Marsilio Ficino Quotes

You must linger among a limited number of master-thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind.

It is certain that I cannot always distinguish my own thoughts from those I read, because what I read becomes the very substance and text of my mind.

The body cannot be the soul.

There is a great difference between mind and body insomuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible.

The idea that excites me the most concerns the two greatest puzzles in science: the origin of the universe, and the origin of consciousness. The origin of the universe is what I do for a living, working on string theory. But I am also fascinated by consciousness.

The smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they’d already solved. They’re open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking.

The history of institutions is often a history of deception and illusions; for their virtue depends on the ideas that produce and on the spirit that preserves them, and the form may remain unaltered when the substance has passed away.

If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you.

Cliche refers to words, commonplace to ideas. Cliche describes the form or the letter, commonplace the substance or spirit. To confuse them is to confuse the thought with the expression of the thought. The cliche is immediately perceivable; the commonplace very often escapes notice if decked out in original dress. There are few examples, in any literature, of new ideas expressed in original form. The most critical mind must often be content with one or the other of these pleasures, only too happy when it is not deprived of both at once, which is not too rarely the case.

That's the other thing: Even if you're on medication, you still have to treat your body properly and take care of yourself. The idea that it [ADHD] goes away or you grow out of it isn't true.

We must have life building, man-making, character-making assimilation of ideas.

We are nothing but ceremony; ceremony carries us away, and we leave the substance of things; we hang on to the branches and abandon the trunk and body.

If the body dies, it does no harm to the mind, but if the mind dies, one can no longer act as a man even though the body survives.

To begin with, our knowledge grows in spots. The spots may be large or small, but the knowledge ever grows all over... What you first gain from them is probably a small amount of new information, a few new definitions, or distinctions, or points of view. But while these special ideas are being added, the rest of your knowledge stands still, and only gradually will you 'line up' your previous opinions with the novelties I am trying to instil, and modify to some slight degree their mass.

It's no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don't have a body, I am a body.

Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.

The soul is the form of the body

But reading is not idleness?it is the passive, receptive side of civilization without which the active and creative world would be meaningless. It is the immortal spirit of the dead realised within the bodies of the living. It is sacramental.

Words created divergencies between beings, because their precise meanings put an opinion around the idea. Music only retains the highest and purest substance of the idea, since it has the privilege of expressing all, whilst excluding nothing.

Ideas about life organize perception; names of emotions organize sensations; rules of syntax organize thought. But pain comes on its own.

Nothing remains beautiful and interesting except thought, because the thought is the life.

Knowledge is a thing that one cannot have enough of. It is the fruit of wisdom, to be eaten carefully and digested fully, unlike that lunch you are bolting down, little friend.

The monad, of which we shall speak here, is nothing but a simple substance which enters into compounds; simple, that is to say, without parts.

The cultivation of the mind is a kind of food supplied for the soul of man.

What action could bodies and substances have if they were not named in a further increase of dignity where common nouns become proper nouns?