Quotes About Petrarch

To have displeased evil and ignorant men is the sure sign of genius and virtue...

Neither exhortations to virtue nor the argument of approaching death should divert us from literature; for in a good mind it excites the love of virtue, and dissipates, or at least diminishes, the fear of death.

never would I trade for some new shape that laurel I was first, in whose sweet shade all other pleasures vanish in my heart.

Petrarch declared that all money was unstable, whirling away "possibly due to the roundness of the coins," further elaborating that money won by gambling was the least stable of all.

Petrarch also writes that suicides are caused by anger, disdain, impatience, and "a kind of furious forgetfulness of what thou art.

I hold Petrarch at leastly partly responsible for the disconcerting gap between Italian's written and spoken vocabularies. The

The 500 years following the fall of the Western Roman Empire were dubbed by the poet Petrarch 'dark.' Although the 14th-century Italian was referring to a literary decline, the term caught on to denote the seemingly backward turn the Western world took with regard to religious and technological developments.

If you find a way to write with open heart to Diary, a friend with Truth, no detail spared, your tome like Petrarch's works will contain the scattered fragments of your soul.

Petrarch complained that, so sloppy were the scribes of his day, and so full of errors were the manuscripts they produced, "an author would not recognize his own work." 7

One day during Holy Week around the year 1400 Niccoli had gathered with some friends at his elegant home. One of his guests was Leonardo Bruni, a literary scholar and translator who would later write up the conversation of that day. Bruni was destined to become one of the most celebrated and influential of all of Florence's lovers of wisdom. He had been born about 1370 in Arezzo, the birthplace of Petrarch

An equal doom clipp'd Time's blest wings of peace.

If you find a way to write with open heart to Diary, a friend with Truth, no detail spared, your tome like Petrarch's works will contain the scattered fragments of your soul.

Laughter, on the other hand, Petrarch went on, is an explosion that tears us away from the world and throws us back into our own cold solitude. Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry. That's why I tell you yet again, and you want to keep in mind: Boccaccio doesn't understand love. Love can never be laughable. Love has nothing in common with laughter.

Romances paint at full length people's wooings, But only give a bust of marriages: For no one cares for matrimonial cooings. There's nothing wrong in a connubial kiss. Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's wife, He would have written sonnets all his life?

One of the first Italians to give a name to the reawakened interest in Greek and Roman learning was the poet Petrarch, who announced early in the 1340s that poets and scholars were ready to lead the cities of Italy back to the glory days of Rome. Classical learning had declined, Petrarch insisted, into darkness and obscurity. Now was the time for that learning to be rediscovered: a rebirth, a Renaissance.

Great errors seldom originate but with men of great minds.

He thought her more beautiful than ever, with a beauty that was at once feminine and angelic, that wholeness of beauty that had moved Petrarch to song and brought Dante to his knees.

Renaissance Humanism, which under Petrarch's formation and tutelage vindicated the importance of poetry and rhetoric as effectors of an intimate bond between reason and emotion, thought and action, intellect and will. Petrarchan Humanism became the historical force mobilizing thought and letters against the blind impulsiveness of an illusory popular culture and the elitism of the philosophical schools" (Trinkaus, 135).

When a passion is not realized ... it fades away, or becomes ideal worship--Dante--Petrarch--that sort of thing!

For a month he is at home: he reads. He reads his Testament, but he knows what it says. He reads Petrarch whom he loves, reads how he defied the doctors: when they had given him up to fever he lived still, and when they came back in the morning, he was sitting up writing. The poet never trusted any doctor after that; but Liz left him too fast for physician's advice, good or bad, or for the apothecary with his cassia, his galingale, his wormwood, and his printed cards with prayers on.

Tacitus appears to have been as great an enthusiast as Petrarch for the revival of the republic and universal empire. He has exerted the vengeance of history upon the emperors, but has veiled the conspiracies against them, and the incorrigible corruption of the people which probably provoked their most atrocious cruelties. Tyranny can scarcely be practised upon a virtuous and wise people.