Ancient Quotes - Page 39

• I drop in from the sky disturbing the silence only momentarily, then leaving the ancient land once more to converse with the sky. It's my home and all I need.

  Toni Onley

  Travel, Home, Land

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• A little part of my life is built around ancient art.

  Michael Steinhardt

  Art, Littles, Life Is

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• It may seem absurd to believe that a 'primitive' culture in the Himalaya has anything to teach our industrialized society. But our search for a future that works keeps spiraling back to an ancient connection between ourselves and the earth, an interconnectedness that ancient cultures have never abandoned.

  Helena Norberg-Hodge

  Believe, Culture, Earth

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• The sea erupted. Often the sea and land changed places. The immobility of contours of continents and seas, a dogma in geology, has no basis in fact. And immediately there is the problem of the climate. There were ancient climates that were very different from what they are today. If those corals grew where they were found, certainly the Earth was not travelling with the same elements of rotation and revolution which means not in the same orbit, not with the axis directed in the same position as it is today. If you don't believe it, try to conservate corals on the North Pole.

  Immanuel Velikovsky

  Believe, Mean, Axes

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• Only the truth and its expression can establish that new public opinion which will reform the ancient obsolete and pernicious order of life; and yet we not only do not express the truth we know, but often even distinctly give expression to what we ourselves regard as false. If only free men would not rely on that which has no power, and is always fettered upon external aids; but would trust in that which is always powerful and free the truth and its expression!

  Leo Tolstoy

  Powerful, Men, Expression

  graf Leo Tolstoy (1913). “Essays, letters, misc. (General articles ; Famine articles ; The Dukhobors)”

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• Down in adoration falling, Lo! the sacred Host we hail; Lo! o'er ancient forms departing, Newer rites of grace prevail; Faith for all defects supplying, Where the feeble senses fail.

  Thomas Aquinas

  Fall, Grace, Sacred

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• Since ancient times, philosophers have maintained that to strive too hard for one's own happiness is self-defeating.

  Peter Singer

  Self, Philosopher, Strive

  Peter Singer (1982). “The expanding circle: ethics and sociobiology”, Plume

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• Atlas, we read in ancient song, Was so exceeding tall and strong, He bore the skies upon his back, Just as the pedler does his pack; But, as the pedler overpress'd Unloads upon a stall to rest, Or, when he can no longer stand, Desires a friend to lend a hand, So Atlas, lest the ponderous spheres Should sink, and fall about his ears, Got Hercules to bear the pile, That he might sit and rest awhile.

  Jonathan Swift

  Song, Strong, Fall

  Jonathan Swift (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Jonathan Swift (Illustrated)”, p.3013, Delphi Classics

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• The simple dignity of a child drinking a bowl of milk embodies the fascination of an ancient rite.

  Carl Sandburg

  Children, Drinking, Simple

  Quoted in Personalia, the Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg (1970).

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• I like that ancient Saxon phrase, which calls, The burial-ground God's-Acre.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Phrases, Acres, Burial

  'God's-Acre' (1841)

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• I like that ancient Saxon phrase, which calls The burial-ground God's-Acre! It is just; It consecrates each grave within its walls, And breathes a benison o'er the sleeping dust.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Wall, Sleep, Dust

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1849). “The Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ; Complete in One Volume”, p.50

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• Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Acoustics, Awareness, Medieval

  "Laws of Media: The New Science". p. 225. Book by Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, 1988.

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• An ancient custom obtains force of nature.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Force, Forces Of Nature, Customs

  "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations" by Jehiel Keeler Hoyt, De Inventione, p. 154-55, 1922.

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• I will venture to assert, that a just translation of any ancient poet in rhyme is impossible. No human ingenuity can be equal to the task of closing every couplet with sounds homotonous, expressing at the same time the full sense, and only the full sense of his original.

  William Cowper

  Sound, Tasks, Venture

  William Cowper (1851). “The Works of William Cowper: His Life, Letters, and Poems. Now First Completed by the Introduction of Cowper's Private Correspondence”, p.379

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• If ancient descent could confer nobility, the lower forms of life would possess it in a greater degree than man.

  John Lancaster Spalding

  Men, Degrees, Descent

  John Lancaster Spalding (1901). “Aphorisms and Reflections: Conduct, Culture and Religion”

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• With kings, nations, and private individuals, the strongest assume to themselves rights over the weakest, and the same rule is followed by animals, by matter, by the elements, so that everything is performed in the universe by violence. And that order which we blame with some appearance of justice is the most universal, most absolute, most unchangeable, and most ancient law of nature.

