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Rome quotes

  • Mille viae ducunt homines per s×cula Romam. Throughout the ages, a thousand roads lead to Rome.

    -Alan of Lille also known as  'Alanus de Insulis'
      Liber Parabolarum, ch.3, l.56.

  • He thought what a pity it was that all his faces were designed to express rage or loathing. Now that something had happened that really deserved a face, 14 he'd none to celebrate it with. As a kind of token, he made his Sex Life in Ancient Rome face.

    - Sir Kingsley Amis
      Lucky  Jim, ch.25.

  • All the devastation, the butchery, the plundering, the conflagrations, and all the anguish which accompanied the recent disaster at Rome were in accordance with the general practice of warfare.

    -St Augustine originally Aurelius Augustinus
    AD 427  City of God, vol.1, ch.1, section 8.

  • †the Metropolis of Great-Britain, founded before the City of Rome, walled by Constantine the Great, no ways inferior to the greatest in Europe for Riches and Greatness.

    - Nathan   d.1742 Bailey
         LONDON1721 An Universal Etymological English Dictionary.

  • Rome de Rome est le seul monument, Et Rome Rome a vaincu seulement. Rome is the only monument left of Rome, And only Rome vanquished Rome.

    -Joachim du Bellay
      Antiquitez de Rome, no.5.

  • Rome seule pouvait a'   Rome ressembler, Rome seule pouvait Rome fait trembler. Only Rome can resemble Rome, And Rome alone can make Rome fall.

    -Joachim du Bellay
      Antiquitez de Rome, no.6.

  • The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England.

    -Book of Common Prayer
    Articles of Religion, XXX VII Of the Civil Magistrates.

  • Like Rome, Nkongsamba was built on seven hills, but there all similarity ended. Set in undulating tropical rain forest, from the air it resembled nothing so much as a giant pool of crapulous vomit on somebody's expansive unmown lawn.

    -William Andrew Murray Boyd
    A Good Man in  Africa, ch.1.

  • In brief, where the Scripture is silent, the church is my text; where that speaks,'tis but my comment; where there is a joint silence of both, I borrow not the rules of my religionfrom Rome or Geneva, butthe dictates of my own reason.

    - SirThomas Browne
    ^5  Religio Medici (published1643), pt.1, section 5.

  • Rome's just a city like anywhere else. Avastly overrated city, I'd say. It trades on belief just as Stratford trades on Shakespeare.

    -Wilson
      Inside Mr Enderby, pt.2, ch.1.

  • Oh Rome! my country! city of the soul!

    -Rochdale
    ^18  Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, canto 4, stanza 78.

  • While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand; When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall; And when Rome fallsthe World.

    -Rochdale
    ^18  Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, canto 4, stanza145.

  • Burn, with Athens and with Rome, A sacred city of the mind.

    - (Ignatius) Roy Dunnachie Campbell
      'Toledo,  July1936'.

  • And thries hadde she been at Jerusalem; She hadde passed manya straunge strem; At Rome she hadde been, and at Boloigne, In Galice at Seint-Jame, and at Coloigne.

    - Geoffrey Chaucer
      Canterbury  Tales,'General Prologue', l.463^6.

  • O fortunatam natam me consule Romam! O lucky Rome, born when I was consul!

    -Cicero full name MarcusTullius Cicero
    Cicero was consul in 63     . His only extant line of poetry, quoted in  Juvenal, Satires 10, l.122.

  • Rome, believe me, my friend, is like its own Monte Testaceo, Merelya marvellous mass of broken and castaway wine-pots.

    - Arthur Hugh Clough
      Amours de Voyage, canto1, pt.2.

  • Humorists are not happy men. Like Beachcomber or Saki orThurber they burn while Rome fiddles.

    - Cyril Vernon Connolly
      Enemies of Promise, ch.16.

  • Rome shall perishwrite that word In the blood that she has spilt.

    -William Cowper
      Poems,'Boadicea: an Ode'.

