Marsilio Ficino Quotes

In these times I don't, in a manner of speaking, know what I want; perhaps I don't want what I know and want what I don't know.

The ideas of things intellectually known pass into the substance of the intellect much more than do foods into the substance of the body.

Poetry being an attempt to express, not the common sense, - as the avoirdupois of the hero, or his structure in feet and inches, - but the beauty and soul in his aspect . . . runs into fable, personifies every fact. . . .

Everyone believes that he abounds in wisdom, but is short of money.

The fate of the poor shepherd, who, blinded and lost in the snow-storm, perishes in a drift within a few feet of his cottage door, is an emblem of the state of man.

Why do we think love is a magician? Because the whole power of magic consists in love. The work of magic is the attraction of one thing by another because of a certain affinity of nature.

. . . the poor man, whom the law does not allow to take . . . a pair of shoes for his freezing feet, is allowed to put his hand into the pocket of the rich, and say, You shall educate me. . . .

Many have paid lip service to philosophy, but these men served it with their whole heart. He tastes nothing who has not tasted for himself.

The abstractionist and the materialist thus mutually exasperating each other, and the scoffer expressing the worst of materialism, there arises a third party to occupy the middle ground between these two, the skeptic, namely. He finds both wrong by being in extremes. He labors to plant his feet, to be the beam of the balance.

Wealth begins . . . in giving on all sides by tools and auxiliaries the greatest possible extension to our powers; as if it added feet and hands and eyes and blood. . . .

You are running to seek your friend. Let your feet run, but your mind need not.

The soul exists partly in eternity and partly in time.

Books that distribute things... with as daring a freedom as we use in dreams, put us on our feet again.

Laurel crowns cleave to deserts And power to him who power exerts; Hast not thy share? On winged feet, Lo! it rushes thee to meet; . . .

What is odious but . . . people . . . who toast their feet on the register. . . .

. . . if [writing] lift you from your feet with the great voice of eloquence, then the effect is to be wide, slow, permanent, over the minds of men; . . .

Mortal men ask God for good things every day, but they never pray that they may make good use of them.

Never worry about anything. Live in the present. Live now. Be happy.

Law it is . . . which hears without ears, sees without eyes, moves without feet and seizes without hands.

The doctors of antiquity have affirmed that love is a passion that resembles a melancholy disease. The physician Rasis prescribed, therefore, in order to recover, coitus, fasting, drunkenness, and walking.

Artists in each of the arts seek after and care for nothing but love.

No man can claim to usurp more than a few cubic feet of the audibilities of a public room. . . .

[Nature said] The sea shall disjoin the people [of England] from others, and knit them to a fierce nationality. It shall give them markets on every side. Long time I will keep them on their feet, by poverty, border-wars . . . seafaring . . .

[The imagination] . . . inspires an audacious mental habit. We are as elastic as the gas of gunpowder, and . . . a word dropped in conversation, sets free our fancy, and instantly our heads are bathed with galaxies, and our feet tread the floor of the Pit.

There is a moment in the history of every nation, when . . . the perceptive powers reach their ripeness and have not yet become microscopic: so that man, at that instant . . . with his feet still planted on the immense forces of night, converses by his eyes and brain with solar and stellar creation.

Who can wonder at the attractiveness... of the bar, for our ambitious young men, when the highest bribes of society are at the feet of the successful orator?