Antiquity Quotes - Page 7

• The great intellectual tradition that comes down to us from the past was never interrupted or lost through such trifles as the sack of Rome, the triumph of Attila, or all the barbarian invasions of the Dark Ages. It was lost after the introduction of printing, the discovery of America, the founding of the Royal Society, and all the enlightenment of the Renaissance and the modern world. It was there, if anywhere, that there was lost or impatiently snapped the long thin delicate thread that had descended from distant antiquity; the thread of that unusual human hobby: the habit of thinking.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Dark, Thinking, Past

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• We should never invoke the spirit of antiquity as our authority. Spirits are peculiar things; they cannot be grasped with the hands and be held up before others. Spirits reveal themselves only to spirits. The most direct and concise method would be, in this case as well, to prove the possession of the only redeeming faith by good works.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Hands, Would Be, Peculiar

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• Again men have been kept back as by a kind of enchantment from progress in science by reverence for antiquity, by the authority of men counted great in philosophy, and then by general consent.

  Francis Bacon

  Philosophy, Men, Progress

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• In fact one of the things about Plotinus is that he maybe not singlehandedly, but I think more than anyone else, killed off the variety and dissension among the philosophical schools of antiquity.

  Peter Adamson

  Philosophical, School, Thinking

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• Very many maintain that all we know is still infinitely less than all that still remains unknown; nor do philosophers pin their faith to others' precepts in such wise that they lose their liberty, and cease to give credence to the conclusions of their proper senses. Neither do they swear such fealty to their mistress Antiquity that they openly, and in sight of all, deny and desert their friend Truth.

  William Harvey

  Wise, Sight, Giving

  William Harvey, Edward Jenner (2010). “Scientific Papers: Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology”, p.66, Cosimo, Inc.

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• I technically live in the desert - Los Angeles being an artificial oasis - but my interest stems even farther to my own ethnic roots and to my love of antiquity, of the Old World and of the east.

  Vera Nazarian

  Oasis, Roots, East

  Source: fantasyworlds.wordpress.com

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• The arts and sciences, in general, during the three or four last centuries, have had a regular course of progressive improvement. The inventions in mechanic arts, the discoveries in natural philosophy, navigation and commerce, and the advancement of civilization and humanity, have occasioned changes in the condition of the world and the human character which would have astonished the most refined nations of antiquity. A continuation of similar exertions is everyday rendering Europe more and more like one community, or single family.

  John Adams

  Art, Philosophy, Character

  John Adams (2015). “The Works of John Adams Vol. 4: Novanglus, Thoughts on Government, Defence of the Constitution I”, p.210, Jazzybee Verlag

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• It must be admitted that the tendency of the human race toward liberty is largely thwarted, especially in France. This is greatly due to a fatal desire-learned from the teachings of antiquity-that our writers on public affairs have in common: They desire to set themselves above mankind in order to arrange, organize, and regulate it according to their fancy.

  Frederic Bastiat

  Teaching, Learning, Race

  Frederic Bastiat (2006). “The Law”, p.41, Cosimo, Inc.

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• 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 The Great

  Christian, Eating, Treats

  Letter 215 to Voltaire on March 19, 1776. "Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great", translated by Richard Aldington, 1927.

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• Children, as well as grown-ups, in their individual, glorified, drudgery-proof homes of Labrador, the tropics, the Orient, or where you will, to which they can pass with pleasure and expedition by means of ever-improving transportation, will be able to tune in their television and radio to the moving picture lecture of, let us say, President Lowell of Harvard; the professor of Mathematics of Oxford; of the doctor of Indian antiquities of Delhi, etc.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  Children, Moving, Mean

  "4D Timelock". Book by Buckminster Fuller, 1928.

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• Ideas that are at odds with the inherited collective wisdom of antiquity are always, on their face suspect.

