TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY ®  •  TODAYINSCI ®
Celebrating 24 Years on the Web
Find science on or your birthday

Today in Science History - Quickie Quiz
Who said: “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index R > Category: Renaissance

Renaissance Quotes (16 quotes)

Burned deforestation photo+quote Destroying rain forest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal
Lacandon jungle burned for agriculture in Chiapas, Mexico (by Jami Dwyer) (source)
[Destroying rain forest for economic gain] is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.
Quoted in R.Z. Sheppard, 'Nature: Splendor in The Grass', Time (3 Sep 1990)
Science quotes on:  |  Burn (99)  |  Burning (49)  |  Cook (20)  |  Deforestation (50)  |  Economic (84)  |  Economics (44)  |  Forest (161)  |  Gain (146)  |  Meal (19)  |  Painting (46)  |  Rain (70)  |  Rain Forest (34)

[The attitude of the Renaissance towards the antique world was that] Archaeology to them was not a mere science for the antiquarian; it was a means by which they could touch the dry dust of antiquity into the very breath and beauty of life, and fill with the new wine of romanticism forms that else had been old and out-worn.
In his essay 'The Truth of Masks', collected in Intentions (1904), 213.
Science quotes on:  |  Antiquarian (2)  |  Antique (3)  |  Antiquity (34)  |  Archaeology (51)  |  Attitude (84)  |  Beauty (313)  |  Breath (61)  |  Breathe (49)  |  Dry (65)  |  Dust (68)  |  Form (976)  |  Life (1870)  |  Mean (810)  |  Means (587)  |  New (1273)  |  New Wine (2)  |  Old (499)  |  Romanticism (5)  |  Touch (146)  |  Wine (39)  |  World (1850)  |  Worn (5)

Development of Western science is based on two great achievements: the invention of the formal logical system (in Euclidean geometry) by the Greek philosophers, and the discovery of the possibility to find out causal relationships by systematic experiment (during the Renaissance). In my opinion, one has not to be astonished that the Chinese sages have not made these steps. The astonishing thing is that these discoveries were made at all.
Letter to J. S. Switzer, 23 Apr 1953, Einstein Archive 61-381. Quoted in Alice Calaprice, The Quotable Einstein (1996), 180.
Science quotes on:  |  Achievement (187)  |  Astonish (39)  |  Astonishing (29)  |  Cause (561)  |  Chinese (22)  |  Development (441)  |  Discovery (837)  |  Enquiry (89)  |  Experiment (736)  |  Find (1014)  |  Geometry (271)  |  Great (1610)  |  Greek (109)  |  Invention (400)  |  Logic (311)  |  Opinion (291)  |  Philosopher (269)  |  Possibility (172)  |  Relationship (114)  |  Sage (25)  |  Step (234)  |  System (545)  |  Systematic (58)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Two (936)  |  Western (45)

Has anyone ever given credit to the Black Death for the Renaissance—in other words, for modern civilization? … [It] exterminated such huge masses of the European proletariat that the average intelligence and enterprise of the race were greatly lifted, and that this purged and improved society suddenly functioned splendidly. … The best brains of the time, thus suddenly emancipated, began to function freely and magnificently. There ensued what we call the Renaissance.
From American Mercury (Jun 1924), 188-189. Collected in 'Eugenic Note', A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949, 1956), 376-377.
Science quotes on:  |  Average (89)  |  Best (467)  |  Black Death (2)  |  Brain (281)  |  Call (781)  |  Civilization (220)  |  Credit (24)  |  Death (406)  |  Enterprise (56)  |  Exterminate (10)  |  Function (235)  |  Improve (64)  |  Intelligence (218)  |  Lift (57)  |  Modern (402)  |  Modern Civilization (3)  |  Other (2233)  |  Proletariat (2)  |  Purge (11)  |  Race (278)  |  Society (350)  |  Sudden (70)  |  Suddenly (91)  |  Time (1911)  |  Word (650)

I feel, sometimes, as the renaissance man must have felt in finding new riches at every point and in the certainty that unexplored areas of knowledge and experience await at every turn.
Address to the University Students (10 Dec 1956 ) in Göran Liljestrand (ed.), Les Prix Nobel en 1955 (1956).
Science quotes on:  |  Certainty (180)  |  Experience (494)  |  Feel (371)  |  Feeling (259)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Man (2252)  |  Must (1525)  |  New (1273)  |  Point (584)  |  Riches (14)  |  Turn (454)  |  Unexplored (15)  |  Wait (66)

