,...

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...

To rulers religion, like almost everything else, is a tool of power.

In the darkness, fear my light.

Whose little boy are you?

The medieval period based its scriptural exegesis upon the Vulgate translation of the Bible. There was no authorized version of this text, despite the clear need for a standardized text that had been carefully checked...

I shower in the dark, barely able to tell soap from conditioner, and tell myself that I will emerge new and strong, that the water will heal me.

He’s truly a renaissance individual for our times, … I’ve likened him to a Will Rogers voice in Congress (with) humor (and) common sense. He brought real legislative achievements, working on environmental issues for Southern...

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...