Quotes About Antiquity

Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.

Ben and I walked by the Forum, which, with the green grass still growing among the stones, seems to be a double ruin: a ruin of antiquity and a monument to the tender sentiments of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelers, for we see not only the ghosts of Romans here but the shades of ladies with parasols and men with beards and little children rolling hoops.

Old books had always filled Brunetti with nostalgia for centuries in which he had not lived.

En el Valle de México la búsqueda arqueológica ha sido fructífera; prácticamente no se puede abrir una zanja sin encontrar restos del período azteca o de épocas anteriores

It's no stretch to say, then, that Thucydides coaches all who read him. For as his greatest modern interpreter (himself a sometime coach) has gently reminded us, the Greeks, despite their antiquity, "may have believed things we have either forgotten or never known; and we must keep open the possibility that in some respects, at least, they were wiser than we.

It is not the part of prudence to neglect that which antiquity in its long experience has approved and which is also taught by apostolic authority.

And my grandmother had bought them in preference to other books, just as she would have preferred to take a house that had a gothic dovecot, or some other such piece of antiquity as would have a pleasant effect on the mind, filling it with a nostalgic longing for impossible journeys through the realms of time.

Lee watched him for a while before he went back to his kitchen. He lifted the breadbox and took out a tiny volume bound in leather, and the gold tooling was almost completely worn away—The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius in English translation.

I'm from such an old family, it's been condemned.

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

If antiquity be the only test of nobility, then cheese is a very noble thing ... The lineage of cheese is demonstrably beyond all record.

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

Lo irreal no es lo opuesto a lo real, sino su lenguaje. Lo banal no es lo contrario de lo profundo, sino su fracaso. Lo trágico no es el reverso de lo cómico, sino su vecino. Lo antiguo no es la negación de lo nuevo, sino su futuro.

He loved the smell and feel of old books. To hold them was to touch the past.

From antiquity to modern times, virtually every society that has been organized as a state has condemned the consumption of human flesh more forcefully than it has condemned the consumption of any other kind of animal food.

Na literatura da Antiguidade, a autoridade da profunda voz masculina, por contraste com a feminina, é constantemente realçada. Tal como um tratado científico da Antiguidade afirma de modo explícito, uma voz grave indica coragem viril, uma voz aguda e feminina, cobardia.

Antiquity believed that the forces of love in the universe were limited. Therefore they were to be used sparingly,and everyone was to be loved only according to his value.

East thus avoided the economic polarization between creditors and debtors that ended up imposing bondage on most of classical antiquity.

No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land.

It had belonged to Charlemagne in its time

To select well among old things is almost equal to inventing new ones.

When historians and literary scholars talk about the classical heritage, or the legacy to Western civilization from antiquity, they are primarily thinking of four worldviews that were written in Hebrew or Greek among the body of religious, philosophical, and literary texts created before 250 B.C. These are the Hebrew Bible, the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, and Hellenistic, or Alexandrine, literature.

One makes a great error if one believes there are 'ancients.' Only now is antiquity starting to arise. It arises in the eyes and soul of the artist.

if the ordination to the priesthood because of a whole liturgical symbolism (which is also psychological) is reserved to men, Christian antiquity was acquainted with charismatic Ammas, spiritual Mothers, who, equally with the Fathers, Abbas, practised the discernment of spirits and penetrating insight into souls.