Thomas More Quotes on Knowledge
Thomas More (1478–1535), the Lord Chancellor of England executed by Henry VIII for refusing the royal supremacy over the church, gave the northern Renaissance one of its founding philosophical works in Utopia (1516) — a speculative narrative of an imagined island commonwealth whose institutional arrangements function as the rhetorical foil against which the contemporary practices of European Christendom are exhibited. The framework participates in the broader Christian humanist programme of More's friend Erasmus, defending the recovery of classical Latin and Greek learning as the principal instrument of moral and political reform, and the deliberately ambiguous philosophical voice of Utopia leaves open whether More commends the depicted institutions or merely uses them to indict their European alternatives.
Quotes
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Attributed to Thomas More:
“If a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics.”
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“Sometimes paraphrased "A little wanton money, which burned out the bottom of his purse.”
Now there was a young gentleman which had married a merchant 's wife. And having a little wanton money, which him thought burned out the bottom of his purse, in the first year of his wedding took his wife with him and went over sea, for none other errand but to see Flanders and France and ride out one summer in those countries. -
“Richard III and His Miserable End (1543)”
For men use, if they have an evil turn, to write it in marble: and whoso doth us a good turn we write it in dust. -
“Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation (1535), Book Two, Section XVI”
And when the devil hath seen that they have set so little by him, after certain essays, made in such times as he thought most fitting, he hath given that temptation quite over. And this he doth not only because the proud spirit cannot endure to be mocked , but also lest, with much tempting the man to the sin to which he could not in conclusion bring him, he should much increase his merit. -
“The increasing influence of the Bible is marvelously great, penetrating everywhere. It carries with it a tremendous power of freedom and justice guided by a combined force of wisdom and goodness.”
Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 34. -
“The Prince himself has no distinction, either of garments, or of a crown; but is only distinguished by a sheaf of corn carried before him; as the high priest is also known by his being preceded by a person carrying a wax light .”
Utopia(1516) | Ch. 7 : Of Their Slaves, and of Their Marriages