Stephen Greenblatt Quotes

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Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.

Stephen Greenblatt

The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.

Stephen Greenblatt

A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure - an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation - characterizes Montaigne's restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes's chronicle of his mad knight, Michelangelo's depiction of flayed skin, Leonardo's sketches of whirlpools, Caravaggio's loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ's feet.

Stephen Greenblatt

Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life.

Stephen Greenblatt

I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter.

Stephen Greenblatt

Stephen Greenblatt

Stephen Greenblatt

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Born: November 7, 1943 (age 81)

Bio: Stephen Jay Greenblatt is an American Shakespearean, literary historian, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. He is John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University.

Known for:

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011)
Renaissance self-fashioning (1980)
Marvelous Possessions (1991)
Hamlet in purgatory (2002)

Stephen Greenblatt on Wikipedia

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