Patrick Curry

  • juanmanuelliehas quoted10 months ago
    For over four hundred years, Niccolò Machiavelli has been a byword for cynicism, immorality and cruelty in politics.
  • juanmanuelliehas quoted10 months ago
    The golden age of Florence was in the 15th century. Florence’s wealth became legendary. Its coin, the florin, was respected everywhere, and its merchants conducted business far and wide, first in the wool industry and then in silk and trade with the East.
  • juanmanuelliehas quoted10 months ago
    This combination of commerce, culture and enlightened despotism made Florence the Renaissance equivalent of Athens in classical antiquity, another turning point in European culture and civilization.
  • juanmanuelliehas quoted10 months ago
    Thanks to the patronage of wealthy merchant families like the Medici, in a time of almost unprecedented creativity and optimism, Florence became the principal centre for Western arts and sciences.
  • juanmanuelliehas quoted10 months ago
    As a movement, it can be said to have started with the 14th-century poet Petrarch, the son of a Florentine exile.
  • juanmanuelliehas quoted10 months ago
    Renaissance humanism was not anti-Christian: it perceived a universal harmony underlying both classical pagan philosophy (especially that of Plato, Plotinus and their followers) and Christianity.
  • juanmanuelliehas quoted10 months ago
    At the centre of the humanist world was not God, however, but the human being (in some versions a divine humanity); not the next world but this; not the ineffable individual soul but public and social life.
  • juanmanuelliehas quoted10 months ago
    There was faith, but mainly in the idea that with wisdom, skill and effort the world could be changed: “virtu vince fortuna” (ability wins over fortune).
  • juanmanuelliehas quoted10 months ago
    trivium (logic, rhetoric and grammar)
  • juanmanuelliehas quoted10 months ago
    the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music)
fb2epub
Drag & drop your files (not more than 5 at once)