Quotes About Ancients

What difference is there between the figure of the conqueror and that of the pirate? said the ancients. The difference only between the eagle and the vulture,—serenity or restlessness.

Vico's terminology follows the principle of his oration Study Methods: to balance the moderns against the ancients. The reader is asked to have Joyce's ''two thinks at a time'' (FW 583.7), to move between the modern and Vico's meaning. Vico does not simply replace modern meanings with his own original ones. He repeatedly faces the reader with both.

Ghost Dog: In the words of the ancients, one should make his decision within the space of seven breaths. It is a matter of being determined and having the spirit to break through to the other side.

La célébrité de l'île ne datait pas d'hier: son nom, ou plutôt sa qualification, remontait à la plus haute Antiquité; les anciens l'appelaient Kalonèse, de deux mots grecs qui signifient belle île.

BACCHUS, n. A convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for getting drunk.

Vain labour for me — vain labour almost for the grave English language — to do justice to the sparkling paradoxes that flew from lip to lip. The favourite theme was the superiority of the moderns to the ancients. Condorcet on this head was eloquent, and to some, at least, of his audience, most convincing. That Voltaire was greater than Homer few there were disposed to deny. Keen was the ridicule lavished on the dull pedantry which finds everything ancient necessarily sublime.

I understand more than the ancients, because I keep thy precepts.

Boil the words you already know down to their bones,' Rex [Browning] says, 'and usually you find the ancients sitting there at the bottom of the pot, staring back up.

Boil the words you already know down to their bones," Rex says, "and usually you find the ancients sitting there at the bottom of the pot, staring back up." Who says such things? And still Zeno steals glances: Rex's mouth, his hair, his hands; there is the same pleasure in gazing at this man as in gazing at a fire.

Boil the words you already know down to their bones," Rex says, "and usually you find the ancients sitting there at the bottom of the pot, staring back up.

And perhaps, posterity will thank me for having shown it that the ancients did not know everything.

At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena. So people stop short at natural laws as at something unassailable, as did the ancients at God and Fate. And they both are right and wrong. But the ancients were clearer, in so far as they recognized one clear conclusion, whereas in the modern system it should appear as though everything were explained.

The ancients had instincts and abilities that are lost to civilization today. Magic was real. It lived inside the shamans. Inside the priests. They passed it on from generation to generation. You have the dregs of that power in you. It it not the strength that it was, but you can access it. But to do so you must be willing to travel deep into your own darkness and be open to risk. To pull from the earth's energy.

Have you ever thought about time? The continuum that connects the dust of the ancients to the pollen that lands on our noses? Have you ever looked and thought...that thing needs a wrinkle in it?

Under the volcano! It was not for nothing the ancients had placed Tartarus under Mt. Aetna, nor within it, the monster Typhoeus, with his hundred heads and—relatively—fearful eyes and voices.

In science it is a service of the highest merit to seek out those fragmentary truths attained by the ancients, and to develop them further.

If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism; if from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition.

There is a real world, but it is beyond this glamour and this vision, beyond these 'chases in Arras, dreams in a career,' beyond them all as beyond a veil. I do not know whether any human being has ever lifted that veil; but I do know, Clarke, that you and I shall see it lifted this very night from before another's eyes. You may think this all strange nonsense; it may be strange, but it is true, and the ancients knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the god Pan.

For the retiring of the mind within itself is the state which is most susceptible of divine influxions; save that it is accompanied in this case with a fervency and elevation (which the ancients noted by fury), and not with a repose and quiet, as it is in the other.

If a person would understand either the Odyssey or any other ancient work, he must never look at the dead without seeing the living in them, nor at the living without thinking of the dead. We are too fond of seeing the ancients as one thing and the moderns as another.

The ancients don't let go of powerful things. Ever.

As the ancients said,     The cat triumphant purrs like a tiger.

Norton suddenly recalled the myth of Oceanus, the sea that, the ancients believed, surrounded the Earth.

The sole object of Logic is the guidance of one's own thoughts: the communication of those thoughts to others falls under the consideration of Rhetoric, in the large sense in which that art was conceived by the ancients; or of the still more extensive art of Education.