The Greek conception of a life in harmony with nature found its most complete development in the rationalism of the Renaissance and of the centuries that followed it.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
If you go back to the Greeks and Romans, they talk about all three - wine, food, and art - as a way of enhancing life.
Since Plato, we have been considering the nature of knowledge, the meaning of meaning and the status of the physical world.
The adoration of human nature by the Greeks appeared in Greek plastic art and was the cause of its excellence.
To realize life in the abstract as noble or beautiful or humane, to set it forth so with radiance upon it, that is civilization in the arts. Shakespeare is the chief modern example of this supreme faculty of mankind.
A heroic nature is very Greek.
The ancient Greek view of happiness was really defined by leading a productive life: It's not about how much you have, it's about what you do with it.
Nature's God really descends from an ancient Greek tradition that was passed along to the early modern philosophers. And these were quite radical thinkers who were really challenging the ways of thinking of their time and the established religion.
A few of the sublimest geniuses of Rome and Athens had some faint discoveries of the spiritual nature of the human soul, and formed some probable conjectures, that man was designed for a future state of existence.
We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.
We may affirm, then, that the main drift of the later Renaissance was away from a humanism that favored a free expansion toward a humanism that was in the highest degree disciplinary and selective.