  Luc de Clapiers

  Kings, Animal, Rights

  Jean de La Bruyère, Luc de Clapiers marquis de Vauvenargues (1903). “La Bruyère and Vauvenargues: Selections from the Characters, Reflexions and Maxims”

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• The role played by education in all political utopias from ancient times onward shows how natural it seems to start a new world with those who are by birth and nature new. So far as politics is concerned, this involves of course a serious misconception: instead of joining with one's equals in assuming the effort of persuasion and running the risk of failure, there is dictatorial intervention, based upon the absolute superiority of the adult, and the attempt to produce the new as a fait accompli, that is, as though the new already existed.

  Hannah Arendt

  Running, Political, Effort

  Hannah Arendt (1968). “Between past and future: eight exercises in political thought”, Viking Adult

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• The Ancient Egyptians considered it good luck to meet a swarm of Bees on the road. What they considered bad luck I couldn't say.

  Will Cuppy

  Good Luck, Bees, Bad Luck

  "How to Attract the Wombat". Book by Will Cuppy, 1949.

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• I should describe mine own nature as tripartite, my interests consisting of three parallel and dissociated groups - (a) Love of the strange and fantastic. (b) Love of the abstract truth and of scientific logick. (c) Love of the ancient and the permanent. Sundry combinations of these three strains will probably account for all my odd tastes and eccentricities.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Groups, Three, Taste

  Letter to Reinhardt Kleiner (7 March 1920), in "Selected Letters I, 1911-1924" edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, (p. 110), 1964.

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• Nietzsche inveighs against every sort of historical optimism; but he energetically repudiates the ordinary pessimism, which is the result of degenerate or enfeebled instincts of decadence. He preaches with youthful enthusiasm the triumph of a tragic culture, introduced by an intrepid rising generation, in which the spirit of ancient Greece might be born again. He rejects the pessimism of Schopenhauer, for he already abhors all renunciation; but he seeks a pessimism of healthiness, one derived from strength, from exuberant power, and he believes he has found it in the Greeks.

  Georg Brandes

  Believe, Optimism, Greek

  "An Essay on the Aristocratic Radicalism of Friedrich Nietzsche". Essay by Georg Brandes (1889), as translated in "Friedrich Nietzsche" by A.G. Chater (p. 21), 1914.

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• It ["The Ancient Mariner"] is marvellous in its mastery over that delightfully fortuitous inconsequence that is the adamantine logic of dreamland.

  James Russell Lowell

  Poetry, Mastery, Logic

  James Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton (1904). “The Complete Writings of James Russell Lowell”

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• Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it.

  William James

  History, Grease, Mind

  William James (2015). “Pragmatism and the Conception of Thruth”, p.134, William James

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• [The Golden Notebook] was not a trumpet for Women's Liberation. It described many female emotions of aggression, hostility, resentment. It put them into print. Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing, came as a great surprise. Instantly a lot of very ancient weapons were unleashed, the main ones, as usual, being on the theme of "She is unfeminine", "She is a man-hater".

  Doris Lessing

  Notebook, Men, Thinking

  Doris May Lessing (1989). “The Doris Lessing Reader”, Jonathan Cape

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• To be sure, the ancient belief that the dream reveals the future is not entirely devoid of truth. By representing to us a wish as fulfilled the dream certainly leads us into the future; but this future, taken by the dreamer as present, has been formed into the likeness of that past by the indestructible wish.

  Sigmund Freud

  Dream, Taken, Past

  Sigmund Freud (2016). “THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS - The Royal Road to the Unconscious: Rules of Dream Interpretation: The Dream as a Fulfillment of a Wish, Distortion in Dreams, The Method of Dream Interpretation, The Sources of Dreams & The Psychology of the Dream Activities”, p.439, e-artnow

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• The seers of ancient India had, in their experiments and efforts at spiritual training and the conquest of the body, perfected a discovery which in its importance to the future of human knowledge dwarfs the divinations of Newton and Galileo , even the discovery of the inductive and experimental method in Science was not more momentous.

  Sri Aurobindo

  Spiritual, Discovery, Effort

  Sri Aurobindo (2006). “The Upanishads--II : Kena And Other Upanishads”, p.355, SriAurobindoAshram Publication Dept

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