  Andrew Thomas

  War, Odds, Ideas

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• The university must be retrospective. The gale that gives direction to the vanes on all its towers blows out of antiquity.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Blow, Giving, Towers

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1981). “The Portable Emerson: New Edition”, p.356, Penguin

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• Twenty thousand thieves landed at Hastings. These founders of the House of Lords were greedy and ferocious dragoons, sons of greedy and ferocious pirates... Such, however, is the illusion of antiquity and wealth, that decent and dignified men now existing, boast their descent from these filthy thieves, who showed a far juster conviction of their own merits, by assuming for their types the swine, goat, jackal, leopard, wolf, and snake, which they severally resembled.

  Lewis Carroll

  Son, Men, Snakes

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• Our own country furnishes antiquities as ancient and durable, and as useful, as any; rocks at least as well covered with lichens,and a soil which, if it is virgin, is but virgin mould, the very dust of nature. What if we cannot read Rome or Greece, Etruria or Carthage, or Egypt or Babylon, on these; are our cliffs bare?

  Henry David Thoreau

  Country, America, Rocks

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.193, Delphi Classics

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• Why should Canada, wild and unsettled as it is, impress us as an older country than the States, unless because her institutions are old? All things appeared to contend there, as I have implied, with a certain rust of antiquity, such as forms on old armor and iron guns,--the rust of conventions and formalities. It is said that the metallic roofs of Montreal and Quebec keep sound and bright for forty years in some cases. But if the rust was not on the tinned roofs and spires, it was on the inhabitants and their institutions.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Country, Gun, Years

  Henry David Thoreau (2017). “Journeys, Adventures & Life in Harmony with Nature – 6 Book Collection (Illustrated): Including Walden, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, A Yankee in Canada & Canoeing in the Wilderness - North American Highlands Series”, p.961, e-artnow

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• All literature, all philosophical treatises, all the voices of antiquity are full of examples for imitation, which would all lie unseen in darkness without the light of literature.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Lying, Philosophical, Light

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• Any man will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of; and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers and classbooks, and when we leave school, the Little Reading, and story books, which are for boys and beginners; and our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Wise, Book, Reading

  Henry David Thoreau (1882). “Walden”, p.168

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• A fortified town is like a man cased in the heavy armor of antiquity, with a horse-load of broadswords and small arms slung to him, endeavoring to go about his business.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Horse, Men, Armor

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Yankee in Canada”, p.53, Graphic Arts Books

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• No mistake is more to be deplored than the conception that a system of morals and religion should derive any portion of its authority either from the circumstance of its novelty or its antiquity, that it should be judged excellent, not because it is reasonable or true, but because no person has ever thought of it before, or because it has been thought of from the beginning of time.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Mistake, Novelty, Moral

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1988). “Shelley's Prose: Or the Trumpet of a Prophecy”

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• For my own part, I adhere to the maxim of antiquity, that the throne is a glorious sepulchre.

  Theodora

  Thrones, Glorious, Maxims

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• You will certainly grant me that neither antiquity nor whatever nation has devised a more repulsive and blasphemous absurdity than that of eating your God. This is the most disgusting dogma of Christian religion, the greatest insult to the Highest Being, the climax of madness and insanity.

  Frederick The Great

  Christian, Insanity, Insult

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• The clatter of a changing world is not pleasant, and those who have enjoyed the comforts and protection of the old order may be shocked and unhappy when they behold the vigorous young builders of a new world sweeping away their time-honored antiquities.

  Helen Keller

  Order, Unhappy, May

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• The tourist debauches the great monuments of antiquity, a comic figure, always inapt in his comments, incongruous in his appearance; ...avarice and deceit attack him at every step; the shops that he patronizes are full of forgeries... But we need feel no scruple or twinge of uncertainty; 'we' are travelers and cosmopolitans; the tourist is the other fellow.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Tourists, Deceit, Needs

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• A dogma recognized throughout antiquity... (that) the soul expiates its sins in the darkness of the infernal regions and... afterwards... passes into new bodies, there to undergo new trials.

  Plotinus

  Karma, Soul, Darkness

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• Wealth, howsoever got, in England makes lords of mechanics, gentlemen of rakes; Antiquity and birth are needless here; 'Tis impudence and money makes a peer.

  Daniel Defoe

  Gentleman, England, Peers

  Daniel Defoe (1855). “The Novels and Miscellaneous Works of Daniel De Foe”, p.443

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