Age of Enlightenment Quotes

Modernism in Vienna brought together science and culture in a new way to create an Age of Insight that emphasized a more complex view of the human mind than had ever existed before.

In 1763 the English were the most powerful nation in the world.

The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophists, economists and calculators has succeeded and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.

Those who did not live during the years close to 1789 do not know the pleasure of living.

America's revolutionary deists saw themselves as - and they were - participants in an international movement that drew on most of the same literary sources across the civilized world.

I mean, the Constitution of this country was written 200 years ago. The house I was living in in Madrid is 350 years old! America is still a project, and you guys are working on it and bringing new things to it every day. That is beautiful to watch.

Also, an area that interests me - and it will probably take years to state what I mean - is the period of the rise of democracy, with Tom Paine, which is around the turn of the 18th century into the 19th.

One of the Age of Enlightenment's most hypnotic images is Ledoux's rendering of his neoclassical theater of 1775 - 1784 in Besancon, surreally reflected in the colossal eye of an unidentified cosmic being.

There are some men who lift the age they inhabit, till all men walk on higher ground in that lifetime.

I suppose there's a melancholy tone at the back of the American mind, a sense of something lost. And it's the lost world of Thomas Jefferson. It is the lost sense of innocence that we could live with a very minimal state, with a vast sense of space in which to work out freedom.

I'm often asked, 'Why didn't Benjamin Franklin ever become president?' My short, easy answer is: He died.

While confronting the problems of the present, I often find myself thinking back to the world of books as it was experienced by the Founding Fathers and the philosophers of the Enlightenment.

In every age there has been a stream of popular opinion that has carried all before it, and given a family character, as it were, to the century.

At what point in human history, when was the last time it was possible for any human being to know everything that was known at that time? For example, it is humanly impossible for any human being to know everything now. So how are we gonna define smart?

We are very lucky to be living in an age in which we are still making discoveries. It is like the discovery of America-you only discover it once. The age in which we live is the age in which we are discovering the fundamental laws of nature, and that day will never come again. It is very exciting, it is marvelous, but this excitement will have to go.

When Louis XIV assumed the reins of government France suddenly and wonderfully came to her maturity; it was as if the whole nation had burst into splendid flower.

I'm a creature of the eighteenth century at heart: The Enlightenment and the search for happiness suit me.

This is an exciting time. I believe we stand at the edge of a new age - a Golden Age - of freedom that will rival any of the great eras of world history because it will be the entire world itself that is changing.

At fifty, that is in 1880, I formulated the idea of unity, without being able to render it. At sixty, I am beginning to see the possibility of rendering it.

Harvey , Galileo , Copernicus do not seem occult to us, but they did so to their contemporaries, hierophants of the mysteries of Natural Law, revealers of the secrets of a New Order of the Ages. After all, the movement eventually came to be called the Age of Enlightenment.

These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed.

Let us thank God that we live in an age when something has influence besides the bayonet.

Whatever else we may say of our own age, for good or evil, nobody is likely to call it an Age of Reason.

Literature - Eastern and Western - abounds with stories, myths, legends about the search for youth, for eternal life.

Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.