Quotes About Ancients

Olive trees are intimate creatures, eloquent in their twistedness. It's easy to understand why the ancients believed human spirits could be trapped inside them.

The ancients used to go off on wars of conquest to ward off tedium. Conquest versus tedium, the bloodied saber versus unendurable peace.

The ancients, who in these matters were not perhaps such blockheads as some may conceive, considered poetical quotation as one of the requisite ornaments of oratory.

The private lives of the ancients are now the public sport of the moderns.

Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet.

In Dublin in 1852, Newman delivered a series of nine discourses intended to set the tone for a proposed Catholic university in Ireland. These discourses represent, to my mind, the finest modern attempt to unite the twin legacies of Athens and Jerusalem. Though the university was never built, the discourses were published as The Idea of a University, and in this form they continue to beckon believers in the Christian revelation to consider the legacy of the ancients.

And nothing prevents men from believing when the guidance comes to them, and from asking forgiveness of their Lord, except that what happened to the ancients should overtake them, or that the chastisement should come face to face with them.

And it's a temptation for any intelligent person, and especially for perfectionists such as the ancients and ourselves, to try to murder the primitive, emotive, appetitive self. But that is a mistake.

It seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate.

But do you really think," he said, concerned, "that one can call psychology a science?" "Certainly. What else is it?" "But even Plato knew that class and conditioning and so forth have an inalterable effect on the individual. It seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate.

Here we must examine the classical understanding of happiness proclaimed by Moses, Solomon, Jesus, Aristotle, Plato, the church fathers and medieval theologians, and many more—the understanding that has recently been replaced by "pleasurable satisfaction." According to the ancients, happiness is a life well lived, a life of virtue and character, a life that manifests wisdom, kindness, and goodness.

The ancients placed love and war in the hands of closely related gods.

The ancients placed love and war in the hands of closely related gods. That was no accident. That, sir, was a profound knowledge of man.

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

To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves... The modern world in comparison, ignores it.

They saw the ruins before they were ruins. They lived in the shining towers that reached into the sky, flew in winged carriages, and remembered all manner of magic the Ancients controlled with their fingertips—the light, the voices, bending the laws of the earth, and soaring above it.

Then she saw me watching her. For perhaps two seconds our eyes met and held. I knew then why the ancients armed the cruellest god with arrows; I felt the shock of it right through my body.

How to rediscover the emerging sense of philosophy? By expanding our thoughts, our lived situation of the philosopher through those of the ancients, and those of the ancients by ours. This reciprocal contestation unveils the common field of which philosophies are only sections.

The wisdom of the ancients decays with time.

There is no doubt that to the ancients of circa 100 A.S., games implied bloodshed; but gladiators' hand-to-hand combats to the death featured in Hollywood movies are overdone, since gladiators were splendid physical specimens who took a long time to be selected and trained and were not easily dispensable.

We marvel why, among the most progressive Western nations, architecture should be so devoid of originality, so replete with repetitions of obsolete styles. Perhaps we are passing through an age of democratisation in art, while awaiting the rise of some princely master who shall establish a new dynasty. 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.

Makyo is, in short, our attachment to favorable conditions that we ourselves approve of. It is possible to subdue them by ignoring them and eliminating them, as testified by the words of ancients.

So the first Seers, watching the wanderings of thought within their own minds, discovered that there was something which came into action when thinking momentarily stopped. That Something was the first faint intimation of the soul. Thus the science of soul-discovery was born and the ancients began to teach men how to know the truth about themselves. In

The sky was black, deep, infinite, the very thing that scared the Greeks and all the other ancients.