If tombstones were still in style, I would want to have the two words [“Renaissance hack”] chiseled right under my name.
In an encounter Flanagan had with The New Yorker film critic, Pauline Kael, she claimed to knew nothing about science. He gently scolded her. Kael responded with the genial retort: “Oh, you're a Renaissance hack,” a description which pleased him. Recounted in Flanagan's Version: A Spectator's Guide to Science on the Eve of the 21st Century (1988), 3.
Science quotes on:  |  Hack (3)  |  Name (359)  |  Right (473)  |  Still (614)  |  Tombstone (2)  |  Two (936)  |  Want (504)  |  Word (650)

It was not alone the striving for universal culture which attracted the great masters of the Renaissance, such as Brunellesco, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo and especially Albrecht Dürer, with irresistible power to the mathematical sciences. They were conscious that, with all the freedom of the individual fantasy, art is subject to necessary laws, and conversely, with all its rigor of logical structure, mathematics follows aesthetic laws.
From Lecture (5 Feb 1891) held at the Rathhaus, Zürich, printed as Ueber den Antheil der mathematischen Wissenschaft an der Kultur der Renaissance (1892), 19. (The Contribution of the Mathematical Sciences to the Culture of the Renaissance.) As translated in Robert Édouard Moritz, Memorabilia Mathematica; Or, The Philomath’s Quotation-Book (1914), 183.
Science quotes on:  |  Aesthetic (48)  |  Alone (324)  |  Art (680)  |  Attract (25)  |  Conscious (46)  |  Culture (157)  |  Leonardo da Vinci (87)  |  Albrecht Dürer (5)  |  Especially (31)  |  Fantasy (15)  |  Follow (389)  |  Freedom (145)  |  Great (1610)  |  Individual (420)  |  Irresistible (17)  |  Law (913)  |  Logic (311)  |  Master (182)  |  Mathematics (1395)  |   Michelangelo, (3)  |  Necessary (370)  |  Power (771)  |  Raphael (2)  |  Rigor (29)  |  Strive (53)  |  Structure (365)  |  Subject (543)  |  Universal (198)

Like Molière’s M. Jourdain, who spoke prose all his life without knowing it, mathematicians have been reasoning for at least two millennia without being aware of all the principles underlying what they were doing. The real nature of the tools of their craft has become evident only within recent times A renaissance of logical studies in modern times begins with the publication in 1847 of George Boole’s The Mathematical Analysis of Logic.
Co-authored with James R. Newman in Gödel's Proof (1986, 2005), 30.
Science quotes on:  |  Analysis (244)  |  Aware (36)  |  Become (821)  |  Begin (275)  |  Being (1276)  |  George Boole (12)  |  Craft (11)  |  Doing (277)  |  Evident (92)  |  Knowing (137)  |  Life (1870)  |  Logic (311)  |  Mathematical Analysis (23)  |  Mathematician (407)  |  Mathematics (1395)  |  Millennia (4)  |  Modern (402)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Principle (530)  |  Prose (11)  |  Publication (102)  |  Real (159)  |  Reasoning (212)  |  Recent (78)  |  Study (701)  |  Time (1911)  |  Tool (129)  |  Two (936)  |  Underlying (33)

Pathology, probably more than any other branch of science, suffers from heroes and hero-worship. Rudolf Virchow has been its archangel and William Welch its John the Baptist, while Paracelsus and Cohnheim have been relegated to the roles of Lucifer and Beelzebub. … Actually, there are no heroes in Pathology—all of the great thoughts permitting advance have been borrowed from other fields, and the renaissance of pathology stems not from pathology itself but from the philosophers Kant and Goethe.
Quoted from an address to a second year class, in Levin L. Waters, obituary for Harry S. N. Greene, M.D., in Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine (Feb-Apr 1971), 43:4-5, 207.
Science quotes on:  |  Advance (298)  |  Archangel (2)  |  Beelzebub (2)  |  Borrow (31)  |  Borrowing (4)  |  Branch (155)  |  Field (378)  |  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (150)  |  Great (1610)  |  Hero (45)  |  Immanuel Kant (50)  |  Lucifer (2)  |  More (2558)  |  Other (2233)  |  Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus (19)  |  Pathology (19)  |  Philosopher (269)  |  Role (86)  |  Stem (31)  |  Suffering (68)  |  Thought (995)  |  Rudolf Virchow (50)  |  Worship (32)

