Isidore Of Seville Quotes

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

If a man wants to be always in God’s company, he must pray regularly and read spiritual books regularly. When we pray, we talk to God; when we read, God talks to us.

O God, great and wonderful, who has created the heavens, dwelling in the light and beauty of it; who has made the earth ... let not my eyes be blind to You, neither my heart be dead, but teach me to praise You...

The earliest medieval logical curriculum, studied from the time of Alcuin’s On Dialectic (late 780s?) until the late tenth century, was based mainly on the accounts of logic in the encyclopedias of Cassiodorus, Isidore of Seville and Martianus Capella, together with Apuleius’s Periermenias (an account of basic Aristotelian syllogistic) and the Ten Categories, a paraphrase-commentary of Aristotle’s Categories. The last of these was written in the circle of Themistius, but attributed in the Middle Ages to Augustine. This misattribution points to one of the reasons why logic had such a large place in early medieval education: it was seen as indispensable in theological discussion, both because it provided a way of posing fundamental questions about God and his relation to his creation, and because it furnished a formidable argumentative weapon in controversy.

In Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, the tides are characterised as ‘a restlessness’, and it was the ocean’s restlessness, as well as its separation from the habitable parts of the world, that gave it rich metaphorical potential.

And now tell me"-in the end I could not restrain myself "how did you manage to know?" "My good Adso," my master said, "during our whole journey I have been teaching you to recognize the evidence through which the world speaks to us like a great book. Alanus de Insulis said that omnis mundi creatura quasi liber et pictura nobis est in speculum and he was thinking of the endless array of symbols with which God, through His creatures, speaks to us of the eternal life. But the universe is even more talkative than Alanus thought, and it speaks not only of the ultimate things (which it does always in an obscure fashion) but also of closer things, and then it speaks quite clearly. I am almost embarrassed to repeat to you what you should know. At the cross roads, on the still-fresh snow, a horse's hoofprints stood out very neatly, heading for the path to our left. Neatly spaced, those marks said that the hoof was small and round, and the gallop quite regular --and so I deduced the nature of the horse, and the fact that it was not running wildly like a crazed animal. At the point where the pines formed a natural roof, some twigs had been freshly broken off at a height of five feet. One of the blackberry bushes where the animal must have turned to take the path to his right, proudly switching his handsome tail, still held some long black horsehairs in its brambles. ... You will not say, finally, that you do not know that path leads to the dungheap, because as we passed the lower curve we saw the spill of waste down the sheer cliff below the great south tower, staining the snow; and from the situation of the crossroads, the path could only lead in that direction." "Yes," I said, "but what about the small head, the sharp ears, the big eyes...?" "I am not sure he has those features, but no doubt the monks firmly believe he does. As Isidore of Seville said, the beauty of a horse requires that the head be small, siccum prope pelle ossibus adhae rente, short and pointed ears, big eyes, flaring nostrils, erect neck, thick mane and tail, round and solid hoofs.' If the horse whose passing I inferred had not really been the finest of the stables, stableboys would have been out chasing him, but instead, the cellarer in person had undertaken the search. And a monk who considers a horse excel lent, whatever his natural forms, can only see him as the auctoritates have described him, especially if" and here he smiled slyly in my direction-"the describer is a learned Benedictine." "All right," I said, "but why Brunellus?" "May the Holy Ghost sharpen your mind, son!" my master exclaimed. "What other name could he possibly have? Why, even the great Buridan, who is about to become rector in Paris, when he wants to use a horse in one of his logical examples, always calls it Brunellus This was my master's way. He not only knew how to read the great book of nature, but also knew the way monks read the books of Scripture, and how they thought through them. A gift that, as we shall see, was to prove useful to him in the days to follow. His explanation, moreover, seemed to me at that point so obvious that my humiliation at not having discovered it by myself was surpassed only by my pride at now being a sharer in it, and I was almost congratulat ing myself on my insight. Such is the power of the truth that, like good, it is its own propagator. And praised be the holy name of our Lord Jesus Christ for this splendid revelation I was granted.

The idea that time could be granular, that there could be minimal intervals of time, is not new. It was defended in the seventh century by Isidore of Seville in his Etymologiae, and in the following century by the Venerable Bede in a work suggestively entitled De Divisionibus Temporum (“On the Divisions of Time”). In the thirteenth century, the great philosopher Maimonides writes: “Time is composed of atoms, that is to say of many parts that cannot be further subdivided, on account of their short duration.”53 The idea probably dates back even further: the loss of the original texts of Democritus prevents us from knowing whether it was already present in classical Greek atomism.54 Abstract thought can anticipate by centuries hypotheses that find a use—or confirmation—in scientific inquiry.

Corpus dictum eo quod corruptum perit. [n25] Solubile enim atque mortale est, et aliquando solvendum. [n26] Caro autem a creando est appellata. [n27] Crementum enim semen est masculi, unde animalium et hominum corpora concipiuntur. Hinc et parentes creatores vocantur. [n28] Caro autem ex quattuor elementis compacta est. Nam terra in carne est, aer in halitu, humor in sanguine, ignis in calore vitali. [n29] Habent enim in nobis elementa suam quaeque partem, cuius quid debetur conpage resoluta. [n30] 25. Subst. corpus je vytvořeno z kořene *kwrep-, 'tělo'; se slovem corruptus, 'zkažený', nesouvisí. Srv. také Isidor, Diff. I,116 (PL 83,23A): 'Tělo (corpus) je nazvané podle zkaženosti (corruptio).' 26. Isidor tuto myšlenku převzal od Lactantia, De opif. Dei, 4,7-8 (SC 213,126). Lactantius označuje v Div. instit. VII,1 (PL 6,736A) jako pramen tohoto tvrzení Platóna. Srv. F. Gasti, L'anthropologia di Isidoro, str. 29, pozn. 34. 27. Subst. caro, 'maso', 'tkán', 'tělo', není etymologicky příbuzné se slovesem creare, 'tvořit', nýbrž je odvozeno od kořene *(s)ker- s významem 'krájet'; srv. např. řecké sloveso χείρειν (keirein), 'krájet', 'stříhat'. Srv. Ernout-Meillet, s. v. caro. Stejnou etymologii uvádí Isidor v Etymol. XX,2,20. 28. Ve skutečnosti pochází subst. crementum, 'přírůstek', přeneseně 'sémě', 'sperma', od slovesa crescere, 'růst', a subst. creator, 'zploditel', 'stvořitel', od slovesa creare, tvořit'. Uvedená slovesa mají podobný základ, ale nejsou příbuzná v té míře, jak se domníval Isidor. Tutéž větu nacházíme u Isidora i v Etymol. IX,5,5. Srv. také Placidus, Gloss. E 9 (GlossL IV,20): 'Má se za to, že excreamentum je to, co vyplivujeme nebo vykašláváme (excreare); rovněž je to mužské sémě, z něhož se počínají těla zvířat i lidí. Proto se také rodučům říká creatores (zploditelé).

The sixth-century glossarist Isidore of Seville, who wrote the Etymologies, one the best and earliest glossaries, wrote of the Antipodes as a race of people who were literally “opposite footed” because, as if from under the earth, “they make footprints upside down from ours.”17 This extraordinary notion was later borne out in another manner by Rev. Robert Kirk who, in his Secret Commonwealth of Elves and Faeries in the 1690s, asserted that each person had a co-imuimeadh, or faery cowalker, who was their reflection or spirit double.18 By the Middle Ages, “the Antipodean realm” was understood to be beneath the earth, the place, as we shall see, also assigned to the Faery realms.