Top 100 Ancients The Quotes
#1. It's hopeless," he went on. "We no longer have the learning of the ancients, the age of giants is past!"
"We are dwarfs," William admitted, "but dwarfs who stand on the shoulders of those giants, and small though we are, we sometimes manage to see farther on the horizon than they.
Umberto Eco
#2. To regard the fundamental as the essence, to regard things as coarse, to regard accumulation as deficiency, and to dwell quietly alone with the spiritual and the intelligent - herein lie the techniques of Tao of the ancients.
Zhuangzi
#3. If the ancients left us ideas, to our credit be it spoken that we moderns are building houses for them
structures which neither Plato nor Archimedes had dreamed possible.
Amos Bronson Alcott
#4. The ancients considered the Pillars of Hercules the head of navigation and the end of the world. The information the ancients didn't have was very voluminous.
Mark Twain
#5. On the whole, the modern palette is the same as the one used by the artists of Pompeii ... I mean it has not been enriched. The ancients used earths, ochres, and ivory-black - you can do anything with that palette.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
#6. In the last fifty years science has advanced more than in the 2,000 previous years and given mankind greater powers over the forces of nature than the ancients ascribed to their gods.
John Boyd Orr
#7. Although many people erroneously interpreted apocalypse as a cataclysmic end of the world, the word literally signified an "unveiling," predicted by the ancients to be that of great wisdom. The coming age of enlightenment.
Dan Brown
#8. The ancients tell us what is best; but we must learn of the moderns what is fittest.
Benjamin Franklin
#9. One makes a great error if one believes there are 'ancients.' Only now is antiquity starting to arise. It arises in the eyes and soul of the artist.
Novalis
#10. The ancients placed love and war in the hands of closely related gods.
John Steinbeck
#11. The difference between ancients and moderns is that the ancients asked what have we experienced, and moderns asked what can we experience.
Alfred North Whitehead
#12. It is my great hope someday, to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known. Namely that our highest currency is respect.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#13. 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. The
Kakuzo Okakura
#14. So our definition of manliness, like that of the ancients, is simple: striving for virtue, honor, and excellence in all areas of your life, fulfilling your potential as a man, and being the absolute best brother, friend, husband, father and citizen you can be.
Brett McKay
#15. No one behind, no one ahead. The path the ancients cleared has closed. And the other path, everyone's path, easy and wide, goes nowhere. I am alone and find my way.
Octavio Paz
#16. Serpine: You have caused me so much trouble over the years detective. It's almost a shame to end it
Skulduggery: You're surrendering?
Derek Landy
#17. What the ancients called Bogan, as separate from Ashla.
James Luceno
#18. Jane Greyson had once told me that my voice was one of the Ancients - old and wise.
Millicent Ashby
#19. Let us get of these indoor narrow modern days, whose twelve hours somehow have become shortened, into the sunlight and the pure wind. A something that the ancients thought divine can be found and felt there still.
Richard Jefferies
#20. 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.
Charles Caleb Colton
#21. Neither ancients nor moderns who were good men have done such ,a deed that, after promising ,a daughter to one man, they have her to another, Nor, indeed, have we heard, even in former creations, of such ,a thing as the covert sale of a daughter for a fixed price, called a nuptial fee.
Guru Nanak
#22. In the ancients, one sees the accomplished letter of entire poetry: in the moderns, one has the presentiment of the spirit in becoming.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#23. Hold firmly that our faith is identical with that of the ancients. Deny this, and you dissolve the unity of the Church.
Thomas Aquinas
#24. For the
Christian, as for the Marxist, nature must be subdued. The Greeks are of the opinion that it is better to
obey it. The love of the ancients for the cosmos was completely unknown to the first Christians, who,
moreover, awaited with impatience an imminent end of the world.
Albert Camus
#25. Did he actually believe in this curse? A curse! He snorted. Deirdre stirred.
Impossible. Curses were for witches, spell casters and the weak-minded.
Jean M. Grant
#26. I have witnessed things the ancients would have called miracles, but they are not miracles. They are the products of someone's dream, and they happen as the result of hard work.
Whoopi Goldberg
#27. Selene's life is a lesson to us that the trajectory of women's equality hasn't always been a forward march. In some ways the ancients were more advanced than we are today; there have been setbacks before and may be more in the future.
Stephanie Dray
#28. By comparing what we know today with what the ancients appear to have known we can guess at the kinds of wine they drank.
Alec Waugh
#29. Since ancient times artists and architects have seen in the golden mean the most aesthetically satisfying geometric ratio.
Stephen M. Barr
#30. Knowing how to fight made men more bold, because no one fears doing what it seems to him he has learned to do. Therefore, the ancients wanted their citizens to be trained in every warlike action.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#31. It was a saying of the ancients, "Truth lies in a well;" and to carry on this metaphor, we may justly say that logic does supply us with steps, whereby we may go down to reach the water.
