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Quotes from The Swerve — Stephen Greenblatt

born 1943 United States

← All quotes by Stephen Greenblatt

8 quotes

The pattern of dreaming and deferral and compromise is an altogether familiar one: it is the epitome of a failed life.

The Swerve (2011)

The quintessential emblem of religion—and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core—is the sacrifice of a child by a parent.

The Swerve (2011)

Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one’s psychic life.

The Swerve (2011)

I am committed by trade to urging people to attend carefully to the verbal surfaces of what they read.

The Swerve (2011)

Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.

The Swerve (2011)

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 world allows—and gnawing fear.

The Swerve (2011)

The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone. What is needed is to refuse the lies proffered by priests and other fantasymongers and to look squarely and calmly at the true nature of things.

The Swerve (2011)

A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure—an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation—characterizes Montaigne’s restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes’s chronicle of his mad knight, Michelangelo’s depiction of flayed skin, Leonardo’s sketches of whirlpools, Caravaggio’s loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ’s feet.

The Swerve (2011)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Stephen Greenblatt (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.