An excerpt from the preface to Giordano Bruno's "The Heroic Frenzies"

An excerpt from the preface to Giordano Bruno's "The Heroic Frenzies". The preface is addressed to Sir Philip Sidney

(this is quoted in Ingrid Rowland's biography of Giordano Bruno)

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It is truly, O most generous Sir, the work of a low, filthy animal nature to have made oneself the constant admirer, and to have fixed a solicitous attachment upon or around the beauty of a woman’s body. Good God! What more vile and ignoble vision can present itself to a clear-sighted eye than a man, brooding, afflicted, tormented, sorry, melancholy; who waxes now cold, now hot, now boiling, now trembling, now pale, now blushing, now in a pose of perplexity, now in the act of decisiveness, a man who spends the best season and the choicest fruits of his life distilling the elixir of his brain toward putting into thought and writ and sealing in public monuments those endless tortures, those grave torments, those reasoned arguments, those laborious thoughts and those bitter desires addressed to the tyranny of an unworthy, imbecilic, foolish and sordid smut?

What tragicomedy, what act, I say, more deserving of pity and laughter could be produced in this theater of the world, on this stage of our perceptions, than these many subjugated men, rendered pensive, contemplative, constant, steadfast, faithful, lovers, devotees, adorers, and slaves of a thing without faith, bereft of all constancy, destitute of intelligence, empty of all merit, void of any acknowledgment or gratitude, where no more sense, intellect, or goodness is to be obtained than might be found in a statue or a painting on a wall? And where there abound more disdain, arrogance, effrontery, vainglory, rage, scorn, perfidy, lust, greed, ingratitude, and other mortal vices than the poisons and instruments of death that could have issued forth from Pandora’s box, all to have, alas, such expansive accommodation within the brain of such a monster? Behold, inscribed on paper, enclosed in books, set before the eyes, and intoned in the ears, a noise, a commotion, a clash of devices, of emblems, of mottoes, of epistles, of sonnets, of epigrams, of books, of chattering scribbles, of terminal sweats, of lives consumed, of cries that deafen the stars, laments that make hell’s caverns reverberate, aches that strike the living dumb, sights that exhaust the pity of the gods, for those eyes, for those cheeks, for that bosom, for that white, for that crimson, for that tongue, for that tooth, for that lip, for that hair, that dress, that mantle, that glove, that slipper, that high heel, that avarice, that giggle, that scorn, that empty window, that eclipse of the sun, that throbbing, that disgust, that stench, that sepulchre, that cesspit, that menstruation, that carrion, that malaria, that uttermost insult and lapse of nature, that with a surface, a shadow, a phantasm, a dream, an enchantment of Circe plied in the service of reproduction, should deceive in the matter of beauty; which simultaneously comes and goes, issues and dies, flowers and rots, and is somewhat beautiful on the outside, but truly and fixedly contains within a shipyard, a workshop, a customhouse, a marketplace of every foulness, toxin, and poison that our stepmother Nature has managed to produce: and once the seed she requires has been paid out, she often repays it with a morass, a remorse, a sadness, a flaccidity, a headache, a lassitude, this and that distemper that are known to all the world, so that every place aches bitterly where it itched so sweetly before.

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Here's an excerpt from another of his works, a dialogue called "Cause, Principle, and Unity"

Poliinnio: As I was studying in my little sanctuary of the Muses, I came upon that passage in Aristotle, at the beginning of the Physics, in which, when he wishes to expound upon what the primal matter may be, he takes as its mirror the feminine sex, that sex, I say, which is wayward, fragile, inconstant, soft, feeble, unlucky, ignoble, vile, abject, despicable, unworthy, reprobate, sinister, detestable, frigid, deformed, empty, vain, indiscreet, insane, perfidious, sluggish, affected, filthy, ungrateful, lacking, maimed, imperfect, inchoate, insufficient, cut short, attenuated, that rust, that caterpillar, that chaff, plague, disease, death.

Among us placed by nature at God’s will

To be a burden and a bitter pill.

Gervasio: You humanists, who call yourselves professors of good literature, when you grow so full of your great ideas that you can’t contain yourselves anymore, you have nothing better to do than dump them on the poor women, just as, when another kind of frenzy takes you, you vent it on the first of your wretched students who passes by.