Juan Luis Vives Quotes on Knowledge
Juan Luis Vives (1493–1540), the Valencian humanist whose long career took him from Paris through Bruges and Oxford to the courts of Henry VIII and Charles V, gave Renaissance philosophy two of its most ambitious works of epistemological and educational reform: the Twenty Books Concerning the Disciplines (De Disciplinis, 1531) and the Three Books on the Soul and Life (De Anima et Vita, 1538). The framework presses a sustained critique of late-medieval scholastic dialectic and a corresponding defence of an empirically grounded study of the soul against the metaphysical psychology of the schools — De Anima et Vita is one of the earliest works of the early-modern philosophical tradition to confine its inquiry to the phenomena and operations of the mind rather than to its underlying nature.
Quotes
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Attributed to Juan Luis Vives:
“Without the help of letters, people are dwarfs.”
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Attributed to Juan Luis Vives:
“Knowledge is the food of the soul.”
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Attributed to Juan Luis Vives:
“Words have a double power: they convey thought and shape it.”
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“Quos omnes libros conscripserunt homines otiosi, male feriati, imperiti, vitiis ac spurcitiae dediti, in queis miror quid delectet nisi tam nobis flagitia blandirentur. Eruditio non est exspectanda ab hominibus qui ne umbram quidem eruditionis viderant. Iam cum narrant, quae potest esse delectatio in rebus quas tam aperte et stulte confingunt?”
All these books were written by idle, unoccupied, ignorant men, the slaves of vice and filth. I wonder what it is that delights us in these books unless it be that we are attracted by indecency. Learning is not to be expected from authors who never saw even a shadow of learning. As for their story-telling, what pleasure is to be derived from the things they invent, full of lies and stupidity? De I -
“All these books were written by idle, unoccupied, ignorant men, the slaves of vice and filth. I wonder what it is that delights us in these books unless it be that we are attracted by indecency. Learning is not to be expected from authors who never saw even a shadow of learning. As for their story-telling, what pleasure is to be derived from the things they invent, full of lies and stupidity? De Institutione Feminae Christianae (1523), trans. by C. Fantazzi (1996), Vol. I, p. 47.”
Quos omnes libros conscripserunt homines otiosi, male feriati, imperiti, vitiis ac spurcitiae dediti, in queis miror quid delectet nisi tam nobis flagitia blandirentur. Eruditio non est exspectanda ab hominibus qui ne umbram quidem eruditionis viderant. Iam cum narrant, quae potest esse delectatio in rebus quas tam aperte et stulte confingunt? -
“In corpore ipso quid forma est? nempe cuticula bene colorata?”
In the body itself what is beauty save a little skin, well colored? Opera , Introductio ad sapientiam , 61, vol. 2, cols. 72–3 (Basil, 1555), reported in William S. Walsh (ed.) The International Encyclopedia of Prose and Poetical Quotations (Philadelphia: John C. Winston Company, 1908) p. 76 Cf. Odo of Cluny -
“In the body itself what is beauty save a little skin, well colored? Opera , Introductio ad sapientiam , 61, vol. 2, cols. 72–3 (Basil, 1555), reported in William S. Walsh (ed.) The International Encyclopedia of Prose and Poetical Quotations (Philadelphia: John C. Winston Company, 1908) p. 76 Cf. Odo of Cluny”
In corpore ipso quid forma est? nempe cuticula bene colorata?