"Humanist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... undesirable; Zola's mercy is colder than justice—nay, Zola's mercy is more bitter in the mouth than injustice. When Zola shows us an ideal training he does not take us, like Rabelais, into the happy fields of humanist learning. He takes us into the schools of inhumanist learning, where there are neither books nor flowers, nor wine nor wisdom, but only deformities in glass bottles, and where the rule is taught from the exceptions. Zola's truth answers the exact description of the skeleton in ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... Iuvenale patre, matre vero Septumuleia ex Aquinati municipio, Claudio Nerone et L. Antistio consulibus (55 A. D.) natus est; sororem habuit Septumuleiam, quae Fuscino nupsit. This may be mere invention on the part of a humanist of the fifteenth century. The life contains many improbabilities and the MS. is of suspiciously late date. But ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... of western Europe. The finding of an unknown manuscript became the excuse for a civic holiday. The man who wrote a grammar became as popular as the fellow who nowadays invents a new spark-plug. The humanist, the scholar who devoted his time and his energies to a study of "homo" or mankind (instead of wasting his hours upon fruitless theological investigations), that man was regarded with greater honour and a deeper respect than was ever bestowed ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... and wide over the globe. The young sculptor sat at the same board as Marsilio Ficino, interpreter of Plato; Pico della Mirandola, the phoenix of Oriental erudition; Angelo Poliziano, the unrivalled humanist and melodious Italian poet; Luigi Pulci, the humorous inventor of burlesque romance—with artists, scholars, students innumerable, all in their own departments capable of satisfying a youth's curiosity, by explaining to him the particular virtues of books discussed, or of antique works ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... praise, it is no less true that many of his detractors appear never to have come in contact with his mind at all. Born in 1839, he spent the greater part of his life in Queen's College, Oxford, where he died in 1894. As literary critic, humanist, and master of a thoroughly original style, he made a considerable impression upon his generation from the first; but it may be safely said that it is only now, when readers are able to look upon his work in a more spacious and ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... nothing for the community or its institutions. On his wide acres family life was replaced by boarding-houses. Schools and churches were closed, and many farmhouses built by the homesteaders rotted down to their foundations. But David Rankin was a husbandman, if not a humanist. His tillage of the soil was successful in that it maintained the fertility of the soil, that it produced large quantities of food for the consumer, and that ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson
... attacked the schoolman's idol Aristotle and the humanist's demigod Cicero. More important were his Annotations on the New Testament, first published by Erasmus in 1505. The Vulgate was at that time regarded, as it was at Trent defined to be, the authentic or official form ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... audience: "My own studies have been almost wholly in Letters, and my visits to the field of the natural sciences have been very slight and inadequate, although those sciences have always strongly moved my curiosity." In a word, he was, and gloried in being, a Humanist. What Humanism meant for him is curiously illustrated by his comment on some speeches which the late[14] Lord Salisbury delivered at Oxford on his first appearance there as Chancellor of the University. After ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... to be a humanist, sir," said he to me, "but I will take the liberty of showing your utter ignorance. Now, sir, do you venture to say that you can answer a question connected with the ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... a comparison of Luther with, let us say, Erasmus. Had he been a humanist, he would have laughed the whole thing [Tetzel's selling of indulgences] to scorn as an exploded superstition beneath the contempt of an intelligent man; had he been a scholastic theologian, he would have sat in his study and drawn fine distinctions to justify ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... shabby disorder and surmounted by a wonderful head, lean, vulpine, eagle-beaked as that of some art-loving despot of the Renaissance: a head combining the venerable hair and large prominent eyes of the humanist with the greedy profile of the adventurer. Wyant, in musing on the Italian portrait-medals of the fifteenth century, had often fancied that only in that period of fierce individualism could types ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... likeness between the character of Hamlet and that of Macbeth, much less identity; nevertheless, it seems to me easy to prove that Macbeth, "the rugged Macbeth," as Hazlitt and Brandes call him, is merely our gentle irresolute, humanist, philosopher Hamlet masquerading in galligaskins ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... is to be noted that Nepenthe, an islet of volcanic stone rising out of the blue Mediterranean, has never—for all its natural attractions—been renowned for cool springs and bubbling streamlets. There is, to be sure, a charming couplet in some old humanist about LYMPHA NEPENTHI; but modern scholars are disposed to think either that the text is corrupt and that the writer was picturing an imaginary NYMPHA—some laughing sea-lady—or else that he merely indulged ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... of the old attitudes involved in worship and prayer, the humanist finds his religious emotions exprest in a heightened sense of personal life and in a cooperative ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... the first great German humanist. He was educated at Freiburg, Paris, and Basel, and gave especial attention to the classic studies, which