Antiquity Quotes - Page 2

• Astrology is knocking at the gates of our universities: A Tübingen professor has switched over to astrology and a course on astrology was given at Cardiff University last year. Astrology is not mere superstition but contains some psychological facts (like theosophy) which are of considerable importance. Astrology has actually nothing to do with the stars but is the 5000-year-old psychology of antiquity and the Middle Ages.

  Carl Jung

  Stars, Years, Astrology

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• We gladly put antiquity above our age but not posterity. Only a father doesn't begrudge his son's talent.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Father, Son, Age

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• 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 M. Weaver

  Men, Mind, Details

  Richard M. Weaver (2013). “Ideas Have Consequences”, p.56, University of Chicago Press

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• Pompeii is an extraordinary place to be because it was preserved exactly as it was. There are many other sites. If you visit any other antiquity-type sites throughout the world, they're very damaged with what's gone on over the centuries since they were abandoned. But this one was just, like, sealed, so you're looking at rock surfaces and the carving of letters and names in the stones looks like it was done yesterday.

  David Gilmour

  Names, Yesterday, Rocks

  "David Gilmour Talks Pompeii Return: 'It’s a Place of Ghosts'". Interview with Kory Grow, www.rollingstone.com. July 7, 2016.

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• The game of chess is the most fascinating and intellectual pastime which the wisdom of antiquity has bequeathed to us.

  Howard Staunton

  Games, Intellectual, Chess

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• Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more modern. It is written as if the specator should be thinking of the backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the author expected that the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Wall, Thinking, Air

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.549, Simon and Schuster

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• Yes, ever since antiquity, the day after Friday has been Saturday.

  Mizuki Nomura

  Friday, Saturday, Has Beens

  Mizuki Nomura (2012). “Book Girl and the Wayfarer's Lamentation (light novel)”, p.132, Hachette UK

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• Each famous author of antiquity whom I recover places a new offence and another cause of dishonor to the charge of earlier generations, who, not satisfied with their own disgraceful barrenness, permitted the fruit of other minds, and the writings that their ancestors had produced by toil and application, to perish through insufferable neglect. Although they had nothing of their own to hand down to those who were to come after, they robbed posterity of its ancestral heritage.

  Petrarch

  Writing, Hands, Mind

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• We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.

  Walter Benjamin

  Life, Long, House

  Walter Benjamin (2016). “One-Way Street”, p.32, Harvard University Press

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• Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity.

  George Orwell

  World, Slavery, May

  George Orwell (1968). “The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell: In front of your nose, 1945-1950”

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• If one discards the Bible as being unreliable, then he must discard almost all literature of antiquity.

  Josh McDowell

  Literature, Ifs, Unreliable

  "Evidence That Demands a Verdict". Book by Josh McDowell, February 1979.

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• Egypt, the Egypt of antiquity, at a later time, exercised a mysterious fascination over me. I recognized a picture of it immediately, without hesitation and astonishment, in an illustrated magazine.

  Pierre Loti

  Egypt, Fascination, Magazines

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• At first sight nothing seems more obvious than that everything has a beginning and an end, and that everything can be subdivided into smaller parts. Nevertheless, for entirely speculative reasons the philosophers of Antiquity, especially the Stoics, concluded this concept to be quite unnecessary. The prodigious development of physics has now reached the same conclusion as those philosophers, Empedocles and Democritus in particular, who lived around 500 B.C.E. and for whom even ancient man had a lively admiration.

  Svante Arrhenius

  Men, Sight, Firsts

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• In antiquity there was only silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men.

  Luigi Russolo

  Men, Silence, Triumph

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• The cause of the break with the tradition of antiquity was the rapid and unexpected advance of Islam. The result of this advance was the final separation of East from West, and the end of the Mediterranean unity.

  Henri Pirenne

  Unity, Islam, Finals

  Henri Pirenne (2013). “Mohammed and Charlemagne”, p.284, Routledge

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• If you look at the heroes of antiquity and myth, they all have flaws. It's something that they have to overcome; their flaws are something that they have to act in spite of. The challenge is not to defy your fate, but to endure it. That is heroic.

  Nicholas Meyer

  Hero, Fate, Challenges

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• ...the holy men sat in an atmosphere reeking of antiquity, so thick with the dust of ages that you can't see through it -nor can they.

  Gertrude Bell

  Life, Men, Dust

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• Therefore we examine with considerable diligence the consensus of the true, learned, and purer antiquity, and we love and praise the testimonies of the fathers which agree with the Scripture.

  Martin Chemnitz

  Father, Scripture, Praise

  Martin Chemnitz (1971). “Examination of the Council of Trent”

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• Thus metaphysics and mathematics are, among all the sciences that belong to reason, those in which imagination has the greatest role. I beg pardon of those delicate spirits who are detractors of mathematics for saying this . . . . The imagination in a mathematician who creates makes no less difference than in a poet who invents. . . . Of all the great men of antiquity, Archimedes may be the one who most deserves to be placed beside Homer.

  Jean le Rond d'Alembert

  Math, Men, Differences

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• From now back to antiquity, its (Tao's) name has not been lost. Thereby, see the origin of all.

  Laozi

  Names, Taoism, Lost

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• Without the concepts, methods and results found and developed by previous generations right down to Greek antiquity one cannot understand either the aims or achievements of mathematics in the last 50 years. [Said in 1950]

  Hermann Weyl

  Years, Achievement, Greek

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• To appreciate present conditions, collate them with those of antiquity.

  Basil Bunting

  Appreciate, Conditions

  Basil Bunting (2016). “The Poems of Basil Bunting”, p.12, Faber & Faber

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• This dogma (the soul) has been present in human psychology from earliest antiquity. No one has ever touched the soul, or has seen one in a test tube, or has in any way come into a relationship with it as he has with the other objects of his daily experience.

  John B. Watson

  Psychology, Soul, Religion

  John B. Watson (2017). “Behaviorism”, p.21, Routledge

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• If the American Revolution had produced nothing but the Declaration of Independence, it would have been worth while. . . . The beauty and cogency of the preamble, reaching back to remotest antiquity and forward so an indefinite future, have lifted the hearts of millions of men and will continue to do. . . . These words are more revolutionary than anything written by Robespierre, Marx, or Lenin, more explosive than the atom, a continual challenge to ourselves as well as an inspiration to the oppressed of all the world.

  Samuel Eliot Morison

  Inspiration, Heart, Men

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• The society that will organize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers will put the whole machinery of the state where it will then belong: into the museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe.

  Friedrich Engels

  Museums, Association, Spinning

  1884 The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.

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