Quotation Listing

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Isidore of Seville

• Letters are signs of things, symbols of words, whose power is so great that without a voice they speak to us the words of the absent; for they introduce words by the eye, not by the ear.
  - Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, Book 1, Chapter 3, Section 1.
  Source: Ernest Brehaut, An Encyclopedist of the Dark Ages: Isidore of Seville New York: Columbia University Press, 1912. 57.
  
  
• And without music there can be no perfect knowledge, for there is nothing without it. For even the universe itself is said to have been put together with a certain harmony of sounds, and the very heavens revolve under the guidance of harmony.
  - Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, Book 3, Chapter 17, Section 1.
  Source: Ernest Brehaut, An Encyclopedist of the Dark Ages: Isidore of Seville New York: Columbia University Press, 1912. 85.
  
  
• And so heresy is named in the Greek from its meaning of choice, since each at his own will chooses what he pleases to teach or believe.
  - Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, Book 8, Chapter 3, Section 2.
  Source: Ernest Brehaut, An Encyclopedist of the Dark Ages: Isidore of Seville New York: Columbia University Press, 1912. 126.