had almost disappeared from the university courses in Germany. He took his master's degree at Basel, and then began to lecture on classical Latin and Greek. Being a born teacher, he drew about ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... study of art exhibitions from the point of view of the humanist is the affinity between pictures and people. Here, for instance, on Madison Square, amid the art heritage of times past, what is it that at once strikes you? Why, that old paintings evidently are quite passe to the new crowd. At these exhibitions preliminary to the big auction sales of venerable ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... watch, a coach, a piece of meat, a tune upon the fiddle, or a fact in hydrostatics, Pepys was pleased yet more by the beauty, the worth, the mirth, or the mere scenic attitude in life of his fellow-creatures. He shows himself throughout a sterling humanist. Indeed, he who loves himself, not in idle vanity, but with a plenitude of knowledge, is the best equipped of all to love his neighbors. And perhaps it is in this sense that charity may be most properly said to begin at home. It does not matter what ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... in [Corpus Christi] College Library, suggests another origin for this Homer. I have been unable to identify the document to which reference is made. It should obviously be a letter of an Italian humanist in the Harleian collection.... Mr. Humphrey Wanley, Librarian to the late Earl of Oxford, told Mr. Fran. Stanley, son of the author, a little before his death, that in looking over some papers in the papers in the Earl's library, he found a Letter from a learned Italian to ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... humanists in the sense defined. Professor Milhaud also appears to be one; and the great Poincare misses it by only the breadth of a hair. In Germany the name of Simmel offers itself as that of a humanist of the most radical sort. Mach and his school, and Hertz and Ostwald must be classed as humanists. The view is in the atmosphere and must ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... influenced by the Italian Renaissance, it is certainly a mistake to reckon the Humanist movement in Germany, as Geiger does,[1] as a 'merely imported culture, entirely lacking independence.' The germ of this great movement towards mental freedom was contained in the general trend of the time, which was striving to free itself from the fetters of the Middle Ages in customs and education ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... there was also a humanist of German birth, Lorenz Behaim, of Nurenburg, who managed his household for twenty years. As he was a Latinist and a member of the Roman Academy of Pomponius Laetus, he must have exercised some influence on the education of his master's children. Generally there ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... South African Republic in 1872. He was bent on the advancement of his nation, and his intelligence was remarkable. He was a man of sterling character, fanciful, enthusiastic, an idealist even, with a horror of slaveholding, and a hankering for the pure life of the humanist. In a measure he was too much in advance of the people with whom he was connected. To them he was something of a Freethinker, a man too ready to judge for himself while the Gospel was at hand to judge for him. Such liberal views were not in accord ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... Reformation one of the products of that great outbreak of many-sided free mental activity included under the general head of the Renascence? Melanchthon, Ulrich von Hutten, Beza, were they not all humanists? Was not the arch-humanist, Erasmus, fautor-in-chief of the Reformation, until he got frightened and basely ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... intolerable. But the spirit underlying this is not mere vanity. No doubt it wounded him to be evil spoken of, to have his pre-eminence called in question, to be shown to have made mistakes: but the real ground of his resentment was rather vexation that anything should arise to mar the unanimity of the humanist advance toward wider knowledge. Conscious of singleness of purpose, it was a profound disappointment to him to have his sincerity doubted, to be treated as an enemy by men who should have ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... you, my boy? Never forget that you owe these fine clothes to the knowledge I have given you. They fit a humanist like yourself, as who says humanities says also elegance. But look on me and say if I have a good mien. In this dress I consider myself to be a very honest man. This M. d'Asterac seems to be tolerably magnificent. It's ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... so in the Victorian Renaissance, a vast intellectual ferment had taken immediate shape in a fierce struggle with long established orthodoxy. But whereas Luther displaced Erasmus, and the earlier reformers fought out the quarrel with the weapons of the theologian rather than those of the Humanist, the latter-day reformation was based upon the extension of the domain of positive science, upon the force of historical criticism, and the sudden reorganisation of accumulated knowledge in the light of a physical theory adequate ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... it is according to their opinion unjust and cruel to punish criminals. "The Christian regards the hooligan, the thief, the wanton, and the drunkard as men and women who have done wrong. But the humanist regards them as men and women who have been wronged."[883] "Human law, like divine law, is based upon the false idea that men know what is right and what is wrong, and have power to choose the right."[884] "Man ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... 1488-1523. An eminent humanist and poet laureate of knightly stock, Hutten had attacked the papacy in various Latin writings before resorting to the vernacular in support of Luther, of whose cause he became, in 1520, an ardent champion. The defeat of his friend Sickingen compelled him to flee to Switzerland, ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas |
