The key point, as Epicurus’ disciple Lucretius wrote in verses of unrivalled beauty, was to abandon the anxious and doomed attempt to build higher and higher walls and to turn instead toward the culti...
No. Honour hath not skill in surgery, then? No.
ITALIANS HAD BEEN book-hunting for the better part of a century, ever since the poet and scholar Petrarch brought glory on himself in the 1330s by piecing together Livy’s monumental History of Rome an...
Vouchsafe, O Lord,21 to bless this workroom of Thy servants, declared the dedication of one scriptorium, that all which they write therein may be comprehended by their intelligence and realized in the...
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 t...
Shakespeare believed that . . . tyrants and their minions would ultimately fail, brought down by their own viciousness and by a popular spirit of humanity that could be suppressed but never completely...
If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?
Flaubert: Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.
Even in systems that have multiple moderating institutions, the chief executive almost always has considerable power. But what happens when that executive is not mentally fit to hold office? What if h...
Acediosus, sometimes translated as apathetic, refers to an illness, specific to monastic communities, which had already been brilliantly diagnosed in the late fourth century by the Desert Father John...
A sentence is but a cheverel glove to a good wit, quips the clown Feste in Twelfth Night,
The discourse of travel in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance is rarely if ever interesting at the level of sustained narrative and teleological design, but gripping at the level of the anecdote...
One of his letters by the French novelist Gustave Flaubert: Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aureli...
To the monk who has dared to contradict a fellow monk with such words as It is not as you say, there is a heavy penalty: an imposition of silence or fifty blows. The high walls that hedged about the m...
Therefore, Jew, Though justice be thy plea, consider this: That in the course of justice none of us Should see salvation. We do pray for mercy, And that same prayer doth teach us all t...
The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone.
Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the heavens more just. (3.4.34–37)
Stability itself is nothing but a more languid motion.
In the enraptured audiences that have flocked to the play for more than four hundred years, Juliet in effect gets her wish that after death, night should take Romeo and cut him out in little stars And...
In Gilgamesh the human formed from clay is a wild man, with flowing hair (possibly all over his body) and the strength and manner of life of the animals. In Genesis the clay human is created in the im...