Antiquity Quotes - Page 3

• Of what violences, murders, depredations, have not the epic poets, from all antiquity, been the occasion, by propagating false honor, false glory, and false religion?

  Samuel Richardson

  Epic, Honor, Violence

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• We do not associate the idea of antiquity with the ocean, nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do of the land, for it was equally wild and unfathomable always.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Nature, Travel, Ocean

  Henry David Thoreau (1866). “Cape Cod”, p.174

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• For those who do not make the transition to a matured, more spiritual self-will reason will indeed be no more than rationalization. Here is a prodigious parallel: just as in antiquity the dysdaimonic personality could not appreciate how his mentality was bound in by his characterological (banausic, doulic) biases, so in modernity the facile or abstractivist rationalist cannot comprehend how his "rationality" merely slavishly subserves his appetites, delusions, preconceptions, ideologies, etc.

  Kenny Smith

  Spiritual, Philosophy, Self

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• If the finding of Coines, Medals, Urnes, and other Monuments of famous Persons, or Towns, or Utensils, be admitted for unquestionable Proofs, that such Persons or things have, in former Times, had a being, certainly those Petrifactions may be allowed to be of equal Validity and Evidence, that there have been formerly such Vegetables or Animals. These are truly Authentick Antiquity not to be counterfeited, the Stamps, and Impressions, and Characters of Nature that are beyond the Reach and Power of Humane Wit and Invention, and are true universal Characters legible to all rational Men.

  Robert Hooke

  Character, Men, Animal

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• Times before you, when even the living men were Antiquities; when the living might exceed the dead, and to depart this world, could not be properly said, to go unto the greater number.

  Thomas Browne

  Men, Numbers, World

  Hydriotaphia Epistle Dedicatory (1658)

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• To be skeptical of the resultant text of the New Testament books is to allow all of classical antiquity to slip into obscurity, for no documents of the ancient period are as well attested bibliographically as the New Testament.

  John Warwick Montgomery

  Book, Obscurity, Ancient

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• Nature is sanative, refining, elevating. How cunningly she hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses, and violets, and morning dew! Every inch of the mountains is scarred by unimaginable convulsions, yet the new day is purple with the bloom of youth and love.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Nature, Morning, Wrinkles

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2010). “Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume VIII: Letters and Social Aims”, p.118, Harvard University Press

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• I transmit but do not create. I place my trust in the teachings of antiquity.

  Confucius

  Teaching, Oneness, Transmit

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• It hardly needs explaining at length, I think, how much authority or beauty is added to style by the timely use of proverbs. In the first place who does not see what dignity they confer on style by their antiquity alone?... And so to interweave adages deftly and appropriately is to make the language as a whole glitter with sparkles from Antiquity, please us with the colours of the art of rhetoric, gleam with jewel-like words of wisdom, and charm us with titbits of wit and humour.

  Desiderius Erasmus

  Art, Thinking, Jewels

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• We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between theilliterateness of my townsman who cannot read at all and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects. We should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Children, Knowing, Literature

  Henry David Thoreau (1882). “Walden”, p.169

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• Antiquite  . en tout ce qui s'y rapporte: Est poncif, embe"  tant! etc. Antiquity. And everything to do with it, cliche  d and boring.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Etc, Boring, Cliche

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• The apartments of the rich are cabinets of curiosities: a conglomeration of classical antiquity, gothic, renaissance; Louis XIII... Something from every century but our own, a predicament that has arisen in no other period... so that we seem to be subsisting on the ruins of the past, as if the end of the world were near.

  Alfred de Musset

  Past, Curiosity, World

  "Confession d'un Enfant du Siécle". Book by Alfred de Musset, 1836.

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• I think it better to keep a profound silence with regard to the Christian fables, which are canonized by their antiquity and the credulity of absurd and insipid people.

  Frederick The Great

  Christian, Thinking, People

  Letter 37 to Voltaire on June 1738. "Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great", translated by Richard Aldington, 1927.