Isaac Watts
#32. Medical research in the twentieth century mostly takes place in the lab; in the Renaissance, though, researchers went first and foremost to the library to see what the ancients had said.
Peter Lewis Allen
#33. A lodestone is a wonderful thing in very many experiments, and like living things. And one of its remarkable virtues in that which the ancients considered to be a living soul in the sky, in the globes and in the stars, in the sun and in the moon.
William Gilbert
#34. Those we call the ancients were really new in everything.
Blaise Pascal
#35. Duty is for Kant the One and All. Out of the duty of gratitude, he claims, one has to defend and esteem the ancients; and only out of duty has he become a great man.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#36. I wanted to show that the fables and mythic tales which the ancients have handed down to us and in which painters and sculptors never cease to find mindless pleasure are the hieroglyphics of a secret, inexhaustible wisdom. I sometimes thought I felt its breath, as though coming from behind a veil.
Hugo Von Hofmannsthal
#37. We were, on that day, no different from the ancients, terrified of our own big sky.
Karen Thompson Walker
#38. To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it.
C.S. Lewis
#39. For years I've studied the ancients' claims of man's awesome mental power, and now science is showing us that accessing that power is an actual physical process. Our brains, if used correctly, can call forth powers that are quite literally superhuman.
Dan Brown
#40. Do not take the yardstick of your ignorance to measure what the ancients knew, and call everything which you do not know lies. Do not call things untrue because they are marvelous, but give them a fair consideration.
Wendell Phillips
#41. Well, the ancients might not have been very heroic. Most of them were probably like Mother, crouched somewhere trying to work out how to make fake jawbone jewelry that would look like the real thing.
Barbara Kingsolver
#42. Stephanie: I wouldn't mind a sister either
Tanith: Any chance of that happening?
Stephanie: I can't see what would be in it for my parents. I mean, they have the perfect daughter already - What more could they want?
Derek Landy
#43. Serpine underestimates you. Everyone underestimates you. You're stronger than they know. You're stronger than you know - Skulduggery
Derek Landy
#44. It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the religious symbolism of the Ancients, that we must look for the footprints of Science, and re-discover the Mysteries of Knowledge.
Albert Pike
#45. The ancients, by their system of colonization, made themselves friends all over the known world; the moderns have sought to make subjects, and therefore have made enemies.
Jean-Baptiste Say
#46. Within this Mine two Stones of old were found, Were this the Ancients called Holy Ground; Who knew their Value, Power and Extent, And Nature how with Nature to Ferment for these if you Ferment with Natural Gold or Silver, their hid Treasures they unfold.
Michael Van Der Gucht
#47. When the ancients said a work well begun was half done, they meant to impress the importance of always endeavoring to make a good beginning.
Polybius
#49. No one talks about it. No one talks about them at all. "The Ancients prefer discretion," Mom once told me. But some say it's because they're so freakish we'd drop dead of fright. Others say they're too attractive, too tempting. I prefer this theory.
Melissa West
#50. Modern writers are the moons of literature; they shine with reflected light, with light borrowed from the ancients.
Samuel Johnson
#51. The truth is that the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns is permanent. It began with Zinjanthropus (one million seven hundred and fifty thousand years ago) and will end only with humanity-- or perhaps the mutants who succeed us will take up the cause.
Francois Le Lionnais
#52. The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of the moderns, has shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#53. HYDRA, n. A kind of animal that the ancients catalogued under many heads.
Ambrose Bierce
#54. Do you have a weapon for me, or do you want me to beat her to death with a large stick? - Mr Bliss
Derek Landy
#55. Paradox is thus a much deeper and universal concept than the ancients would have dreamed. Rather than an oddity, it is a mainstay of the philosophy of science.
William Poundstone
#56. The ancients say that one note of a song is twenty times more powerful than a single word, and that only in song can truth be clearly perceived, for though words can harbor lies, music cannot abide them.
Nicole Evelina
#57. The ancients believed in Fate because they recognized how hard it is for anyone to change anything. The pull of past and future is so strong that the present is crushed by it. We lie helpless in the force of patterns inherited and patterns re-enacted by our own behavior. The burden is intolerable.
Jeanette Winterson
#58. Skulduggery, she's not being professional - Tanith Low
Derek Landy
#59. 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.
Sharon Cameron
#60. I am not one who was born with great wisdom. I love the ancients and diligently seek wisdom among them.
Confucius
#61. Cheer up everyone, since we're all going to die horribly anyway, what's there to be worried about? - Skulduggery Pleasant.
Derek Landy
#62. The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called "spannungsbogen"
which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.
Frank Herbert
#63. Tis no wonder, says one of the ancients, that chance has so great a dominion over us, since it is by chance we live.
Michel De Montaigne
#64. The ancients recommended us to sacrifice to the Graces, but Milton sacrificed to the Devil.
