Antiquity Quotes
More Antiquity Quotes
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))
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))
History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquity.
cicero— De Oratore II, 36.
A long period of distress and anarchy, in which empire, and arts, and riches, had migrated from the banks of the Tiber, was incapable of restoring or adorning the city; and, as all that is human must retrograde if it do not advance, every successive age must have hastened the ruin of the works of antiquity.
Edward Gibbon— Vol. 1, Chap. 71.
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.
There has been an inversion in the hierarchy of the two principles of antiquity, “Take care of yourself” and “Know yourself.” In Greco-Roman culture, knowledge of oneself appeared as the consequence of the care of the self. In the modern world, knowledge of oneself constitutes the fundamental principle.
Michel Foucault— “Technologies of the Self,” 'Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, p. 228
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 II of Prussia— Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great (New York: Brentano's, 1927), trans. Richard Aldington, letter 37 from Frederick to Voltaire (June 1738)
Neither antiquity nor any other nation has imagined a more atrocious and blasphemous absurdity than that of eating God. This is how Christians treat the autocrat of the universe.
Frederick II of Prussia— Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great (New York: Brentano's, 1927), trans. Richard Aldington, letter 215 from Frederick to Voltaire (1776-03-19)
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)
It is an ancient belief, going back to classical antiquity, that specialization of any kind is illiberal in a freeman. A man willing to bury himself in the details of some small endeavor has been considered lost to these larger considerations which must occupy the mind of the ruler.
richard weaver— p. 56 (Ideas have Consequences (1948))
'Tis not antiquity, nor author, That makes truth truth, altho' time's daughter.
Samuel Butler— Hudibras, Part II (1664), Canto III
The sages of antiquity employed parables to elucidate various subjects – sometimes philosophical principles – at others moral truths at others, maxims of economy – Jesus excelled in all.
— William Bengo'. Collyer, in "Lectures on Scripture parables", p.xi
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
"liberal minds living within our side of the border, would certainly not feel ashamed of their own Slavic language, or the fact that their basic identity, just like the language, is Slavic, instead of establishing a variety of racist theories about antiquity and some super-humans from which we originate".
— Denko Maleski, first Minister of foreign affairs of FYROM (1991 to 1993) and ambassador to the United Nations from 1993 to 1997, in an interview to Radio Free Europe, March 30 2013
[N]either antiquity nor any other nation has imagined a more atrocious and blasphemous absurdity than that of eating God. This is how Christians treat the autocrat of the universe.
— Frederick the Great, Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great (New York: Brentano's, 1927), transl. Richard Aldington, letter 215 from Frederick to Voltaire, 19 March 1776.
To live classically and to realize antiquity practically within oneself is the summit and goal of philology.
— Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991) § 147
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).
History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquity.
— De Oratore II, 36.
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, Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great (New York: Brentano's, 1927), transl. Richard Aldington, letter 37 from Frederick to Voltaire, June 1738.
[N]either antiquity nor any other nation has imagined a more atrocious and blasphemous absurdity than that of eating God. This is how Christians treat the autocrat of the universe.
— Frederick the Great, Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great (New York: Brentano's, 1927), transl. Richard Aldington, letter 215 from Frederick to Voltaire, 19 March 1776.
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
Thou wert before the Continents, before The hollow heavens, which like another sea Encircles them and thee, but whence thou wert, And when thou wast created, is not known, antiquity was young when thou wast old.
richard henry stoddard— Richard Henry Stoddard, Hymn to the Sea, line 104.
Perhaps there is no literature in Europe that mirrors so clearly as the Portuguese, the painful conflict in the minds of people who, on the one hand, by their humanistic education, not only knew better but also more uncritically admired, ancient learning than their medieval predecessors, and, who, on the other hand, in the same epoch, were confronted with abundant proofs of the insufficiency and fallibility of that same antiquity.
— Reijer Hooykaas, "The Portuguese Discoveries and the Rise of Modern Science" in Selected Studies in History of Science (1983)
Damn the age; I will write for antiquity.
Charles Lamb— Charles Lamb, Bon Mots by Charles Lamb and Douglas Jerrold, Ed. by Walter Jerrold.
