Quotes About Ancient

For the ancient Greeks, who lacked our social media, the only way to achieve mass duplication of the details of one's life in the apprehension of others was to do something wondrously worth the telling. Our wondrous technologies might just save us all the personal bother. Kleos is a tweak away.

P]erhaps at midnight, when all boundaries are lost, the country reverts to its ancient shape, as the Romans saw it, lying cloudy, when they landed, and the hills had no names and rivers wound they knew not where. —Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

At the center of Zoroastrian theology was a unique monotheistic system based on the sole god, Ahura Mazda ("the Wise Lord"). Like most ancients, Zarathustra could not easily conceive of his god as being the source of both good and evil. He therefore developed an ethical dualism in which two opposing spirits, Spenta Mainyu ("the beneficent spirit") and Angra Mainyu ("the hostile spirit"), were responsible for good and evil, respectively.

Athena was originally worshiped as a flat piece of olive wood that was washed and bejeweled, wrapped in garments, and carefully tended by a cadre of her priestesses.16

But biblical and other ancient Near Eastern sources do not share Enlightenment theology of sophisticated intellectuals (ancient and modern).

Mribus antqus rs stat Rmna virsque. (Ennius Ann. 467.)

Two thousand years ago, five thousand, they didn't have a word for imagination, and faith was the best they could come up with for a pretty solemn bunch of followers.

If I'd been born in ancient Greece, I'd worship Zeus and Aphrodite

Remorse, etymologically, is the action of biting again: that's what the feeling does to you. Imagine the strength of the bite when I reread my words. They seemed like some ancient curse I had forgotten even uttering.

Courtiers in some of their inscriptions referring to the king say, "I did what his ka loved" or "I did that which his ka approved

The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind. The god-side of our ancient mentality, at least in a certain period of history, usually or perhaps always spoke in verse. This means that most men at one time, throughout the day, were hearing poetry (of a sort) composed and spoken within their own minds.

She had sacrificed her childhood to save her brothers; she loved her family above all else, and her spirits yearned to return home once more, to the wild forest and the land of mystic tales and ancient spirits whence he had taken her. That was the place of her heart, and if he loved her, he must let her go.

Every ancient tale has truth at its heart, I said. That's what I've always believed, anyway. But after years and years of retelling, the shape of those old stories changes. What may once have been simple and easily recognized becomes strange, wondrous and magical. Those are only the trappings of the story. The truth lies beneath those fantastic garments.

This was a familiar feeling, for there were many places in the great forest where you could drink in its energy, become one with its ancient heart. When you were in trouble, you could find your way in these places.

Los chinos, por su parte, aman también el jade, pero es que quizás seamos los orientales los últimos que sentimos fascinación por estos pedruscos de aspecto extrañamente turbio, en los que parece que haya cuajado un aire viejo, de siglos, piedras que encierran en lo más profundo un brillo opaco, como estancado.

But Enki wants to save Atrahasis,50 the 'exceedingly wise man' of the city of Shuruppak.

It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written.

I really can't believe what a state the Pyramids are in. I thought they had flat rendered sides, but when you get up close, you see how they are just giant boulders balanced on top of each other, like a massive game of Jenga that has got out of hand. I

All those tiny ancient marine life forms falling to the ocean floor to come back to life one day as a Disney Fairies Tea Set.

Right up until the end, Victor's mind had been as methodical as an efficient library, whereas Amelia felt that hers was more like the cupboard under the stair where ancient hockey sticks were shoved in beside broken Hoovers and boxes of old Christmas decorations, and the one thing you knew was in there—a five-amp fuse, a tin of tan shoe polish, a Phillips screwdriver—would almost certainly be the one thing you couldn't lay your hands on.

The man who first gave history a recognized place in science was an ancient historian.

The wise man of Miletus thus declared the first of things is water

The mouth of a perfectly contented man is filled with beer. -Egyptian proverb, c. 2200 BCE

Land of lost gods and godlike men.