6 Giordano Bruno Quotes on Giordano bruno

Giordano Bruno quotes on giordano bruno

57. He is one martyr whose name should lead all the rest. He was not a mere religious sectarian who was caught up in the psychology of some mob hysteria. He was a sensitive, imaginative poet, fired with the enthusiasm of a larger vision of a larger universe... and he fell into the error of heretical belief. For this poets vision he was kept in a dark dungeon for eight years and then taken out to a blazing market place and roasted to death by fire.

58. Joyce gives the ghost guises like Saint Bruno and The Nolan of the Cabashes and Noland's brown and Nolan Browne and Bruno Nowlan and Nolans Brumans and Mr. Brown and Bruno Nolan and many others. The encyclopedic Joyce was deeply impressed by Bruno's heady coincidence of contraries, and was no doubt sympathetic to Bruno's hectic and finally tragic bouts with the Inquisition. McLuhan the Joycean scholar was certainly conscious of Joyce's debt to Bruno. But I like to think there was more: that when 'Bruno Nolan' winked from one of paper sleeves, McLuhan made a recognition as if glimpsing a companion from across the centuries and winked back.

59. 'History has not yet registered a stable appraisal for Giordano Bruno' writes Giorgio de Santillana in The Age of Adventure. Perceptions of Bruno were volatile enough in his lifetime; many have remained polarized to this day. Radoslav Tsanoff calls Bruno 'the outstanding philosopher of the Renaissance,' and Harold Hoffding cites Bruno's work as 'the greatest philosophical thought-structure executed by the Renaissance.' Yet Bertrand Russell despairs of crediting Bruno with philosophy at all: 'There were fruitful intuitions lost in that disorder, but they had not yet reached the point of precision at which philosophy begins.' The chasm of opinion dividing Bruno, even to this day, is one of the many improbables of this turbulent and exultant figure.

60. In 1584, twenty-five years before Galileo lifted a telescope, Bruno took the Copernican hypothesis to the outrageous new conclusion that the sun is merely one of an infinity of stars, which stretch across boundless and inexhaustible space. It was consummate audacity to proclaim an infinite universe in the teeth of the doctrinal dogfights of the 16th century. It was yet bolder to exult in the de immenso with the bounding wonder of a poet. The prospect of our earth reduced to a turning speck in endless space was terrifying to contemplate. An ecstatic Bruno cried, 'My thoughts are stitched to the stars!' and contemplated little else. With an impetuous abandon that his contemporaries found reckless and even dangerous, Bruno proceeded to rethink man's relationship to the universe, to himself, and to God by the unimaginable light of countless stars. His conclusions were simply unbelievable for a late medieval mind: infinite other worlds, inhabited like our own, spread throughout space; a structure to the universe of suns and clusters of suns circling in grand orbits, but no 'center' except in the ground beneath two human feet; the presence of God not atop an empyrean throne past the threshold of the farthest stars, but inhabiting every atom of matter; an eternal span to matter, which can change its form but never be exhausted in any proportion; and finally a logic infinity demanded of him - an innate union of all contraries, by which evil and good, history and the future, localized humanity and an infinite universe inform and express one another...

61. He was drawn to the centers of learning to announce his startling philosophy; from most he was curtly expelled... He was contradictory, capricious, often insufferable: his moods could flash abruptly from antic lampooning to raw invective, from wild exhilaration to fierce bitterness, from clownishness to a blackdog melancholy. 'Gay in sorrow, sorrowful in gaiety,' he said of himself, and the contraries of the tempestuous Bruno survive in his writings, where exalted and discerning passages seem to bob and dip in great waves of bombast... Controversial and largely dismissed in his lifetime, Bruno fared no better after his death. If his ideas were disputed, so was his martyrdom. For centuries, rumor and doubt shrouded the terrible fire in the Campo dei Fiore and as late as 1885 there are references to the 'legends' of Bruno's burning at the stake... Only in the twentieth century has Bruno begun emerging from his long neglect into prominence.

62. You I admire as being more, - much more - a man, and more believer too, than half the canting orthodox.