Ficino Quotes

[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. ~ Marsilio Ficino

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? ~ Marsilio Ficino

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 ... ~ Marsilio Ficino

[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 ... ~ Marsilio Ficino

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. ~ Marsilio Ficino

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

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

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

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

The roots of Campanella's "Solar City" (and the District of Columbia) can be found in deeper occult parallels within the literature formulated by hermetical philosophers Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino in Renaissance Florence; both prophetically predicting the restoration of the Egyptian solar religion as the correct political theology of the planet and itself the model for a "New World" civil religion. In another words they believed the Abrahamic solar faiths of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam would ultimately be exposed as substituted forms of Egyptian sun worship with in "New World" - the United States. It would be this "New World" that would midwife civilization from the waning Piscean Age into the "Masonic" Aquarian Age, a new age of the holy spirit. Simon Greenleaf's Druids and Campanella's Solarians are the de-facto "mediating" Joachimite order through which heavenly signs are mediated by a Sun Priest - an executive or President - who frames policy based upon his knowledge of the correspondences between science (i.e. Egyptian natural religion), grades of being, and heavenly correspondences. This polity was replicated from 1797 within the General Grand Chapter of Royal Arch Masons with reference both to Enoch (cf. Webb's 1797 Monitor) and the priest king Melchizedek of which the Grand Master DeWitt Clinton became the symbolic presiding executive. This configuration is important to make because it establishes the position of the District of Columbia ~ Robert W. Sullivan IV

In the fifteenth century, Marsilio Ficino put it as simply as possible. The mind, he said, tends to go off on its own so that it seems to have no relevance to the physical world. At the same time, the materialistic life can be so absorbing that we get caught in it and forget about spirituality. What we need, he said, is soul, in the middle, holding together mind and body, ideas and life, spirituality and the world. ~ Thomas Moore

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; ... ~ Marsilio Ficino

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. ~ Marsilio Ficino

The soul exists partly in eternity and partly in time. ~ Marsilio Ficino

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. ~ Marsilio Ficino

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

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 ... ~ Marsilio Ficino

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

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 ... ~ Marsilio Ficino

He tastes nothing who has not tasted for himself ~ Marsilio Ficino

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. ~ Marsilio Ficino

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

At every person's birth, he or she is assigned a certain daemon by his own star, a guardian of life to help with his destined task. ~ Marsilio Ficino