Science, above all, respects the power of the human intellect. Science is the apotheosis of the intellect and the consummation of the Renaissance. Science respects more deeply the potential of humanity than religion ever can.
Essay collected in John Cornwell (ed.), 'The Limitless Power of Science', Nature's Imagination: The Frontiers of Scientific Vision (1995), 125.
Science quotes on:  |  Apotheosis (2)  |  Consummation (7)  |  Human (1512)  |  Human Intellect (32)  |  Humanity (186)  |  Intellect (251)  |  More (2558)  |  Potential (75)  |  Power (771)  |  Religion (369)  |  Respect (212)  |  Science And Religion (337)

Since [World War I] we have seen the atomic age, the computer age, the space age, and the bio-engineering age, each as epochal as the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution. And all these have occurred in one generation. Man has stood on the moon and looked back on the earth, that small planet now reduced to a neighbourhood. But our material achievements have exceeded the managerial capacities of our human minds and institutions.
As quoted in Colin Bingham (ed.), Wit and Wisdom: A Public Affairs Miscellany (1982), 227.
Science quotes on:  |  Achievement (187)  |  Age (509)  |  Atomic Age (6)  |  Back (395)  |  Bioengineering (5)  |  Bronze (5)  |  Bronze Age (2)  |  Capacity (105)  |  Computer (131)  |  Earth (1076)  |  Engineering (188)  |  Epoch (46)  |  Exceed (10)  |  Generation (256)  |  Human (1512)  |  Human Mind (133)  |  Industrial Revolution (10)  |  Institution (73)  |  Iron (99)  |  Iron Age (3)  |  Look (584)  |  Man (2252)  |  Material (366)  |  Mind (1377)  |  Moon (252)  |  Neighbourhood (2)  |  Occur (151)  |  Planet (402)  |  Reduce (100)  |  Revolution (133)  |  Small (489)  |  Space (523)  |  Space Age (4)  |  Stand (284)  |  War (233)  |  World (1850)  |  World War I (3)

The dawn of the modern world was breaking in the era of the Renaissance before natural science took its stand on the firm ground of slowly won observation. Then, ceasing to be speculative philosophy, tossed about by every wind of doctrine, it became an independent and progressive branch of knowledge, developed by the healthy interaction of inductive observation and deductive reasoning.
In Science and the Human Mind: A Critical and Historical Account of the Development of Natural Knowledge (1912), 7. Co-authored with Catherine Durning Whetham (his wife).
Science quotes on:  |  Deduction (90)  |  Doctrine (81)  |  Independent (74)  |  Induction (81)  |  Interaction (47)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Natural Science (133)  |  Observation (593)  |  Philosophy (409)  |  Progressive (21)  |  Reasoning (212)  |  Speculation (137)

The Italian Renaissance, though not medieval, is not modern; it is more akin to the best age of Greece. … No Italian of the Renaissance would have been unintelligible to Plato or Aristotle…. With the seventeenth century it is different: Plato and Aristotle, Aquinas and Occam, could not have made head or tail of Newton.
In History of Western Philosophy (1979, 2004) 484.
Science quotes on:  |  17th Century (20)  |  Saint Thomas Aquinas (18)  |  Aristotle (179)  |  Different (595)  |  Greece (9)  |  Italy (6)  |  Medieval (12)  |  Modern (402)  |  Sir Isaac Newton (363)  |  Plato (80)  |  Unintelligible (17)

