Quotes About Antiquity

We all pay an involuntary homage to antiquity – a "blind homage," as Bacon calls it in his "Novum Organum," which tends greatly to the obstruction of truth. To the great majority of mortal eyes, Time sanctifies everything that he does not destroy. The mere fact of anything being spared by the great foe makes it a favourite with us, who are sure to fall his victims.

La bella Antigüedad fue siempre venerable; pero no creo en absoluto que ella sea admirable. Veo a los antiguos, sin doblar las rodillas; son grandes, es cierto, pero hombres como nosotros.

Have you by any chance an edition of St. Ignatius's treatise against the Gnostics?" he asked in a low clear voice. The young assistant looked gravely back. "Not for sale, I'm afraid," he said. "Nor, if it comes to that, the Gnostic treatises against St. Ignatius." "Quite," Anthony answered.

It is the things that have a history, L. Compared to them we are ghosts.

It is not self-forgetting and pain-loving antiquarianism nor self-forgetting and intoxicating romanticism which induces us to turn with passionate interest, with unqualified willingness to learn, toward the political thought of classical antiquity. We are impelled to do so by the crisis of our time, the crisis of the West.

How old are you?" "Ah that is a good one. I do not know." "Before cars?" "Before trains, before guns. Before people stole the curves from the high clouds and the angles from the flying flocks to build all their little alphabets.

Very old music is, like, 11th century in my mind. That's very old.

The oldest book I have is a treatise on architecture from the 17th century.

The one charm of the past is that it is the past.

We extol ancient things, regardless of our own times. [Lat., Vetera extollimus recentium incuriosi.]

Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of the ages through which they have passed.

In the highest antiquity, the people did not know that there were rulers. In the next age they loved them and praised them. In the next they feared them; in the next they despised them.

In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud.

How I have walked... day after day, and all alone, to see if there was not something among the old things which was new!

If I were an antiquarian, I would have eyes only for old stuff, but I am a historian. Therefore, I love life.

What is a country without rabbits and partridges They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products ancient and venerable familes known to antiquity as to modern times of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground.

But the appeal to antiquity is both a treason and a heresy...The only Divine evidence to us of what was primitive is the witness and voice of the Church at this hour.

I love old books. They tell you stories about their use. You can see where the fingerprints touched the pages as they held the book open. You can see how long they lingered on each page by the finger stains.

One of the brilliant things about Britain is the way you've managed to save old things but to keep using them - that they've not just become museums the way they do in the United States.

Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of ages through which they passed.

The Phoenicians are entitled to be commemorated in history by the side of the Hellenic and Latin nations; but their case affords a fresh proof, and perhaps the strongest proof of all, that the development of national energies in antiquity was of a one-sided character.

Mankind are apt to be strongly prejudiced in favor of whatever is countenanced by antiquity, enforced by authority, and recommended by custom.

You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?

If society treated sex with any dignity or respect, both pornographers and prostitutes would have status, which they obviously had at one time. The sexual women of antiquity were the artists and writers of sexual love. Since organized religions have made all forms of sexual pleasure evil, no modern equivalent exists today.