Quotes
Number of quotes found: 35
- things
- nature
- universe
- one
- soul
- death
- god
- infinite
- life
- single
- time
- mind
- nothing
- cannot
- impossible
- space
- sense
- heart
- certain
- spirit
- everything
- body
- eternal
- always
- world
- within
- truth
- everywhere
- center
- change
- worlds
- merely
- greatness
- rather
- must
- beyond
- may
- grow
- infinity
- like
- manifest
- wish
- earth
- none
- afar
- think
- changes
- ever
- species
- leave
- die
- neither
- desires
- become
- see
- wise
- divinity
- thus
- latent
- present
Here am I miserable, deprived of a heart, abandoned by my thoughts, bereft of the hope I had entirely placed in them. Nothing else remains but the sense of my poverty, unhappiness, and wretchedness. And what am I not deprived of this sense too? Why does death not come to my aid, now that I am deprived of life? For what purpose are my natural faculties deprived of their power?
Source: The Heroic Frenzies - 1585
Because the soul always desires to love more than it loves and to see more than it sees. Moreover the soul desires that this species which the sight has engendered in it should not become attenuated, enfeebled, or lost.
Source: The Heroic Frenzies - 1585
In this manner, although the soul at first launches complaints against its heart and thoughts, it now desires to be raised with them and manifestly deplores the union and familiarity contracted with corporeal matter. Leave me then, it cries, corporeal life, and do not trouble me, so that I may reascend to my native home, to my sun.
Source: The Heroic Frenzies - 1585
Here the sorrowing soul, not in real discontent, but in the passion of a certain amorous martyrdom, speaks as though addressing its discourse to those who are similarly impassioned. It has dismissed its heart, as it were, against its will, for the heart directs its course toward an impossible goal, extends itself where it cannot reach and would embrace what it cannot grasp; and the more the heart is estranged from the soul, the more does it enkindle itself toward the infinite.
Source: The Heroic Frenzies - 1585
Behold in the candle borne by this Chandler, to whom I give birth, that which shall clarify certain shadows of ideas … I need not instruct you of my belief. Time gives all and takes all away; everything changes but nothing perishes. One only is immutable, eternal and ever endures, one and the same with itself. With this philosophy my spirit grows, my mind expands. Whereof, however obscure the night may be, I await the daybreak, and they who dwell in day look for night …
Source: The Chandler
In exercising its faculty, then, the mind can desire an object only to the extent that it is near, proximate, known and familiar to it. Thus a pig cannot wish to be a man nor desire anything appropriate to the appetite of a man. He prefers to wallow in the mud rather than in a bed of fine linen; he would sooner mate with a sow than with the most beautiful woman nature produces, because the desire conforms to the nature of the species.
Source: The Heroic Frenzies - 1585
This is a beauty which comes and goes, is born and dies, blooms and decays; and is eternally beautiful for so very short a moment and within itself truly and lastingly contains a cargo, a store-house, an emporium, a market of all the filth, toxins and poisons which our step-mother nature is able to produce; who having collected that seed of which she makes use, often recompenses us by a stench, by repentance, by melancholy, by languor, by a pain in the head, by a sense of undoing, by many other calamities which are evident to everyone, so that one suffers bitterly, where formerly he suffered only a little.
Source: The Heroic Frenzies - 1585
Unless you make yourself equal to God, you cannot understand God: for the like is not intelligible save to the like. Make yourself grow to a greatness beyond measure, by a bound free yourself from the body; raise yourself above all time, become Eternity; then you will understand God. Believe that nothing is impossible for you, think yourself immortal and capable of understanding all, all arts, all sciences, the nature of every living being. Mount higher than the highest height; descend lower than the lowest depth. Draw into yourself all sensations of everything created, fire and water, dry and moist, imagining that you are everywhere, on earth, in the sea, in the sky, that you are not yet born, in the maternal womb, adolescent, old, dead, beyond death. If you embrace in your thought all things at once, times, places, substances, qualities, quantities, you may understand God.
Source: Quoted in Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition - 1999
For nature is not merely present, but is implanted within things, distant from none…
Source: De Immenso - 1591
Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it.
Source: Supposedly to be hislast wordsto the inquisitors that had sentenced him to death - 1600
It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.
Source: Quoted in Life and Teachings of Giordano Bruno - 1913





