Quotes About Antiquity

Another trick—calculated to lure a different, more sophisticated customer—was to bury a piece in the back of the store, reverse the vacuum cleaner over it (instant antiquity!) and allow the nosy customer to ferret it out on his or her own—look

Archaeologists only look at what lies beneath their feet. The sky and the heavens don't exist for them.

It was often difficult to tell if things were a hundred years old, or a hundred thousand.

That whole heroic notion of the women warriors known as Amazons is extremely appealing. It was appealing in antiquity, and, throughout the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, they're always portrayed as heroic, courageous, and the equals of men, and that's just extremely attractive and has been since antiquity.

Nature is sanative, refining, elevating. How cunningly she hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses, and violets, and morning dew! Every inch of the mountains is scarred by unimaginable convulsions, yet the new day is purple with the bloom of youth and love.

By and large, only behind the most obscure doors of high academe can one unearth a mention of the great African empires and polities of antiquity like Kush, Benin, Meroe, Djenne, Ghana, and Songhay.

Dorrigo Evans was unable to make head or tail of it. His tastes were in any case already ossifying into the prejudices of those who voyage far into classics in adolescence and rarely journey elsewhere again. He was mostly lost with the contemporary and preferred the literary fashions of half a century before—in his case, the Victorian poets and the writers of antiquity.

We do not dislike everything that shines, but we do prefer a pensive lustre to a shallow brilliance, a murky light that, whether in a stone or an artifact, bespeaks a sheen of antiquity. . . . we do love things that bear the marks of grime, soot, and weather, and we love the colours and the sheen that call to mind the past that made them.

A little skill in antiquity inclines a man to Popery.

The life of famous men was more glorious in antiquity; the life of obscure men is happier with the moderns.

The great men of antiquity were poor.

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.

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.

A man is not necessarily a master because he happened to compose two or three centuries ago. Let us beware of the worship of mere antiquity.

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.

I feel that I belong to the 19th century. Some composers' music is very topical. It almost says, 'This is about what I read in newspapers yesterday.' Not mine.

To my mind the old masters are not art; their value is in their scarcity.

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

There were poets before Homer.

I have always wanted to know why, wherever archaeologists dig, do they always find red and white poles?

Hindu civilisation is the only great classical culture to survive intact from the ancient world, and at temples such as Madurai one can still catch glimpses of festivals and practices that were seen by Greek visitors to India long before the rise of ancient Rome. Indeed, it is only when you grasp the astonishing antiquity, and continuity, of Hinduism that you realise quite how miraculous is survival has been.

Doctrine once sown strikes deep its root, and respect for antiquity influences all men.

Those who, from a pretended respect to antiquity, appeal at every turn to an original plan for the constitution, only cover their turbulent spirit and their private ambition under the appearance of venerable forms.

Slavery is as old as civilization, and has been practiced all over the world. It was ubiquitous in antiquity, and is taken for granted in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible (you may recall that Paul enjoined slaves to obey their masters "in fear and trembling" as they would Christ)