Giordano Bruno > Quotes

“Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.”
― Giordano Bruno

“Maybe you who condemn me are in greater fear than I who am condemned.”
― Giordano Bruno

“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.”
― Giordano Bruno

“If the butterfly wings its way to the sweet light that attracts it, it's only becasue it doesn't know that the fire can consume it.”
― Giordano Bruno

“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.”
― Giordano Bruno

“They dispute not in order to find or even to seek Truth, but for victory, and to appear the more learned and strenuous upholders of a contrary opinion. Such persons should be avoided by all who have not a good breastplate of patience.”
― Giordano Bruno

“I await your sentence with less fear than you pass it. The time will come when all will see what I see.”
― Giordano Bruno

“The Divine Light is always in man, presenting itself to the senses and to the comprehension, but man rejects it.”
― Giordano Bruno

“In space there are countless constellations, suns and planets; we see only the suns because they give light; the planets remain invisible, for they are small and dark. There are also numberless earths circling around their suns...”
― Giordano Bruno, Despre infinit univers si lumi

“Desire urges me on, while fear bridals me.”
― Giordano Bruno, The Heroic Enthusiasts - (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem

“There is no top or bottom, no absolute
positioning in space. There are only positions that are relative to the others.
There is an incessant change in the relative positions throughout the universe
and the observer is always at the centre".”
― Giordano Bruno

“It is immoral to hold an opinion in order to curry another's favor; mercenary, servile, and against the dignity of human liberty to yield and submit; supremely stupid to believe as a matter of habit; irrational to decide according to the majority opinion, as if the number of sages exceeded the infinite number of fools.”
― Giordano Bruno

“Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it.”
― Giordano Bruno

“Since I have spread my wings to purpose high,
The more beneath my feet the clouds I see,
The more I give the winds my pinions free,
Spurning the earth and soaring to the sky.”
― Giordano Bruno

“Natura est deus in rebus”
― Giordano Bruno, Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast

“Therefore the perfect, absolutely and in itself, is one, infinite, which cannot be
greater or better, and that which nothing can be greater or better. This is one, everywhere,
the only God, universal nature, of which nothing can be a perfect image
or reflection, but the infinite.”
― Giordano Bruno

“Its a poor mind that would think with the multitude, because it is multitude. Truth is not altered by the opinions of the vulgar, or by confirmations of the many”
― Giordano Bruno

“XIV. Of all men they alone are at leisure who take time for philosophy, they alone really live; for they are not content to be good guardians of their own lifetime only. They annex ever age to their own; all the years that have gone ore them are an addition to their store. Unless we are most ungrateful, all those men, glorious fashioners of holy thoughts, were born for us; for us they have prepared a way of life. By other men's labours we are led to the sight of things most beautiful that have been wrested from darkness and brought into light; from no age are we shut out, we have access to all ages, and if it is our wish, by greatness of mind, to pass beyond the narrow limits of human weakness, there is a great stretch of time through which we may roam. We may argue with Socrates, we may doubt32 with Carneades, find peace with Epicurus, overcome human nature with the Stoics, exceed it with the Cynics. Since Nature allows us to enter into fellowship with every age, why should we not turn from this paltry and fleeting span of time and surrender ourselves with all our soul to the past, which is boundless, which is eternal, which we share with our betters?”
― Giordano Bruno, On the Infinite, the Universe and the Worlds: Five Cosmological Dialogues

“But your achievement for others may easily come to be inscribed in the book of eternity -- either that which is seen on earth or that other which is believed to be in heaven. For that which you receive from others is a testimony to their virtue, but all that you do for others is the sign and clear indication of your own virtue. Farewell.”
― Giordano Bruno, On the Infinite, the Universe and the Worlds: Five Cosmological Dialogues

“To ask the power to reform itself, what a dullness!”
― Giordano Bruno

“The ancient observed, and we also observe, that sometimes things fall to earth, or some things leave the earth, or whatever parts we may be near. Whence, he says, and we may also say if we like, that something has moved either upward or downward, but only with regard to a certain region, or in a certain perspective, something passing from us to the moon would look the opposite to those across from us on the moon; where we would say, something has ascended, those moon people, our anticephali, would say that something has descended. Such motions, therefore, make no distinction between up and down, hither and thither with respect to the infinite universe, but only the finite world in which we are, or within the boundaries of the infinite worlds' horizons, or according to the calculations of the innumerable stars; hence, the same thing, with the same motion, can be regarded differently and called at the same time "rising" and "falling". Determinate bodies, therefore, do not have infinite motion, but finite and determinate calculation within their own limits. But that which is indeterminate and infinite has neither finite nor infinite motion, and knows no differentiation of space or time.”
― Giordano Bruno, On the Infinite, the Universe and the Worlds: Five Cosmological Dialogues

