Quotes About Ancient

They all shared a certain coolness, a cruel, mannered charm which was not modern in the least but had the strange cold breath of the ancient world : they were magnificent creatures, such eyes, such hands, such looks - sic oculos, sic ille manus, sic ora ferebat.

For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless.

Tulips, I thought, staring at the jumble of letters before me. Had the ancient Greeks known them under a different name, if they'd had tulips at all? The letter psi, in Greek, is shaped like a tulip. All of a sudden, in the dense alphabet forest of the page, little black tulips began to pop up in a quick, random pattern like falling raindrops.

After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great. To escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident of one's moment of being. There are other advantages, more difficult to speak of, things which ancient sources only hint at and which I myself only understood after the fact.

It seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate.

We don't like to admit it," said Julian, "but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilized people—the ancients no less than us—have civilized themselves through the willful repression of the old, animal self.

Worry! What a waste of time. All the holy books were right. Clearly 'worry' was the mark of a primitive and spiritually unevolved person. What was that line from Yeats, about the bemused Chinese sages? All things fall and are built again. Ancient glittering eyes. This was wisdom. People had been raging and weeping and destroying things for centuries and wailing about their puny individual lives, when—what was the point? All this useless sorrow?

Thus hath the Lord said, Stand ye in the ways and see and ask for the old paths, where the good way is and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls (Jeremiah 6:16).

Then said Littleheart son of Bronweg: ·'Know then that Tuor was a man who dwelt in very ancient days in that land of the North called Dor-lómin or The Land of Shadows and of the Eldar the Noldoli know it best' .

An ancient military leader supposedly once said that it is well that war is so terrible, because otherwise people would grow too fond of it

It's quiet." "Too quiet," Jason said, then laughed. "That's an ancient joke on Earth." "The more I hear about Urth the stranger it gets.

Why did the dinosaur cross the road? Because chickens hadn't been invented back then!

Voynich Manuscript

Many theories of the ancient world seem terribly childish today, a hodge-podge of fables and false comparisons.But our theories will seem childish five-hundred years from now.Every theory is based on some analogy, and sooner or later the theory fails because the analogy turns out to be false. A theory in its day helps to solve the problems of the day.

in the face of horror, ancient rituals regained their meaning

His mouth came to hers suddenly, hovering above those thirsting lips as he drilled her with the intensity of his mercury gaze. " Neliss . . . " he murmured, reverting to the elegance of their ancient language. " Neliss ent desita." Beauty of the ages.

The image of the ancient fasces (bundled birch rods and axes) was already old when Rome adopted it as a symbol of state.

Third, in coming to understand Biblical symbolism, we may receive some clues from other ancient literature, but we must always have clear-cut Biblical indication for any symbol or image we think we have found. We don't want to read the modern secular worldview into the Bible, but we don't want to read the corrupt worldview of ancient Near-Eastern paganism into it either.

Our bodies, minds, and spirits stand in ancient communion with the soil.

Electricity was a part of the world from its creation, and therefore my Electra is as old as Daylight or Moonlight, and equally beneficent to mortals and fairies alike.

The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.

Germania of Tacitus

Woden, Thor, and Tiu

[Breadbaking is] one of those almost hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony. It leaves you filled with one of the world's sweetest smells... there is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel, that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.