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)
It is extremely dangerous to have a state run by someone who governs by impulse.
Instead, he wrote, quoting Lucretius, there were multiple worlds, where the seeds of things, in their infinite numbers, would certainly combine to form other races of men, other creatures. Each of the...
Independence & self-reliance had no cultural purchase; indeed, they could scarcely be conceived, let alone prized...The best course was humbly to accept the identity to which destiny assigned you: the...
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...
IN DEPICTING THE aspiring tyrant’s strategy, Shakespeare carefully noted among the landed classes of his time the strong current of contempt for the masses and for democracy as a viable political poss...
I am committed by trade to urging people to attend carefully to the verbal surfaces of what they read. Much of the pleasure and interest of poetry depends on such attention.
Can honour set-to a leg? Falstaff asks, at the brink of battle.
At Cambridge, a graduate in grammar in the late Middle Ages was required to demonstrate his pedagogical fitness by flogging a dull or recalcitrant boy.
A few months after he penned his Dialogue in Praise of the Papal Court, poor Lapo died of plague at the age of thirty-three.)
You bitches, sows, screech-owls, night owls, she-wolves, blood suckers, [who] cry Give, give! without ceasing (Prov. 30:15–16). Come now, hear me, harlots, prostitutes, with your lascivious kisses, yo...
With his contrasting vision of anxious, work-obsessed, overly disciplined Italians and happy-go-lucky, carefree Germans,
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 Ara...
What human beings can and should do, he wrote, is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure...
Unappeasable desire and the fear of death are the principal obstacles to human happiness, but the obstacles can be surmounted through the exercise of reason.
The group shared a combination of extreme marginality and arrogant snobbishness.
The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion. The principal enemies of human happiness are inordinate desire—the fantasy of attaining something that exceeds what the finite mortal wor...
Stability itself is nothing but a more languid motion.
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 worl...