Top 93 Quotes & Sayings by Giordano Bruno
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno.
Last updated on December 3, 2024.
The soul of the world is in the whole world, and is everywhere so adapted to matter that, at each place, it produces the proper subject and causes the proper actions.
There is one simple Divinity found in all things, one fecund Nature, preserving mother of the universe insofar as she diversely communicates herself, casts her light into diverse subjects, and assumes various names.
Innumerable spirits and souls, when spread out through the same space, do not interfere with each other such that the diffusion of one would affect the diffusion of an infinity of others.
With luck on your side, you can do without brains.
Nothing is so good that impious and sacrilegious and wicked people cannot contort its proper benefit into evil.
To the perfect, if it be perfect, there is nothing that can be added; therefore, the will is not capable of any other desire, when that which is of the perfect is present with it, highest and best.
Because of the active principle and spirit or universal soul, nothing is so incomplete, defective or imperfect, or, according to common opinion, so completely insignificant that it could not become the source of great events.
The whole soul is in the whole body, in the bones and in the veins and in the heart; it is no more present in one part than in another, and it is no less present in one part than in the whole, nor in the whole less than in one part.
It may be you fear more to deliver judgment upon me than I fear judgment.
What can be more stupid than to be in pain about future things and absent ones which at present are not felt?
There is a descent from God through the world to animals, and an ascent from animals through the world to God. He is the highest point of the scale, pure act and active power, the purest light.
Time takes all and gives all.
The intellectual power is never at rest; it is never satisfied with any comprehended truth, but ever proceeds on and on towards that truth which is not comprehended. So also the will, which follows the apprehension; we see that it is never satisfied with anything finite.
Do you not see what damage has been done to science through this: i.e. pedants wishing to be philosophers; to treat of natural things, and mix themselves with and decide about things Divine?
I consider that all which lives must feed itself and nourish itself in a manner suitable to the way in which it lives.
There is no law governing all things.
Beautiful sights arouse feelings of love, and contrary sights bring feelings of disgrace and hate. And the emotions of the soul and spirit bring something additional to the body itself, which exists under the control of the soul and the direction of the spirit.
Just as Divinity descends in a certain manner, to the extent that one communicates with Nature, so one ascends to Divinity through Nature, just as by means of a life resplendent in natural things one rises to the life that presides over them.
Divine love does not weigh down, nor carry his servant captive and enslaved to the lowest depths, but raises him, supports him and magnifies him above all liberty whatsoever.
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.
Every soul and spirit has some degree of continuity with the universal spirit, which is recognized to be located not only where the individual soul lives and perceives, but also to be spread out everywhere in its essence and substance, as many Platonists and Pythagoreans have taught.
Time is the father of truth, its mother is our mind.
The soul, in its power, is present in some way in the entire universe, because it apprehends substances which are not included in the body in which it lives, although they are related to it.
It is proper that noble spirits, equipped with truth and enlightened with the Divine intelligence, should arm themselves against dense ignorance by climbing up to the high rock and tower of contemplation.
Although one soul lives in the whole body, and all the body's members are controlled by one soul, still the whole body and the whole soul and the parts of the universe are vivified by a certain total spirit.
That which we have lived is nothing; that which we live is a point; that which we have to live is not yet a point, but may be a point which, together, shall be and shall have been.
We see that pedantry has never been held in such esteem for the government of the world as in our times, and it offers as many paths of the true intelligible species and objects of infallible and sole truth as there are individual pedants.
See how fortune deludes us, and that which we put carefully into her hands, she either breaks or lets it fall from her hands, or causes it to be removed by the violence of another, or suffocates and poisons, or taints with suspicion, fear and jealousy to the great hurt and ruin of the possessor.
I who am in the night will move into the day.
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, how r ever obscure the night may be, I await daybreak, and they who dwell in day look for night Rejoice therefore, and keep whole, if you can, and return love for love.
The beginning, middle, and end of the birth, growth, and perfection of whatever we behold is from contraries, by contraries, and to contraries; and whatever contrariety is, there is action and reaction, there is motion, diversity, multitude, and order, there are degrees, succession and vicissitude.
Those wise men knew God to be in things, and Divinity to be latent in Nature, working and glowing differently in different subjects and succeeding through diverse physical forms, in certain arrangements, in making them participants in her, I say, in her being, in her life and intellect.
All things are in the Universe, and the universe is in all things: we in it, and it in us; in this way everything concurs in a perfect unity.
The gems of philosophy are not less precious because they are not understood.
Innumerable suns exist; innumerable earths revolve around these suns in a manner similar
to the way the seven planets revolve around our sun. Living beings inhabit these worlds.
I fought, and therefore, believed in my victory. There is more to the fact that I didn't fear death and preferred a brave death instead of a life of an idiot.
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.
What 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.
Time takes all and gives all
The Divine Light is always in man, presenting itself to the senses and to the comprehension, but man rejects it.
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.
There is no absolute up or down, as Aristotle taught; no absolute position in space; but the position of a body is relative to that of other bodies. Everywhere there is incessant relative change in position throughout the universe, and the observer is always at the center of things.
I beg you, reject antiquity, tradition, faith, and authority! Let us begin anew by doubting everything we assume has been proven!
Why, I say, do so few understand and apprehend the internal power?... He who in himself sees all things, is all things.
Divinity reveals herself in all things. Everything has Divinity latent within itself. For she enfolds and imparts herself even unto the smallest beings, and from the smallest beings, according to their capacity. Without her presence nothing would have being, because she is the essence of the existence of the first unto the last being.
I do not know when, but I know that many have come in this century to develop arts and sciences, sow the seeds of a new culture that will flourish, unexpected, sudden, just when the power is deluded into believing they have won.
Magicians can do more by means of faith than physicians by the truth.
When we consider the being and substance of that universe in which we are immutably set, we shall discover that neither we ourselves nor any substance doth suffer death. For nothing is in fact diminished in its substance, but all things, wandering through infinite space, undergo change of aspect.
Desire urges me on, while fear bridals me.
The soul is not the body and it may be in one body or in another, and pass from body to body.
The fools of the world have been those who have established religions, ceremonies, laws, faith, rule of life.
God is infinite, so His universe must be too. 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.
If the first button of one's coat is wrongly buttoned, all the rest will be crooked.
I have declared infinite worlds to exist beside this our earth. It would not be worthy of God to manifest Himself in less than an infinite universe.
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.
I have held and hold souls to be immortal.... Speaking as a Catholic, they do not pass from body to body, but go to paradise, purgatory or hell. But I have reasoned deeply, and, speaking as a philosopher, since the soul is not found without body and yet is not body, it may be in one body or in another, and pass from body to body.
Nature is none other than God in all things. Animals and plants are living effects of Nature; Whence all of God is in all things.
Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.
I await your sentence with less fear than you pass it. The time will come when all will see what I see.
Maybe you who condemn me are in greater fear than I who am condemned.
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