Archaic Quotes

#1. That old saying about opportunity only knocking once is as archaic as the flat-earth theory and as patently untrue. Opportunity knocks all the time - and it rings your doorbell, calls you up, and sends you e-mails.

Victoria Moran

#2. Our minds can go no further. The human imagination is capable of no further expression of beauty than the carved owl of Athene, the archaic, marble serpent, the arrogant selfish head of the Acropolis Apollo.

Hilda Doolittle

#3. Toddlers can make you feel as if you have violated some archaic law in their personal Koran and you should die, infidel.

Anne Lamott

#4. We are returning to the archaic, that is, the eternal condition of mankind, which the brief parenthesis of 'modernity' made us forget, in other words, the rivalry of peoples, of ethnic and cultural blocs and of civilisations.

Guillaume Faye

#5. English orthography satisfies all the requirements of the canons of reputability under the law of conspicuous waste. It is archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective; its acquisition consumes much time and effort; failure to acquire it is easy of detection.

Thorstein Veblen

#6. In aesthetic theory it might be extremely difficult, if not quite impracticable, to draw a line between the canon of classicism, or regard for the archaic, and the canon of beauty.

Thorstein Veblen

#7. A smile appears on the faces of most archaic figures, a happiness of expression seeming to transcend that of human beings.

Francis Henry Taylor

#8. It was an archaic expression of friendship by an undisciplined man in an age when most men seemed in mortal fear of being mistaken for pansies for even a split second.

Kurt Vonnegut

#9. As Eskimo language is to snow, so archaic English is to 'metal objects designed to cause harm'.

Austin Grossman

#10. The Theatre of the Oppressed is theatre in this most archaic application of the word. In this usage, all human beings are Actors (they act!) and Spectators (they observe!).

Augusto Boal

#11. Licking Falls, Ohio, had its own set of standards. They were archaic at best.

Jeaniene Frost

#12. It may seem strange, perhaps even socially archaic, but I strongly believe that people ought to reach out to each other in this way, neighbor to neighbor, stranger to stranger, because our failure to do so has warped the social fabric into one of conjoined loneliness and all its attached sufferings.

Alan Kaufman

#13. Picasso is what is going to happen and what is happening; he is posterity and archaic time, the distant ancestor and our next-door neighbor. Speed permits him to be two places at once, to belong to all the centuries without letting go of the here and now.

Octavio Paz

#14. Our perceptions of 'managing' employees are founded on archaic outdated business fundamentals.

Shawn Casemore

#15. Translation, an archaic way of silencing, marginalizing or disowning other people's originality, must come to an end.

Thorsten J. Pattberg

#16. What if, I never tire of asking, we said 'Secret Council' instead of the archaic and therefore cuddly 'Privy Council'?

Christopher Hitchens

#17. Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche.

Carl Jung

#18. They're protecting an archaic industry. They should turn their attention to new models.

Bob Weir

#19. They plunged through heavy walls of sound, mountains of archaic thought, valleys of mood music, bad shoe sessions and footling bats and suddenly heard a girl's voice.

Douglas Adams

#20. The early ascendancy of leisure as a means of reputability is traceable to the archaic distinction between noble and ignoble employments. Leisure is honourable and becomes imperative partly because it shows exemption from ignoble labour.

Thorstein Veblen

#21. I sometimes wonder if I'm built from old videotape. I feel archaic, worn from overuse and increasingly obscure. One day I'll get caught up in the grinding wheels of my own life and unravel.

David Thomas Moore

#22. Cosmic terror appears as an ingredient of the earliest folklore of all races and is crystallised in the most archaic ballads, chronicles, and sacred writings.

H.P. Lovecraft

#23. Ircumcision, an archaic ritual mutilation that has no justification whatever and no place in a civilized society.

Ashley Montagu

#24. The publishing industry is an archaic and inefficient industry.

J.A. Konrath

#25. White men project onto the Negro the primitive drives, the archaic powers, the uncontrolled instincts that they do not want to admit in themselves, of which they are unconscious, and that they therefore designate as the corresponding qualities of other people.

C. G. Jung

#26. Every mind is a room packed with archaic furniture.

Dee Hock

#27. I think that stereoscopic 3D will have to continue to develop. It's still quite archaic because of the glasses you have to wear.

Michel Ocelot

#28. Technology has changed, and we need to figure out how to improve the archaic way of what makes a hit, or how to determine how many viewers are watching beyond some people with Nielsen boxes in a small percentage of homes in random areas.

Jim Rash

#29. Painting is, I think, inevitably an archaic activity and one that depends on spiritual values.

Bridget Riley

#30. What's really interesting about that is that a lot of these words that were incendiary in their time now seem almost harmless and laughable, because they have this archaic quality.