  • Soldati, io esco da Roma. Chi vuole continuare la guerra contro lo straniero venga con me. Non posso offrigli ne onori ne   stipendi; gli offro fame, sete, marce forzate, battaglie e morte. Chi ama la Patria me segua. Soldiers, I'm getting out of Rome. Anyone who wants to carry on the war against the outsiders, follow me. I can offer you neither honours nor wages, I offer you hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles and death. Anyone who loves his country, follow me.

    - Giuseppe Garibaldi
    Quoted in Giuseppe Guerzoni Garibaldi (1882), vol.1.

  • It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind.

    - Edward Gibbon
    Memoirs of My Life (published1796), ch.6, note. Variations of the lines can be found in the various drafts of Gibbon's autobiography and in the last lines of the Decline and Fall:'It was among the ruins of the Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised near twenty years of my life, and which, however inadequate to my own wishes, I finally deliver to the curiosity and candour of the public' (vol.6, ch.71).

  • I paid the prices of life Standing where Rome immortal heard October's strife, A war poet whose right of honour cuts falsehood like a knife. 375

    - Ivor Gurney
    c.1922  'Poem for End'.

  • How is it possible to sayan unkind or irreverential word of Rome? The city of all time, and of all the world!

    - Nathaniel Hawthorne
      The Marble Faun, ch.12.

  • We know the war prepared On every peaceful home, We know the hells declared For such as serve not Rome, The terror, threats and dread In market, hearth and field: We know when all is said We perish if we yield.

    - (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling
      'Ulster'.

  • I have been increasingly moved to wonder whether my job is a job or a racket, whether economists, and particularly economic theorists, may not be in the position that Cicero, citing Cato, ascribed to the augurs of Romethat they should cover their faces or burst into laughter when they met on the street.

    - Frank Hyneman Knight
      Collected in Essays on theHistory and Method of Economics (1956).

  • Tous chemins vont a'   Rome. All roads lead to Rome.

    -Jean de La Fontaine
      Fables, pt.12, no.29,'Le juge arbitre, l'hospitalier, et le solitaire'.

  • How glorious it would be in the eyes of God and men, if we managed to hunt the Catholics from England, follow them to France, and, like the bold King of Sweden, rouse the Protestants in France, plant our religion in Paris by agreement or force, and go from there to Rome to chase the Antichrist and burn the town whence superstition comes.

    - David Leslie
      Said to Lord Hume, Council of Scottish Nobles,  Aug.

  • Dum Romae consulitur, Saguntum expugnatur. While they were deliberating in Rome, Saguntum was captured.

    -Livy full name Titus Livius   5917
    Oral tradition deriving from Livy's description of the siege and capture of the Spanish city of Saguntum by the Carthaginians in 219     . The Roman senate deliberated endlessly before deciding to take actionwhen it was already toolate. Cf. Livy 21.7.1 'Dum ea Romani parant consultantque, iam Saguntum summa vi oppugnabatur'.

  • It has lately been brought to my knowledge That the Ministers fully design To suppress each cathedral and college, And eject every learned divine. To assist this detestable scheme Three nuncios from Rome are come over; They left Calais on Monday by steam, And landed to dinner at Dover.

    -1st Baron
      'The Country Clergyman's Trip to Cambridge', stanza 2.  A satiricalpoem against the opposition to Catholic emancipation.

  • On desperate seas long wont to roam, Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, Thy Naiad airs have brought me home To the glory that was Greece, And the grandeur that was Rome.

    - EdgarAllan Poe
      'To Helen', stanza 2.

  • I am very glad that I see Rome while it yet exists; before a great number of years are elapsed, I question whether it will be worth seeing. Between the ignorance and poverty of the present Romans, every thing is neglected and falling to decay.

    - Horace, 4th Earl of Orford Walpole
      Letter. Collected in P Cunningham (ed) The Letters of HoraceWalpole, Fourth Earl of Orford (1857^9).

  • Randolph Churchill went into hospital†to have a lung removed. It was announced that the trouble was not 'malignant'. Seeing Ed Stanley in White's, on my way to Rome,Iremarked that it was atypicaltriumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.

    - Evelyn Arthur StJohn Waugh
      Diary note, Mar.

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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