Stephen Greenblatt Quotes

Poems are difficult to silence.

~ Stephen Greenblatt

Human beings, Lucretius thought, must not drink in the poisonous belief that their souls are only part of the world temporarily and they are heading somewhere else. That belief will only spawn in them a destructive relation to the environment in which they live the only lives they have.

~ Stephen Greenblatt

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 the groaning shelves? How to hold the profusion of knowledge in one's head? The loss of this plenitude would have been virtually inconceivable to anyone living in its midst. Then, not all at once but with the cumulative force of a mass extinction, the whole enterprise came to an end. What looked stable turned out to be fragile, and what had seemed for all time was only for the time being.

~ Stephen Greenblatt

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

~ Stephen Greenblatt

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.

~ Stephen Greenblatt

In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.

~ Stephen Greenblatt

I began with the desire to speak with the dead.

~ Stephen Greenblatt

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

~ Stephen Greenblatt

What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.

~ Stephen Greenblatt