Philip Kaufman

#31. The 'drugs or surgery only approach that modern medicine uses to treat today's diseases is archaic.

Julian Whitaker

#32. This is the kind of touch they like: folk art, archaic, made by women, in their spare time, from things that have no further use. A return to traditional values. Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want? On

Margaret Atwood

#33. Galvanised into action by the second trial, I was determined to change Britain's archaic sex laws.

Cynthia Payne

#34. Obsolescence and death, the reign of the archaic, the abandoned, and the corny: Really, if you saw Windows 3.0 on the sidewalk outside the building, would you bend over and pick it up?!?

Bruce Sterling

#35. Mandatory showers had been dropped in the fall, when Lilah Porter protested the archaic practice by staging a sit-in in the gym, where she set up a projector and played the shower scene from Carrie in a continuous loop until the school board caved.

Marlene Perez

#36. Caught Beauty , held to light, now apes A good, now evil, thing the shifting sign And spectrum of archaic, psychic shapes.

Philip Jose Farmer

#37. Girls who put out are tramps. Girls who don't are ladies. This is, however, a rather archaic usage of the word. Should one of you boys happen upon a girl who doesn't put out, do not jump to the conclusion that you have found a lady. What you have probably found is a Lesbian.

Fran Lebowitz

#38. That is why we profess a spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.

Mark Rothko

#39. Surrealism: An archaic term. Formerly an art movement. No longer distinguishable from everyday life.

Brad Holland

#40. Delicate in every way but one
God knows we like archaic kinds of fun
Chance is the only game I play with, baby
We let our battles choose us.

Lorde

#41. One of the more curious paradoxes of Yates's nature was his almost archaic courtliness toward women on the one hand, and his lifelong tendency to emphasize their physical defects and/or dubious upbringing on the other.

Blake Bailey

#42. I'm much more into bad, trashy Belgian techno. I like that much more than rock bands. The whole idea of a rock band is so archaic.

Luke Haines

#43. I hold the most archaic values on earth ... the fertility of the soul, the magic of the animals, the power-vision in solitude ... the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.

Gary Snyder

#44. In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time.

Mircea Eliade

#45. It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement

Jacques Derrida

#46. 'Canticum Sacrum' is wonderfully archaic. What Stravinsky does is extraordinary. It takes you on a journey from Gregorian chant right through to the modernism of Webern - and all in 17 minutes.

John Tavener

#47. All the old bindings are broken. Cosmological centers now are anywhere and everywhere. The earth is a heavenly body, most beautiful of all, and all poetry is now archaic that fails to match the wonder of this view.

Joseph Campbell

#48. The Indians used to be the only inhabitants of the Americas, but times change. Having perceived us as belonging to history, they are free to emote over us, to re-create us in their history-based understanding, and dismiss our present lives as archaic and irrelevant to the times.

Paula Gunn Allen

#49. Not only has photography so thoroughly saturated our visual environment as to make the invention of visual images seem archaic, but it is also clear that photography is too multiple, too useful to other discourses, ever to be wholly contained within traditional definitions of art.

Douglas Crimp

#50. I could list hundreds of words I've come up against in the course of my work that did not exist in the era of which I was writing and for which I never could find a suitably old-time, archaic or obsolete substitute.

Gary Jennings

#51. You must survive with grace. You must do so gallantly. How archaic these terms seem to us in our modern world. There is little grace or gallantry in commerce or politics and not much in art.

Chris Cooper

#52. Painting and sculpture are very archaic forms. It's the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with not just his own hands, but brains, imagination, heart maybe.

Philip Guston

#53. My hope, of course, is that we won't have to play by these archaic rules forever and that eventually we can all just be ourselves.

Sheryl Sandberg

#54. In front of us, Annabelle and Aspen argue over whether black-and-white movies are amazing or archaic. Blue walks a few feet behind like he's waiting for the pair to transition from verbal zingers to hair pulling. He wants a front-row seat for that show, and I don't blame him.

Victoria Scott

#55. The central figure in the archaic revival is the shaman.

Terence McKenna

#56. Today it is not a matter of 'conserving' the present or returning to a recent past that has failed, but rather of regaining possession of our most archaic roots, which is to say those most suited to the victorious life.

Guillaume Faye

#57. She's smart, she's funny and she's not afraid to take risks. Not to mention that she's beautiful, sexy and charming. You know it, I know it, and soon everyone else will know it. The only person who doesn't know it is her because of archaic fuckheads like yourself telling her otherwise.

