Antiquity Quotes
More Antiquity Quotes
Lucan is the most philosophical and the most public-spirited poet of all antiquity.
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 16 (1823), p. 254
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
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— This quotation is useful for explanations of the period of art nouveau, and the causes of the art movement.
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
A little skill in antiquity inclines a man to Popery; but depth in that study brings him about again to our religion.
thomas fuller— The True Church Antiquary. Compare: "A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion", Francis Bacon, Of Atheism.
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
There have been snake people ( nagas or nags) and their rulers and their rulers, commonly multiheaded cobras, in Hindu mythology since antiquity.
— In page 82 (Plants of Life, Plants of Death)
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
No degree of antiquity can give sanction to a usage bad in itself.
— Lord Mansfield, Case of John Money and others (1765), 19 How. St. Tr. 1027.
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— Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 56
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
Lao-tse may be regarded as the deepest thinker of Chinese antiquity.
— William Howitt, in The History of the Supernatural (1863), p. 321
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)