“Copernicus not only moved the Earth but also set in motion the minds of men”
― Giordano Bruno

“Make then your forecasts, my lords Astrologers, with your slavish physicians, by means of those astrolabes with which you seek to discern the fantastic nine moving spheres; in these you finally imprison your own minds, so that you appear to me but as parrots in a cage, while I watch you dancing up and down, turning and hopping within those circles. We know that the Supreme Ruler cannot have a seat so narrow, so miserable a throne, so straight a tribunal, so scanty a court, so small and feeble a simulacrum that a phantasm can bring to birth, a dream shatter, a delusion restore, a chimera disperse, a calamity diminish, a misdeed abolish and a thought renew it again, so that indeed with a puff of air it were brimful and with a single gulp it were emptied. On the contrary we recognize a noble image, a marvellous conception, a supreme figure, an exalted shadow, an infinite representation of the represented infinity, a spectacle worthy of the excellence and supremacy of Him who transcendeth understanding, comprehension or grasp. Thus is the excellence of God magnified and the greatness of his kingdom made manifest; he is glorified not in one, but in countless suns; not in a single earth, a single world, but in a thousand thousand, I say in an infinity of worlds.”
― Giordano Bruno, On the Infinite, the Universe and the Worlds: Five Cosmological Dialogues

“Tanrı,iradesini hakim kılmak için yeryüzündeki iyi insanları kullanır;yeryüzündeki kötü insanlar ise kendi iradelerini hakim kılmak için Tanrı'yı kullanırlar.”
― Giordano Bruno

“Philotheo. I say that the universe is entirely infinite because it hath neither edge, limit, nor surfaces. But I say that the universe is not all-comprehensive infinity because each of the parts thereof that we can examine is finite and each of the innumerable worlds contained therein is finite. I declare God to be completely infinite because he can be associated with no boundary and his every attribute is one and infinite. And I say that God is all-comprehensive infinity because the whole of him pervadeth the whole world and every part thereof comprehensively and to infinity. That is unlike the infinity of the universe which is comprehensively in the whole but not comprehensively in those parts which we can distinguish within the whole (if indeed we can use the name parts, since they appertain to an infinite whole). [27]”
― Giordano Bruno, On the Infinite, the Universe and the Worlds: Five Cosmological Dialogues

“Why wouldst thou that God should in power, in act and in effect (which in him are identical) be determined as the limit of the convexity of a sphere, rather than that he should be as we may say the undetermined limit of the boundless? The limit I say, without limit, that I may differentiate the one infinity from the other. For He is the whole, comprehensive [26] and complete totality of the infinite, but the universe is the explicit though not the all-comprehensive totality (if indeed we may in any wise use the term totality where there is neither part nor boundary). Therefore the nature of the one doth comprehend boundaries; that of the other is bounded. And this is not the distinction between infinite and finite. The distinction is rather that the one is infinite, while the other doth limit according to the nature of the totality and of the whole being thereof. So that although it is entirely infinite, the infinity thereof is not completely comprehensive, for this would be repugnant to dimensional infinity.”
― Giordano Bruno, On the Infinite, the Universe and the Worlds: Five Cosmological Dialogues

“Desire urges me on while fear bridals me”
― Giordano Bruno

“An infinite body, according to us, is neither potentially nor actually mobile, neither light nor heavy potentially or actually.”
― Giordano Bruno, On the Infinite, the Universe and the Worlds: Five Cosmological Dialogues

“Deve-se compreender, pois, que a semelhança não envolve proporcionalidade.”
― Giordano Bruno, Cause, Principle and Unity: And Essays on Magic

“We are wont to say that it was not in our power to choose the parents who fell to our lot, that they have been given to men by chance; yet we may be the sons of whomsoever we will. Households there are of noblest intellects; choose the one into which you wish to be adopted; you will inherit not merely their name, but even their property, which there will be no need to guard in a mean or niggardly spirit; the more persons you share it with, the greater it will become. These will open to you the path to immortality, and will raise you to a height from which no one is cast down. This is the only way of prolonging mortality—nay, of turning it into immortality. Honours, monuments, all that ambition has commanded by decrees or reared in works of stone, quickly sink to ruin; there is nothing that the lapse of time does not tear down and remove. But the works which philosophy has consecrated cannot be harmed; no age will destroy them, no age reduce them; the following and each succeeding age will but increase the reverence for them, since envy works upon what is close at hand, and things that are far off we are more free to admire. The life of the philosopher, therefore, has wide range, and he is not confined by the same bounds that shut others in. He alone is freed from the limitations of the human race; all ages serve him as if a god. Has some time passed by? This he embraces by recollection. Is time present? This he uses. Is it still to come? This he anticipates. He makes his life long by combining all times into one.”
― Giordano Bruno, On the Infinite, the Universe and the Worlds: Five Cosmological Dialogues