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• But the origin of the American Republic is distinguished by peculiar circumstances. Other nations have been driven together by fear and necessity-the governments have generally been the result of a single man's observations; or the offspring of particular interests. In the formation of our constitution, the wisdom of all ages is collected-the legislators of antiquity are consulted-as well as the opinions and interests of the millions who are concerned. In short, it is an empire of reason.

  Noah Webster

  Men, Age, Together

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• In antiquity men studied for their own sake; nowadays men study for the sake of impressing others.

  Confucius

  Men, Sake, Study

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• I cannot sufficiently be astonished that such is the insanity of some men, such the impiety of their blinded understanding, such, finally, their lust after error, that they will not be content with the rule of faith delivered once and for all from antiquity, but must daily seek after something new, and even newer still, and are always longing to add something to religion, or to change it, or to subtract from it!

  Vincent of Lerins

  Men, Errors, Insanity

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• No one really knew the sciences except the Lord Robert, Bishop of Lincoln, by reason of his length of life and experience, as well as of his studiousness and zeal. He knew mathematics and perspective, and there was nothing which he was unable to know; and at the same time he was sufficiently acquainted with languages to be able to understand the saints and the philosophers and the wise men of antiquity but his knowledge of languages was not such as to enable him to effect translations until the latter portion of his life.

  Roger Bacon

  Wise, Men, Length Of Life

  "Opus Tertium". Book by Roger Bacon, p. 91, 1267.

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• Nonsense prevails, modesty fails Grace and virtue turn into stupidity While the calendar fades almost all barricades to a pale compromise And our leaders have feasts on the backsides of beasts They still think they're the gods of antiquity If something you missed didn't even exist It was just an ideal is it such a surprise?

  Elvis Costello

  Thinking, Stupidity, Leader

  Song: All This Useless Beauty, Album: All This Useless Beauty, 1996

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• We have now in our possession three instruments of civilization, unknown to antiquity. These are the art of printing; free representative government; and, lastly, a pure and spiritual religion, the deep fountain of generous enthusiasm, the mighty spring of bold and lofty designs, the great sanctuary of moral power.

  Edward Everett

  Spiritual, Art, Spring

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers". Book by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, 1895.

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• Custom is often only the antiquity of error.

  Cyprian

  Errors, Customs

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• Neither an enlightened philosophy, nor all the political wisdom of Rome, nor even the faith and virtue of the Christians availed against the incorrigible tradition of antiquity. Something was wanted, beyond all the gifts of reflection and experience - a faculty of self government and self control, developed like its language in the fibre of a nation, and growing with its growth.

  Lord Acton

  Christian, Philosophy, Reflection

  "The History of Freedom in Christianity". Lord Acton's Address Delivered to the Members of the Bridgnorth Institute, acton.org. May 28, 1877.

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• For indeed Christianity was complicit in the death of antiquity, and in the birth of modernity, not because it was an accomplice of the latter, but because it, alone in the history of the West, constituted a rejection of and alternative to nihilism's despair, violence, and idolatry of power; as such, Christianity shattered the imposing and enchanting facade behind which nihilism once hid, and thereby, inadvertently, called it forth into the open.

  David Bentley Hart

  Rejection, Despair, Nihilism

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• From antiquity, people have recognized the connection between naming and power.

  Casey Miller

  Power, People, Connections

  Casey Miller, Kate Swift (2000). “Words and Women”, p.18, iUniverse

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• The importance of Plotinus is not only his own philosophical ideas which are quite interesting, but his historical impact as the founder of neo-Platonism which is the main philosophical tradition of late antiquity.

  Peter Adamson

  Philosophical, Impact, Ideas

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• The phrase the violent bear it away fascinated the 20th century Irish-American storyteller Flannery O'Connor, who used it as the title of one of her novels. O'Connor's surname connects her to an Irish royal family descended from Conchobor (pronounced Connor), the prehistoric king of Ulster who was foster father to Cuchulainn and husband of the unwilling Derdriu. In the western world, the antiquity of Irish lineages is exceeded only by that of the Jews.

  Thomas Cahill

  Kings, Husband, Father

  Thomas Cahill (2011). “How The Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe”, p.71, Hachette UK

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