Voltaire
#65. Speak of the moderns without contempt and of the ancients without idolatry; judge them all by their merits, but not by their age
Lord Chesterfield
#66. What the ancients called a clever fighter is one who not only wins, but excels in winning with ease.
Sun Tzu
#67. 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.
Jim Jarmusch
#68. The ancients, sir, are the ancients, and we are the people of today.
Moliere
#69. The Ancients understood the omnipotence of the underside of things.
Louis Pasteur
#70. More immediately, by waxing soulful you will have granted yourself the possibility of ecstatic participation in what the ancients considered a divinely animated universe. And on a day to day basis, folks, it doesn't get any better than that.
Tom Robbins
#71. The ancients said: Hulk to be whole.
Laozi
#73. Why did the ancients praise the Way? Did they not say it was because you find what you seek and are saved from your wrongdoings?
Laozi
#74. As however the ancients say that in case of necessity any Christian lay person can administer the sacrament of Baptism, so Luther says the same thing about absolution in case of necessity, where no priest is present.
Martin Chemnitz
#75. The ancients stole all our ideas from us.
Mark Twain
#76. Serpine: No, my old enemy, I think for the moment anyway, we're all alone. And you have something I want
Skulduggery: A winning sense of style?
Derek Landy
#77. 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.
Malcolm Lowry
#78. Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue; but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse.
C.S. Lewis
#79. Though the ancients were ignorant of the principles of Christianity there were in them the germs of its spirit.
Herman Melville
#80. Those ancients who in poetry presented
the golden age, who sang its happy state,
perhaps, in their Parnassus, dreamt this place.
Here, mankind's root was innocent; and here
were every fruit and never-ending spring;
these streams
the nectar of which poets sing.
Dante Alighieri
#81. Tombs decked by the arts can scarcely represent death as a formidable enemy; we do not, indeed, like the ancients, carve sports and dances in the sarcophagus, but thought is diverted from the bier by works that tell of immortality, even from the altar of death.
Madame De Stael
#82. 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.
John Stuart Mill
#83. Happy the age, happy the time, to which the ancients gave the name of golden, not because in that fortunate age the gold so coveted in this our iron one was gained without toil, but because they that lived in it knew not the two words "mine" and "thine"!
Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
#84. Books have immortalized great minds. Books have kept ancients secrets alive. A world which least value books, least value the real essence of wisdom and least know how to preserve what is precious!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#85. Just as the ancients danced to call upon the spirits in nature, we too can dance to find the spirits within ourselves that have been long buried and forgotten.
Anna Halprin
#86. Damn it, I have to stop this bleeding. Oh, Will I would truly love to kick your ass for this. If you die, I swear, I'm going to kill you again." A Fine Line the Ancients (Part I).
J.C. Brennan
#87. Blue paint among the ancients, or red paint among the modern Britons.
G.K. Chesterton
#88. To betray is to act against, I just haven't acted at all - China Sorrows
Derek Landy
#89. Well might the ancients make silence a god; for it is the element of all godhood, infinitude, or transcendental greatness,
at once the source and the ocean wherein all such begins and ends.
Thomas Carlyle
#90. Someone has said that to plagiarise from the ancients is to play the pirate beyond the Equator, but that to steal from the moderns is to pick pockets at street corners.
Nicolas Chamfort
#91. Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#92. Therefore they who say our thoughts are not our own because they resemble the Ancients, may as well say our faces are not our own, because they are like our Fathers: And indeed it is very unreasonable, that people should expect us to be Scholars, and yet be angry to find us so.
Alexander Pope
#93. 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.
Mary Stewart
#94. When dawn comes I'm sitting in bed with my arms around my knees and, since I have nothing to do, am trying to know myself. "Know yourself"
what splendid and useful advice; too bad the ancients never thought of showing how to use this advice.
Anton Chekhov
#95. The others agreed that the gifts of the ancients and the gods were sometimes confusing, and Desidora did eventually decide to stay in.
Patrick Weekes
#96. Why I love the ancients so much? Aside from everything else, when I read them, the entire past between them and me unfolds at thesame time. The hearts of how many heroes and poets may have been set on fire by Plutarch's biographies which now inspire me with their own and with borrowed flames!
Franz Grillparzer
#97. When we move beyond information toward transformation, we savor the truth of seeking to do life "under the Word" as the ancients have taught.
William Anthony Donohue
#98. But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions.
Vladimir Nabokov
#99. The ancients wrested the secrets from the depths of the earth and from the hearts of the stars, and with those secrets they banished sickness, death, and all forms of discomfort. And sickness, death, and discomfort gathered together and created the demons, and the demons destroyed the ancients.
L.E. Modesitt Jr.
#100. EZE7.26 Mischief shall come upon mischief, and rumour shall be upon rumour; then shall they seek a vision of the prophet; but the law shall perish from the priest, and counsel from the ancients.
Anonymous
