Antiquity Quotes
More Antiquity Quotes
I need not ask thee if that hand, now calmed, Has any Roman soldier mauled and knuckled, For thou wert dead, and buried and embalmed, Ere Romulus and Remus had been suckled: antiquity appears to have begun Long after that primeval race was run.
horace smith— Horace Smith, Address to the Mummy in Belzoni's Exhibition.
The categories within which the colonists thought about the social foundations of politics were inheritances from classical antiquity, reshaped by seventeenth century English thought.
bernard bailyn— Chapter VI, THE CONTAGION OF LIBERTY, p. 273
An author of antiquity said that every event has two handles, and that, in order to carry it, there is no sense in choosing the one that hurts the hand.
Émile chartier— In The Rain (Alain On Happiness (1973))
Nor rough, nor barren, are the winding waysOf hoar antiquity, but strown with flowers.
thomas warton— "Sonnet Written in a Blank Leaf of Dugdale's Monasticon" (1777), line 13.
"Censure," says a late ingenious author, "is the tax a man plays for being eminent." It is a folly for an eminent man to think of escaping it, and a weakness to be affected with it. All the illustrious persons of antiquity, and indeed of every age in the world, have passed through this fiery persecution. There is no defense against reproach but obscurity; it is a kind of comitant to greatness, as satires and invectives were an essential part of a Roman triumph.
joseph addison— No. 101 (26 June 1711).
The discoveries of modern science do not disagree with the oldest traditions which claim an incredible antiquity for our race.
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky— Chapter I (Volume I)
There is no doubt that this tradition of a superimposed Greek house was widely believed by the Macedonians[...] There was a persistent, well attested tradition in antiquity that told of a group of Greeks from Argos -descendants of Temenus, kinsman of Heracles- who came to Macedonia and established their rule over the Makedones, unifying them and providing a royal house.
eugene n. borza— p. 80 (In the Shadow of Olympus: The Emergence of Macedon (1990))
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— All This Useless Beauty
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— Edward Everett, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 141.
Is it not the glory of the people of America, that, whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience? To this manly spirit, posterity will be indebted for the possession, and the world for the example, of the numerous innovations displayed on the American theatre, in favor of private rights and public happiness.
james madison— Federalist No. 14 (1787-11-30) text from Wikisource. This quotation was used on the official invitations to the 1985 presidential inaugural of President Ronald Reagan.
The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis .
thomas mann— Ch. 5 (The Magic Mountain (1924))
The economic concept of value does not occur in antiquity .
karl marx— Notebook VII, The Chapter on Capital, p. 696
Has everything been done to justify our actions in the light of history? What can there be left for a commander in defeat? In antiquity they took poison.
walter model— To his chief of staff General Carl Wagener on 17 April 145, before dissolving Army Group B. Quoted in "Battle for the Ruhr" by Derek S. Zumbro (2006, p. 373)
If our titles recall the known myths of antiquity, we have used them again because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas.. …(they) express something real and existing in ourselves.
mark rothko— radio broadcast, together with Adolph Gottlieb, 1943
They [the wise spirits of antiquity in the first circle of Dante's Inferno ] are condemned, Dante tells us, to no other penalty than to live in desire without hope, a fate appropriate to noble souls with a clear vision of life.
george santayana— Obiter Scripta (1936)
When one turns to psychological models of mental illness, one finds that the psychodynamic model of human mind and of mental disease is also of considerable antiquity. Thus, Empedocles of Agrigentum (490-430 B.C.) from whom Hippocrates took the theory of four elements, stressed the importance of emotions of love and hate as the controlling agents of human behavior and of physiological functions.
— p. 23 (A History of Great Ideas in Abnormal Psychology, (1990))
...the town of Sheffield is of great antiquity, and its manufactures are of world-wide reputation, especially that of cutlery, which has been celebrated for more than 500 years.
— Petition for city status to Queen Victoria from Sheffield Town Council, 1 February 1893.
"Censure," says a late ingenious author, "is the tax a man plays for being eminent." It is a folly for an eminent man to think of escaping it, and a weakness to be affected with it. All the illustrious persons of antiquity, and indeed of every age in the world, have passed through this fiery persecution. There is no defense against reproach but obscurity; it is a kind of comitant to greatness, as satires and invectives were an essential part of a Roman triumph.
joseph addison— Joseph Addison, The Spectator, No. 101 (26 June 1711).
One of the characteristics of the university is that it is made up of professors who train professors, or professionals training professionals. Education was this no longer directed toward people who were to be educated with a view to become fully developed human beings, but to specialists, in other that they might learn how to train other specialists. This is the danger of “Scholasticism,” that philosophical tendency which began to be sketched at the end of antiquity, developed in the Middle Ages, and whose presence is still recognizable in philosophy today.
pierre hadot— Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (1995), p. 270
Lucan is the most philosophical and the most public-spirited poet of all antiquity.
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 16 (1823), p. 254
It appears to me that there can be no question, that Aristotle stands forth, not only as the greatest figure in antiquity, but as the greatest intellect that has ever appeared upon the face of this earth.
— George J. Romanes, as quoted in "The most important question in the world.": Is mankind advancing? (1910), p. 38
...in the sense in which a poet is a philosopher ... Virgil is the greatest philosopher of ancient Rome. ...Virgil was, among all authors of classical antiquity, one for whom the world made sense, for whom it had order and dignity, and for whom, as for no one before his time except the Hebrew prophets, history had meaning.
— T. S. Eliot, "Virgil and the Christian World" (1951), later published in On Poetry and Poets (1956).
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— Bouvard et Pe cuchet avec un choix des sce narios, du Sottisier, L'Album de la Marquise et Le Dictionnaire des ide es re c° ues. (published1881, translated by Geoffrey Wall,1994).
Today Eratosthenes' method [of calculating the circumference of the earth] seems almost banal … yet it is inaccessible to prescientific civilizations, and in all of antiquity not a single Latin author succeeded in stating it coherently.
lucio russo— 3.2, "Geodesy and Mathematical Geography", p. 68
After having achieved this immense work, an important scientific conclusion remains to be drawn: the anthropological study and the microscopic analysis of hair, carried out by four laboratories: Judiciary Medecine (Professor Ceccaldi), Société L'Oréal, Atomic Energy Commission, and Institut Textile de France showed that Ramses II was a 'leucoderm', that is a fair-skinned man, near to the Prehistoric and antiquity Mediterraneans, or briefly, of the Berbers of Africa.
— Christiane Desroches Noblecourt, Colette Roubet, Lionel Balout, La Momie de Ramsès II: Contribution Scientifique à l'Égyptologie, Paris, Rech. sur les Civilisations (1985, p. 383)
My little children are playing at my side, Learning to talk, they babble unformed sounds. These things have made me happy again And I forget my lost cap of office. Distant, distant I gaze at the white clouds: With a deep yearning I think of the Sages of antiquity.
— "Shady, shady the wood in front of the Hall"
— Translated by Arthur Waley
