94 Quotes by Stephen Greenblatt

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

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.

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

Poems are difficult to silence.

On August 1, 1632, the Society of Jesus strictly prohibited and condemned the doctrine of the atoms.

I began with the desire to speak with the dead.

Human beings, Lucretius thought, must not drink in the poisonous belief that their souls are only part of the world temporarily and they are heading somewhere else. That belief will only spawn in them a destructive relation to the environment in which they live the only lives they have.

Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.

Our sense that a library is a public good and our idea of what such a place should look like derived precisely from a model created in Rome several thousand years ago.