Quotes About Ancients

Our habitual instructors, our ordinary conversation, our inevitable and ineradicable prejudices tend to make us think that "Progress" is the normal fact in human society, the fact which we should expect to see, the fact which we should be surprised if we did not see. But history refutes this. The ancients had no conception of progress; they did not so much as reject the idea; they did not even entertain the idea.

Love is the poetry of the senses. It has the destiny of all that which is great in man and of all that which proceeds from his thought. Either it is sublime, or it is not. When once it exists, it exists forever and goes on always increasing. This is the love which the ancients made the child of heaven and earth.

The notion that the laws of nature had to be intentionally obeyed reflects the ancients' focus on why nature behaves as it does, rather than on how it behaves.

The modern mind rebels at this notion—the notion of something's virtue tied to its inherent purpose. Nature, we believe, is blind and valueless—we don't blame a snake for biting or a baby for crying. But that's not what the ancients meant by virtue. They didn't mean our modern moral sense of "virtue"—being a nice person, or something similarly vague. They meant fulfilling the telos for which you were created.

This was what never failed to stir her--the unfathomable gulf between today's thinking and the way the ancients thought. They were truly alien, not merely innocent agrarians with a foolish faith.

The physical laws of the universe were in effect long before the pharaohs. The ancients were aware of many and knew how to use some. Much of that knowledge was lost during the Dark Ages. A lot of that wisdom remains to be rediscovered.

The ancients considered mechanics in a twofold respect: as rational, which proceeds accurately by demonstration, and practical. To practical mechanics all the manual arts belong, from which mechanics took its name.

did not choose to print the Wesson's Guide. Because a printing press was a manchine, and machines were technology, and because technology clouded minds, weakened the will, and took away the self-reliance of the Ancients--or so their Parliament said--such dangerous items could be used only by a special license.

What if the Ancients used the number of ticks to mark the time of day, instead of the height of the sun or moon? so highmoon could happen here.." "That way highmoon is not the time; highmoon is happening at the different time every night. If you're counting the ticks as time.

It is good to learn from the ancients. I'm a bit of an ancient myself. They had a lot of time to think about architecture and landscape.

The best artifact was the calendar of the ancients, a great carved piece of stone as big as a kitchen, circular, bolted to the wall like a giant clock. In the center was an angry face looking out, as if he'd come through that stone from some other place to have a look at us, and not very pleased about it.

And the story suggests something more: unchaperoned, and left to our own untutored judgment, we are quick to aim low and worship qualities that are beneath us—in this case, an artificial animal that brings out our own animal instincts in a completely unregulated way. The old Hebrew story makes it clear how the ancients felt about our prospects for civilized behaviour in the absence of rules that seek to elevate our gaze and raise our standards.

J'ai lu des millions de plaisanteries sur l'ignorance des anciens qui voyaient des esprits partout : il me semble que nous sommes beaucoup plus sots, nous qui n'en voyons nulle part.

The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.

You perhaps know me as a novelist. Literature is one of the arts - in fact, the noblest of the arts. That is not my opinion; it was first expressed by the ancients. As art, literature has many similarities with the other art forms.

the idea that the Ancients had a different way of relating to the world, that they experienced it as something that interacted with them. When they observed the world, the world observed them back.

ancient variety of views on ethics and on knowledge – how we can come to engage with the ancients in a respectful but critical way, both disagreeing with them and learning from them.

The light of Christianity has only served to show how much more hypocrisy and vice its teachings have begotten in the world since its advent, and how immensely superior were the ancients over us in every point of honor.

Whatever ignorance, pride or fanaticism may suggest to the contrary, Esoteric Cosmology can be shown inseparably connected with both philosophy and modern science. The gods of the ancients, the monads--from Pythagoras down to Leibnitz--and the atoms of the present materialistic school (as borrowed by them from the theories of the old Greek Atomists) are only a compound unit, or a graduated unity like the human frame, which begins with body and ends with spirit.

The mineral world is a much more supple and mobile world than could be imagined by the science of the ancients. Vaguely analogous to the metamorphoses of living creatures, there occurs in the most solid rocks, as we now know, perpetual transformation of a mineral species.

When we move beyond information toward transformation, we savor the truth of seeking to do life "under the Word" as the ancients have taught.

The fly, my dear sir, has one striking feature; its wings are typical of the aërial powers of the psychic faculties. The ancients did well when they typified the soul as a butterfly!

The dialogue that happened between the ancients and the world was not simply something that happened in their heads; it was something that happened in the actual world. The way the Ancients perceived the world was the way the world truly was. This gave them extraordinary influence and power. Reality was not only capable of taking part in a dialogue - intelligible and articulate - it was also persuadable.

Would that we loved the ancients more and copied them less! It has been said that the Greeks were great because they never drew from the antique.