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When I touched my hand against the Western Wall and placed my prayer between its ancient stones, I thought of all the centuries that the children of Israel had longed to return to their ancient homeland. When I went to Sderot and saw the daily struggle to survive in the eyes of an eight-year-old boy who lost his leg to a Hamas rocket, and when I walked among the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem, I was reminded of the existential fear of Israelis when a modern dictator seeks nuclear weapons and threatens to wipe Israel off the face of the map - face of the Earth.
Barack ObamaWhat I mean by context is worldview - having the ancient Israelite or first-century Jew in your head as you read. How would an ancient Israelite or first-century Jew read the Bible - what would they be thinking in terms of its meaning? The truth is that if we put one of those people into a small group Bible study and asked them what they thought about a given passage meant, their answer would be quite a bit different in many cases than anything the average Christian would think. They belonged to the world that produced the Bible, which is the context the Bible needs to be understood by.
Michael S. HeiserWell you know, the comic strip [Doctor Strange]... yeah, was an Asian man, in fact, a very ancient Tibetan man living on the top of a mountain. The film script that I was given wasn't an Asian man, so I wasn't asked to play an Asian man - I was asked to play an ancient Celtic person.
Tilda SwintonAnd someday when the descendants of humanity have spread from star to star, they wonโt tell the children about the history of Ancient Earth until theyโre old enough to bear it; and when they learn theyโll weep to hear that such a thing as Death had ever once existed!
Eliezer YudkowskyMade as we were in the image of God we scarcely find it strange to take again our God as our All. God was our original habitat and our hearts cannot but feel at home when they enter again that ancient and beautiful abode.
Aiden Wilson TozerThe propensity to play is situated in very ancient regions of the brain. Rats that have had their neocortex removed still engage in normal play.
Jaak PankseppThe hounding of a dog pursuing a fox or other animal in the horizon may have first suggested the notes of the hunting-horn to alternate with and relieve the lungs of the dog. This natural bugle long resounded in the woods of the ancient world before the horn was invented.
Henry David ThoreauParis was a universe whole and entire unto herself, hollowed and fashioned by history; so she seemed in this age of Napoleon III with her towering buildings, her massive cathedrals, her grand boulevards and ancient winding medieval streets - as vast and indestructible as nature itself.
Anne RiceAncient wisdom and quantum physicists make unlikely bedfellows: In quantum mechanics the observer determines (or even brings into being) what is observed, and so, too, for the Tiwis, who dissolve the distinction between themselves and the cosmos. In quantum physics, subatomic particles influence each other from a distance, and this tallies with the aboriginal view, in which people, animals, rocks, and trees all weave together in the same interwoven fabric.
Huston SmithIn ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.
Richard M. NixonThe Jungian view of drama would be that it affects all of our imaginations and somehow taps into our hidden, ancient, primordial memories.
Jeremy NorthamNever allow the cross to lose itโs centrality to the ministry of your church. I believe we ought to connect ancient truth to contemporary questions, but the ultimate source of hope for every problem we face in our lives is the cross where Jesus died.
Brandon CoxOur religions will never at any time take root; the ancient wisdom of the human race will not be supplanted by the events in Galilee. On the contrary, Indian wisdom flows back to Europe, and will produce a fundamental change in our knowledge and thought.
Arthur SchopenhauerAtlantis: Fabled. Mystical. Golden. Mysterious. Glorious and magical. There are those who claim that it never was. But then there are also those who think they are safe in this modern world of technology and weapons. Safe from all the ancient evils. They even believe that wizards, warriors, and dragons are long dead. They are fools clinging to their science and logic while thinking it will save them. (Thrylos)
Sherrilyn KenyonOld truths and ancient magic, revolution and invention, all conspire to distract us from the passion that in one way or another defeats us all.
Anne RiceNow when the ancient Egyptians, awestruck and wondering, turned their eyes to the heavens, they concluded that two gods, the sun and the moon, were primeval and eternal; and they called the former Osiris, the latter Isis.
Diodorus SiculusI am when the Chinese, who know everything, build a house, they consult the precepts of an ancient science, Feng Shui, which tells them exactly how, when, and where the work must be done, and so brings good fortune to the home forever.
Jan MorrisThe most ancient and important taboo prohibitions are the two basic laws of totemism: not to kill the totem animal and to avoid sexual intercourse with members of the totem clan of the opposite sex.
Sigmund FreudI am also well aware that literature only has a minimal influence on political disputes or economic crises in the world, but its significance to human beings is ancient.
Mo YanAncient Egypt was a Negro Civilization. The history of Black Africa will remain suspended in air and cannot be written correctly until African historians dare to connect it with the history of Egypt.
Cheikh Anta DiopWith respect to the doctrine of a future life, a North American Indian knows just as much as any ancient or modern philosopher.
Thomas B. MacaulayDoes the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes? Certainly the modern novel does, but the ancient legends did not do the same. Oedipus' psychology was deduced by Aeschylus or Freud, but the character is simply there, fixed in a pure and terribly disquieting state.
