Stephen Greenblatt quotes are thought-provoking, memorable and inspiring. From views on society and politics to thoughts on love and life, Stephen Greenblatt has a lot to say. In this list we present the 9 best Stephen Greenblatt quotes, in no particular order. Let yourself get inspired!
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Stephen Greenblatt quotes
Poems are difficult to silence.
— Stephen Greenblatt
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.
— Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
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 extinction, the whole enterprise came to an end. What looked stable turned out to be fragile, and what had seemed for all time was only for the time being.
— Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one’s psychic life.
— Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
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.
— Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
In short, it became possible – never easy, but possible – in the poet Auden’s phrase to find the mortal world enough.
— Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
I began with the desire to speak with the dead.
— Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England
Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.
— Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
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.
— Stephen Greenblatt
What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.
— Stephen Greenblatt
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