Quotes about Petrarch

6 Sourced Quotes

Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's wife,
He would have written sonnets all his life?

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.

Robin Maxwell (author)

Courteous love was avowedly a form of drama, but not the less a force of society. Illusion for illusion, courteous love in Thibaut's hands, or in the hands of Dante and Petrarch, was as substantial as any other convention;— the balance of trade, the rights of man, the Athanasian Creed. In that sense the illusions alone were real; if the middle-ages had reflected only what was practical, nothing would have survived for us.

We are concerned with the artistic and social side of life, and have only to notice the coincidence that while the Virgin was miraculously using the power of spiritual love to elevate and purify the people, Eleanor and her daughters were using the power of earthly love to discipline and refine the Courts. Side by side with the crude realities about them, they insisted on teaching and enforcing an ideal that contradicted the realities, and had no value for them or for us except in the contradiction. The ideals of Eleanor and her daughter Mary of Champagne were a form of religion, and if you care to see its evangels, you had best go directly to Dante and Petrarch.

He cursed Petrarch for redacting verses to sonnets, which he said were like that tyrant's bed, where some who were too short were racked, others too long cut short.

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.