Always penetrates the particular fissures in one’s psychic life.
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 began as downsizing went on to wholesale abandonment. Schools closed, libraries and academies shut their doors, professional grammarians and teachers of rhetoric found themselves out of work. The...
Virtually the entire output of many other writers, famous in antiquity, has disappeared without a trace.
Unlike many other animals, who are endowed at birth with what they need to survive, human infants are almost completely vulnerable:
Tyrannical power is more easily exercised when it appears that the old order continues to exist. The reassuring consensual structures may now be hollowed out and merely decorative, but they are all st...
Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know. And so far will I trust thee,
The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.
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...
The early founders of monastic orders did not regard copying manuscripts as an exalted activity; on the contrary, as they were highly aware, most of the copying in the ancient world had been done by e...
Stability itself is nothing but a more languid motion.
It was better that monastic scribes had been forced to copy everything exactly at it appeared before their eyes, even those things that made no sense at all.
I am, Jefferson wrote to a correspondent who wanted to know his philosophy of life, an Epicurean.
Human society began not in a Golden Age of tranquility and plenty, but in a primitive battle for survival. There was no original paradisal time of plenty, as some have dreamed, in which happy, peacefu...
Books were scarce and valuable. They conferred prestige on the monastery that possessed them, and the monks were not inclined to let them out of their sight,
And all for use of that which is mine own. Well then, it now appears you need my help. Go to, then. You come to me, and you say ‘Shylock, we would have moneys’—you say so, You, that di...
A sentence is but a cheverel glove to a good wit, quips the clown Feste in Twelfth Night,
This man, remarked a contemporary, dismayed at the wanton damage, knew as much of antiquities as the moon does of lobsters.)
The printers who set the books in type still depended on accurate, readable, handwritten transcriptions, often of manuscripts that were illegible to all but a few.
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...