Quotes About Byzantine

The breakup of the old order in the Near East, according to Sufi tradition, reunited the 'beads of mercury' which were the esoteric schools operating in the Egyptian, Persian and Byzantine empires into the 'stream of quicksilver' which was intrinsic, evolutionary Sufism. The

the Byzantine style, which so few care for to-day, but which moves me because these tall, emaciated angels and saints seem to have less relation to the world about us than to an abstract pattern of flowing lines that suggest an imagination absorbed in the contemplation of Eternity.

It was a sumptuous, oh, truly sumptuous autumn day, all Byzantine coppers and golds under a Tiepolo sky of enamelled blue, the countryside all fixed and glassy, seeming not so much itself as its own reflection in the still surface of the lake. It was the kind of day on which, latterly, the sun for me is the world's fat eye looking on in rich enjoyment as I writhe in misery.

At Ravenna in Italy, where the buildings of Justinian's time have remained unaltered, one can study, better even than at Constantinople and Rome, the graceful Byzantine capitals and columns and brilliant mosaics, and the early Christian basilican type of architecture.

relations between the crusaders and the Byzantine emperor were seldom cordial.

for the Byzantine Empire, absolute monarchy though it might be, ran its economy on socialist lines. Private enterprise was rigidly controlled: production, labour, consumption, foreign trade, public welfare, even the movement of population were all in the hands of the State. The consequence was a vast horde of civil servants, imbued by the Emperor with one overriding principle: to curb if not actually to destroy the power of the army.

is there anyone so deaf that he cannot hear in Byzantine churches some echo of the Catacombs? What could be more natural than that just as martyrs made paintings for martyrs, latter-day bureaucrats paint for bureaucrats?

There was never a greater crime against humanity than the fourth crusade," says Stephen Runciman. It destroyed the treasures of the past and broke down the most advanced culture of Europe. Far from uniting Eastern and Western Christendom, it implanted in the Greeks a hostility toward the West that has never entirely disappeared, and it weakened the Byzantine defenses against the rising power of the Ottoman Turks, to whom they eventually succumbed.

Galen maintained that the human womb had two cavities, in which he was followed by the major Arabic medical writers. The idea that there were seven divisions, three warmer ones on the right engendering males, three colder ones on the left engendering females, and a seventh, in the middle, producing a hermaphrodite, may have resulted from a systemization in Byzantine medicine of various separate ancient ideas bearing upon multiple births and sex differentiation;