94 Quotes by Stephen Greenblatt

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.

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

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.

What is honour? A word. What is in that word “honour”?

The group shared a combination of extreme marginality and arrogant snobbishness.

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. The cultural shift is notoriously difficult to define, and its significance has been fiercely contested.

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.

The bookworm – “one of the teeth of time,” as Hooke put it – is no longer familiar to ordinary readers, but the ancients knew it very well.

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.