The position of the anthropologist of to-day resembles in some sort the position of classical scholars at the revival of learning. To these men the rediscovery of ancient literature came like a revelation, disclosing to their wondering eyes a splendid vision of the antique world, such as the cloistered of the Middle Ages never dreamed of under the gloomy shadow of the minster and within the sound of its solemn bells. To us moderns a still wider vista is vouchsafed, a greater panorama is unrolled by the study which aims at bringing home to us the faith and the practice, the hopes and the ideals, not of two highly gifted races only, but of all mankind, and thus at enabling us to follow the long march, the slow and toilsome ascent, of humanity from savagery to civilization. And as the scholar of the Renaissance found not merely fresh food for thought but a new field of labour in the dusty and faded manuscripts of Greece and Rome, so in the mass of materials that is steadily pouring in from many sides—from buried cities of remotest antiquity as well as from the rudest savages of the desert and the jungle—we of to-day must recognise a new province of knowledge which will task the energies of generations of students to master.
'Author’s Introduction' (1900). In Dr Theodor H. Gaster (ed.), The New Golden Bough (1959), xxv-xxvi.
Science quotes on:  |  Age (509)  |  Aim (175)  |  Ancient (198)  |  Anthropology (61)  |  Antiquity (34)  |  Bell (35)  |  Civilization (220)  |  Classical (49)  |  Desert (59)  |  Dream (222)  |  Eye (440)  |  Fad (10)  |  Faith (209)  |  Field (378)  |  Follow (389)  |  Food (213)  |  Fresh (69)  |  Generation (256)  |  Gift (105)  |  Gifted (25)  |  Greater (288)  |  Home (184)  |  Hope (321)  |  Humanity (186)  |  Ideal (110)  |  Jungle (24)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Labor (200)  |  Learning (291)  |  Literature (116)  |  Long (778)  |  Mankind (356)  |  March (48)  |  Mass (160)  |  Master (182)  |  Material (366)  |  Merely (315)  |  Middle Age (19)  |  Middle Ages (12)  |  Modern (402)  |  Must (1525)  |  Never (1089)  |  New (1273)  |  Panorama (5)  |  Practice (212)  |  Province (37)  |  Race (278)  |  Rediscovery (2)  |  Resemble (65)  |  Revelation (51)  |  Rome (19)  |  Scholar (52)  |  Shadow (73)  |  Side (236)  |  Slow (108)  |  Solemn (20)  |  Sound (187)  |  Splendid (23)  |  Still (614)  |  Student (317)  |  Study (701)  |  Task (152)  |  Thought (995)  |  Two (936)  |  Vision (127)  |  Vista (12)  |  Will (2350)  |  World (1850)

The so-called “scientific revolution,” popularly associated with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but reaching back in an unmistakably continuous line to a period much earlier still. Since that revolution overturned the authority in science not only of the middle ages but of the ancient world—since it ended not only in the eclipse of scholastic philosophy but in the destruction of Aristotelian physics—it outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom … It looms so large as the real origin of the modern world and of the modern mentality that our customary periodisation of European history has become an anachronism and an encumbrance.
The Origins of Modern Science (1949), viii.
Science quotes on:  |  Age (509)  |  Ancient (198)  |  Aristotle (179)  |  Authority (99)  |  Back (395)  |  Become (821)  |  Call (781)  |  Continuous (83)  |  Customary (18)  |  Destruction (135)  |  Displacement (9)  |  Eclipse (25)  |  Encumbrance (5)  |  End (603)  |  Everything (489)  |  History (716)  |  Internal (69)  |  Large (398)  |  Loom (20)  |  Medieval (12)  |  Middle Age (19)  |  Middle Ages (12)  |  Modern (402)  |  Origin (250)  |  Period (200)  |  Philosophy (409)  |  Physic (515)  |  Physics (564)  |  Rank (69)  |  Reduce (100)  |  Reformation (6)  |  Revolution (133)  |  Rise (169)  |  Scientific (955)  |  Scientific Revolution (13)  |  So-Called (71)  |  Still (614)  |  System (545)  |  World (1850)

Those who suggest that the “dark ages” were a time of violence and superstition would do well to remember the appalling cruelties of our own time, truly without parallel in past ages, as well as the fact that the witch-hunts were not strictly speaking a medieval phenomenon but belong rather to the so-called Renaissance.
From Interview (2003) on the Exhibition, 'Il Medioevo Europeo di Jacques le Goff' (The European Middle Ages by Jacques Le Goff), at Parma, Italy (27 Sep 2003—11 Jan 2004). Published among web pages about the Exhibition, that were on the website of the Province of Parma.
Science quotes on:  |  Age (509)  |  Appalling (10)  |  Belong (168)  |  Call (781)  |  Cruelty (24)  |  Dark (145)  |  Dark Ages (10)  |  Do (1905)  |  Fact (1257)  |  Hunt (32)  |  Medieval (12)  |  Parallel (46)  |  Past (355)  |  Phenomenon (334)  |  Remember (189)  |  So-Called (71)  |  Speaking (118)  |  Suggest (38)  |  Superstition (70)  |  Time (1911)  |  Truly (118)  |  Violence (37)


Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
Sitewide search within all Today In Science History pages:
Visit our Science and Scientist Quotations index for more Science Quotes from archaeologists, biologists, chemists, geologists, inventors and inventions, mathematicians, physicists, pioneers in medicine, science events and technology.

Names index: | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

Categories index: | 1 | 2 | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
Thank you for sharing.
- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


by Ian Ellis
who invites your feedback
Thank you for sharing.
Today in Science History
Sign up for Newsletter
with quiz, quotes and more.