Karina Halle

#58. What did we ever do before text messaging?' Vi asked...
Write notes to each other. On paper'
Seems positively archaic now.'
Pretty soon we'll just be wired into each other and orject our thoughts back and forth,' Skye said...

Paul Ruditis

#59. What was then an augury for direction of action among the ruins of an archaic mentality is now the search for an innocence of certainty among the mythologies of facts.

Julian Jaynes

#60. The situation was primordial. The Man beneath prevailed for a moment over the civilised superstructure, the Draper. He pushed at the pedals with archaic violence. So Palaeolithic man may have ridden his simple bicycle of chipped flint in pursuit of his exogamous affinity.

H.G.Wells

#61. A cave of scars!
ancient, archaic wallpaper
built up, layer on layer
from the earliest, dream-white
to yesterday's, a red-black scrawl
a red mouth slowly closing

Adrienne Rich

#62. An ethical fraternity, with its mythical Nothing, not infused by any archaic-infantile driving force, is a pure vacuum and can never evoke in man the slightest trace of that age-old animal power which drives the migrating bird across the sea. . . .

C. G. Jung

#63. This archaic idea - that a woman who is unmarried and childless at 30 is somehow unnatural - will probably always exist, and, like most social standards, it is ridiculous.

Beth Ditto

#64. The world is filled with archaic objects - mailboxes which look like alarm boxes, banks which look like places to break out of rather than places to enter.

Raymond Loewy

#65. Songwriting as an art is a bit archaic now. Just writing a song is not good enough.

David Bowie

#66. This 'archaic' stage of Sumerian script is not wholly understood by modern scholarship; and Sumerology is a tightly-knit, somewhat secretive academic discipline, which does not make it easy for the outsider to form a clear view of the current state of knowledge in the field.

Geoffrey Sampson

#67. Cultural anthropology is not valuable because it uncovers the archaic in the psychological sense. It is valuable because it is constantly rediscovering the normal.

Edward Sapir

#68. Pearl spent the passing days buried so deep in the musty, dusty sorcery tomes that sometimes when she emerged, she spoke in archaic english. "Hast thou a light?" she'd asked him this afternoon when her study room had grown dark with gathering clouds.

Gail Dayton

#69. I don't believe in proper cinema; it doesn't have the strength of television. People having to go out to the cinema is really archaic. I'd much rather sit at home.

David Bowie

#70. The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.

Northrop Frye

#71. must his simplicity of thought and occasional quaintness be reproduced in the form of archaisms of language; and that not only because the affectation of an archaic

Herodotus

#72. I guess I'm attracted to more archaic words because they can be imbued with more meaning, because their definition is elusive.

Andrew Bird

#73. (Alice Balint)called maternal love removed from reality, 'archaic love', and regarded it as the predecessor of civilized maternal love. This archaic love is based on the feeling that the child's body was part of the mother's body; it is hers and she can do with it as she pleases.

Terez Virag

#74. I think all experience is, in some way, shape or form, filtered down to help you, in your present moment. With Shakespeare, you're trying to act with a fairly archaic language, although in certain aspects, it's deeply modern.

Joseph Fiennes

#75. For Guy Davenport--whom he told me John Barth once called the last modernist--modernism is 'a renaissance of the archaic'.

Lance Olsen

#76. And then he tells her stories. Myths he learned from his instructor. Fantasies he created himself, inspired by bits and pieces of others read in archaic books with crackling spines.

Erin Morgenstern

#77. I slip into the archaic at dramatically appropriate moments. So sue me.

Jim Butcher

#78. I don't say things like "the grace of God." All that's white noise to me, not because I'm an intellectual. For many people, it's gibberish. Likewise, the idea that the Koran was dictated by an archaic illiterate is a fantasy.

Christopher Hitchens

#79. Only in humans, alone among the animals, did violence make victim mechanisms necessary and bring them into being. If original sin created the problem of violence, it found a solution in archaic religion. The paradox of human cultures is that violence expels violence: Satan casts out Satan. MSB

Rene Girard

#80. Religion is perhaps its own worst enemy. For religion, masquerading under the guise of archaic creeds, and impossible literalisms, and ecclesiasticism indifferent to human needs, has brought about an inevitable and in many respects wholesome revulsion.

Georgia Harkness

#81. If there's one thing that the Web has changed about modern communication, it's that we've at long last done away with the archaic idea that publishing is the private playground of people who have ideas, experiences, and opinions.

Lore Sjoberg

#82. The first dictionaries were glossaries of Homeric words, intended to help Romans read the Iliad and Odyssey as well as other Greek literature employing the 'archaic' Homeric vocabulary.

Mortimer J. Adler

#83. My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.

Seamus Heaney

#84. What good is ye world when ye canst not livest hither.

K. Hari Kumar