Top 60 Stephen Greenblatt Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Poems are difficult to silence.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

2. “The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

3. “But if Shakespeare himself is maybe about meaning and truth, I don’t know, then he is certainly about pleasure and interest, we start with pleasure and interest, but maybe eventually it gets to meaning and truth.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

4. “Populism may look like an embrace of the have-nots, but in reality it is a form of cynical exploitation. The unscrupulous leader has no actual interest in bettering the lot of the poor. Surrounded from birth with great wealth, his tastes run to extravagant luxuries, and he finds nothing remotely appealing the lives of underclasses... But he sees that they can be made to further his ambition.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

5. “Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

6. “If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh?”

— Stephen Greenblatt

7. “I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

8. “First of all, there was a volcano of words, an eruption of words that Shakespeare had never used before that had never been used in the English language before. It’s astonishing. It pours out of him.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

9. “Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one’s psychic life.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

10. “Through reading literature we can make ghosts speak to us, and we can speak back to them.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

Featured in: Reading Quotes

11. “The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

12. “Something happened in the Renaissance, something that surged up against the constraints that centuries had constructed around curiosity, desire, individuality, sustained attention to the material world, the claims of the body.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

13. “If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?”

— Stephen Greenblatt

14. “The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

15. “Venus and Adonis is a spectacular display of Shakespeare’s signature characteristic, his astonishing capacity to be everywhere and nowhere, to assume all positions and to slip free of all constraints. The capacity depends upon a simultaneous, deeply paradoxical achievement of proximity and distance, intimacy and detachment.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

16. “Everyone understood that Latin learning was inseparable from whipping. One educational theorist of the time speculated that the buttocks were created in order to facilitate the learning of Latin.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

17. “Stability itself is nothing but a more languid motion.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

18. “I am his Highness’ dog at Kew; Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?”

— Stephen Greenblatt

19. “What human beings can and should do, he wrote, is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure of the world.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

20. “Flaubert: “Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

21. “Now a Protestant confronting a Catholic ghost is exactly Shakespeare’s way of grappling with what was not simply a general social problem but one lived out in his own life.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

22. “I believe in broken, fractured, complicated narratives, but I believe in narratives as a vehicle for truth, not simply as a form of entertainment, though I love entertainment, but also a way of conveying what needs to be conveyed about the works that I care about.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

23. “Most teachers of the humanities lived itinerant lives, traveling from city to city, giving lectures on a few favorite authors, and then restlessly moving on, in the hope of finding new patrons.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

24. “Something happened in the Renaissance, something that surged up against the constraints that centuries had constructed around curiosity, desire, individuality, sustained attention to the material world, the claims of the body. The cultural shift is notoriously difficult to define, and its significance has been fiercely contested.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

25. “Can honour set-to a leg?” Falstaff asks, at the brink of battle.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

26. “In short, it became possible – never easy, but possible – in the poet Auden’s phrase to find the mortal world enough.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

27. “Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

28. “Human beings, Lucretius thought, must not drink in the poisonous belief that their souls are only part of the world temporarily and they are heading somewhere else. That belief will only spawn in them a destructive relation to the environment in which they live the only lives they have.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

29. “The transformation was not sudden or once-for-all, but it became increasingly possible to turn away from a preoccupation with angels and demons and immaterial causes and to focus instead on things in this world; to understand that humans are made of the same stuff as everything else and are part of the natural order; to conduct experiments without fearing that one is infringing on God’s jealously guarded secrets; to question authorities and challenge received doctrines;.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

30. “What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

31. “The bookworm – “one of the teeth of time,” as Hooke put it – is no longer familiar to ordinary readers, but the ancients knew it very well.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

32. “The monk in the grip of acedia would find it difficult or impossible to read. Looking away from his book, he might try to distract himself with gossip but would more likely glance in disgust at his surroundings and at his fellow monks. He would feel that things were better somewhere else, that he was wasting his life, that everything was stale and pointless, that he was suffocating.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

33. “The first and perhaps the most important requirement for a successful writing performance – and writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig – is to understand the nature of the occasion.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

34. “Tyrannical power is more easily exercised when it appears that the old order continues to exist. The reassuring consensual structures may now be hollowed out and merely decorative, but they are all still in place, so that the bystanders, who crave psychological security and a sense of well-being, can persuade themselves that the rule of law is being upheld.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

35. “To spend your existence in the grip of anxiety about death, he wrote, is mere folly. It is a sure way to let your life slip from you incomplete and unenjoyed. He gave voice as well to a thought I had not yet quite allowed myself, even inwardly, to articulate: to inflict this anxiety on others is manipulative and cruel.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

36. “No special writing rituals. And my desk is usually cluttered.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

37. “Violators of the edict were threatened with eternal damnation and a fine of 10 ducats.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

38. “Eve is a figure for the soul that each human should love. The commandment to be fruitful and multiply did not originally refer to the flesh but to “a spiritual brood of intellectual and immortal joys filling the earth.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

39. “My father who in this case was an obsessive life-long storyteller, and by a very peculiar trick of my father’s. My father would tell a very, very long story, and the punch line would be in Yiddish.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

40. “Even in systems that have multiple moderating institutions, the chief executive almost always has considerable power. But what happens when that executive is not mentally fit to hold office? What if he begins to make decisions that threaten the well-being and security of the realm?”

— Stephen Greenblatt

41. “It is extremely dangerous to have a state run by someone who governs by impulse.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

42. “I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

43. “It is not that Shakespeare’s art is in technicolor and fancy, and that real life is black and white and tedious. The life that Shakespeare was living was the only life he had, and he had to use it to create what he was doing.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

44. “What was ridiculous about Christianity, from the perspective of a cultivated pagan, was not only its language – the crude style of the Gospels’ Greek resting on the barbarous otherness of Hebrew and Aramaic – but also its exaltation of divine humiliation and pain conjoined with an arrogant triumphalism.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

45. “What I wanted to do was to get that sense of being in touch with this lost world while holding onto what draws readers and audiences there in the first place.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

46. “First of all, Shakespeare is about pleasure and interest. He was from the first moment he actually wrote something for the stage, and he remains so.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

47. “On the other side of anger at those who either peddled false visions of security or incited irrational fears of death, Lucretius offered a feeling of liberation and the power to stare down what had once seemed so menacing. What human beings can and should do, he wrote, is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure of.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

48. “The mob then dragged her corpse outside the city walls and burned it. Their hero Cyril was eventually made a saint.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

49. “I am committed by trade to urging people to attend carefully to the verbal surfaces of what they read.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

50. “I believe that it is a whole lifetime of work on Shakespeare’s part that enabled him to do what he did. But the question is how you can explain this whole lifetime in such a way to make it accessible and available to us, to me.”

— Stephen Greenblatt