Umberto EcoLight is the only connection we have with the Universe beyond our solar system, and the only connection our ancestors had with anything beyond Earth. Follow the light and we can journey from the confines of our planet to other worlds that orbit the Sun without ever dreaming of spacecraft. To look up is to look back in time, because the ancient beams of light are messengers from the Universe's distant past.
Brian CoxI didn't have an identity. It was manufactured. My identity now? It was written on the wall by ancient forces.
Robert Downey, Jr.In Old Europe and Ancient Crete, women were respected for their roles in the discovery of agriculture and for inventing the arts of weaving and pottery making.
Carol P. ChristHistory, when they do it, is ancient history, and they sensationalize even that. Contemporary history is virtually ignored on television.
Tariq AliI have always been spurred on by my not finding expressed anywhere the kinds of perspectives that I thought these issues most perspicuously needed and deserved; but that is just another way of saying that Americans have overwhelmingly expunged from their public understanding the strongest and most clarifying resources out of ancient and traditional European cultures. By far we prefer our familiar and user-friendly parochialisms, and there is no percentage in trying to pry these pachydermal plates apart.
Kenny SmithHalloween is an ancient druidic holiday, one the Celtic peoples have celebrated for millennia. It is the crack between the last golden rays of summer and the dark of winter; the delicately balanced tweak of the year before it is given over entirely to the dark; a time for the souls of the departed to squint, to peek and perhaps to travel through the gap. What could be more thrilling and worthy of celebration than that? It is a time to celebrate sweet bounty, as the harvest is brought in. It is a time of excitement and pleasure for children before the dark sets in. We should all celebrate that.
Jenny ColganPLAGUE, n. In ancient times a general punishment of the innocent for admonition of their ruler, as in the familiar instance of Pharaoh the Immune. The plague today . . . is merely Nature's fortuitous manifestation of her purposeless objectionableness.
Ambrose BierceMen must speak English who can write Sanskrit; they must speak a modern language who write, perchance, an ancient and universal one.
Henry David ThoreauThe progress of democracy seems irresistible, because it is the most uniform, the most ancient and the most permanent tendency which is to be found in history.
Alexis de TocquevilleAll the stories I have told you are finally as useless as all ancient knowledge is to man and to us. Its images and its poetry can be beautiful; it can make us shiver with the recognition of things we have always suspected or felt. It can draw us back to times when the earth was new to man, and wondrous. But always we come back to the way the earth is now.
Anne RiceSound has spoiled the most ancient of the world's arts, the art of pantomime, and has canceled out the great beauty that is silence.
Charlie ChaplinWe are searching for the core of our lives; our culture intuits that writing, that ancient activity, might be the pathway...Awakening does not feed ego's needs and desires; it pulverizes the self. Our society couldn't knowingly bear such reduction, so we've tricked ourselves into the same path but call it writing.
Natalie GoldbergThree young cats with starlight in their eyes and the whisper of ancient wind in their fur." -Rock, Cats of the Clans
Erin HunterWe remember the specter of sectarian violence -- al Qaeda's attacks on mosques and pilgrims, militias that carried out campaigns of intimidation and campaigns of assassination. And in the face of ancient divisions, you stood firm to help those Iraqis who put their faith in the future.
Barack ObamaTreating other people as you would like to be treated. It is an ancient, universal ethical imperative. And it requires no supernatural beliefs.
Phil ZuckermanGhastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the nightly shore - Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore! Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.
Edgar Allan PoeBeauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a word which both imperceptibly and yet unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, a world of interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness.
Hans Urs von BalthasarOur ancient laws expressly declare that those who are but delegates themselves shall not delegate to others powers which require judgment and integrity in their exercise.
Thomas JeffersonThere seems also to be a tremendous risk to indigenous cultures if we insist that all scholarship be conducted in English. We are, for example, dealing with ancient and very highly-developed cultures in Korea, Japan, China and the Middle East. What is the impact on cultural and scholarly vitality forcing everyone to do their work in English? I do not have an answer, but this issue has been very much on my mind.
Henry RosovskyMen sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man?... We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.
Henry David ThoreauWe have Christians against Muslims against Jews. They're making incompatible claims on real estate in the Middle East as though God were some kind of omniscient real estate broker parsing out parcels of land to his chosen flock. People are literally dying over ancient literature.
Sam HarrisAcademe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught.
Ambrose BierceLoyalty saves us from the self-advantaging compromising of important relations - such as friendship, marital and professional commitments, group memberships, and so on. But as the Aristotelians would put it, its expression requires phronesis - wisdom not to allow it to compromise other important virtues ,there is something to the ancient doctrine of the unity of the virtues. I believe that is true of all virtues, but especially of the executive virtues - such as industriousness, sincerity, conscientiousness, and courage - which may become detached from substantive goods.
John Kleinig