Quotes About Ancient

When you're 16, 30 seems ancient. When you're 30, 45 seems ancient. When you're 45, 60 seems ancient. When you're 60, nothing seems ancient.

Ancient worship . . . does truth. All one has to do is to study the ancient liturgies to see that liturgies clearly do truth by their order and in their substance. This is why so many young people today are now adding ancient elements to their worship. . . . This recovery of ancient practices is not the mere restoration of ritual but a deep, profound, and passionate engagement with truth—truth that forms and shapes the spiritual life into a Christlikeness that issues forth in the call to a godly and holy life and into a deep commitment to justice and to the needs of the poor.

The Bible is an ancient text from an ancient context. We live thousands of miles and thousands of years away from that context, which also represents different cultures. Archaeology is a modern means of revealing both the lost record of the ancient world, and the historical and social world of the Bible. While the purpose of archaeology is not to prove the historicity of the people and events recorded in Scripture, it can help immeasurably to confirm the historical reality and accuracy of the Bible and to demonstrate that faith has a factual foundation.

Nobody brings ancient history and archaeology to life like Adrienne Mayor. From the Russian steppes to China, and from Roman Egypt and Arabia to the Etruscans, she leads the reader on a breathtaking quest for the real ancient warrior women reflected in myths--their daring, archery, tattoos, fine horses, and independence from male control. The book's rich erudition, communicated in sparkling prose and beautiful illustrations, makes it a riveting read.

I really think there is a very large distinction between synthetic and naturally occurring drugs. ... I think that these plants 'take people' as much as people take the plants. ... When you take one of these ancient, ancient hallucinogens you are locking in to the morphogenetic fields of all the people who ever took it.

I read mostly historical fiction - lots of stuff set in ancient Rome and ancient Greece. I also liked sci-fi and fantasy: David Gemmell, Raymond E. Feist. It's a nice escape from the world. As much as I do love real-life stories, they can often make you hurt in a way I'd rather not hurt.

Something aches at the very core of me, something ancient and deep and stronger than words: the filament that joins each of us to the root of existence, that ancient thing unfurling and resisting and grappling, desperately, for a foothold, a way to stay here, breathe, keep going.

I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Part of Sykes's motive was rooted in religiosity. A devout Catholic, he regarded a return of the ancient tribe of Israel to the Holy Land as a way to correcta nearly two-thousand-year-old wrong. That view had taken on new passion andurgency with the massacres of the Armenians. To Sykes, in that ongoing atrocity, the Ottoman Empire had proven it could never again be trusted to protectits religious minority populations. At war's end, the Christian and Jewish HolyLand of Palestine would be taken from it, and the failure of the Crusades maderight.

Wendy Doniger has spent decades collecting not only myths from ancient texts but stories of all kinds from novels, movies, newspapers about an old mystery: what has or hasn't happened in bed for centuries. Rich in insights about sex, lies, and personal identity, the result is entertaining, enthralling, and, yes, sexy.

Ah; but my courage fails me, and my heart is sick within me! —Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the skeptic who would fain believe, on the galley-slave of life who puts to sea alone, in the darkness of night, beneath a firmament illumined no longer by the consoling beacon-fires of the ancient hope.

I often derive a peculiar satisfaction in conversing with the ancient and modern dead, — who yet live and speak excellently in their works. My neighbors think me often alone, — and yet at such times I am in company with more than five hundred mutes — each of whom, at my pleasure, communicates his ideas to me by dumb signs — quite as intelligently as any person living can do by uttering of words.

Part of my attraction to ancient art is that there is an element of risk, of speculation.

Each new Clarice, compact as a living body with its smells and its breath, shows off, like a gem, what remains of the ancient Clarices, fragmentary and dead.

The ancient dialogue between reason and the senses is almost always more interestingly and passionately resolved in favor of the senses.

True myths, ancient and modern, stop time because they emerge from somewhere beyond time.

All sober inquirers after truth, ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, have declared that the happiness of man, as well as his dignity, consists in virtue.

In addition to English, at least one ancient language, probably Greek or Hebrew, and two modern languages would be required.

I remember myself, that when I was young, I had sometime the company of one ancient godly minister, who was of weaker parts than many others, but yet did profit me more than most; because he would never in prayer or conference speak of God, or the life to come, but with such marvelous seriousness and reverence, as if he had seen the majesty and glory which he talked of.

Some ruins of ancient times are much more beautiful than the best buildings of modern eras!

On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose, Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend . . . He reached a middle height, and at the stars, Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank. Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank, The army of unalterable law.

In some ways, Lotus Eaters is a journey disguised as a party film; there's a circus in the movie, and there are parties, but the real story is of an internal journey. There's themes of emptiness and excess and beauty and grief around it, but it's always surrounded by these glamorous events, and those are ways of waylaying her on her journey in the same way that it is in the ancient Greek story.

Contempt for private wrongs was one of the features of ancient morals.

To Nature the dweller in the Nile valley linked all that was dear to him: his happiest fetes, poetry, and love - all were bound up with the garden and its products, especially flowers. Few Oriental nations can think of a festival without flowers, but nowhere are they so completely a part of human life, and so essential, as in [Ancient] Egypt.

An ancient dictum says that when Zeus wanted to destroy someone, he would first drive him mad.

China is the largest and most ancient of Asiatic countries, but it is not for us boastfully to talk of her right to a position of 'leadership' among those countries.

There are actually two separate issues here. The first is whether (as ancient philosophers and Nietzsche assume) only the privileged elite can live a worthwhile life. The second is whether it's possible to fulfill the roles of both serious artist and upstanding citizen. It seems to me that philosophy can dissect both questions, by delineating clearly the anatomy of the good life and the structural conditions of the roles.

If we look to the history of other nations, ancient or modern, we find no example of a growth so rapid, so gigantic, of a people so prosperous and happy.

A new breeze is blowing, and a world refreshed by freedom seems reborn; for in man's heart, if not in fact, the day of the dictator is over. The totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree.

Yoga is not an ancient myth buried in oblivion. It is the most valuable inheritance of the present. It is the essential need of today and the culture of tomorrow

So, the ant way of life is very ancient and very successful. As far as human beings are concerned, we've been around for only one million years--too soon be sure.

Marseilles isn't a city for tourists. There's nothing to see. Its beauty can't be photographed. It can only be shared. It's a place where you have to take sides, be passionately for or against. Only then can you see what there is to see. And you realize, too late, that you're in the middle of a tragedy. An ancient tragedy in which the hero is death. In Marseilles, even to lose you have to know how to fight.

Look, this isn’t The Mummy. It’s not like a teenaged girl’s diary could resurrect the dead or anything. It’s just the story of her innocuous life. What on earth could an ancient girl have known that would be worth killing someone over? (Tory) You’re asking me that question? People kill each other over a pair of shoes or for wearing the same jacket. (Acheron)

Hold on to the ancient Way to master the present, and to learn the distant beginning.

These days it seems the lyric impulse, so seemingly fragile, comes in for a lot of abuse-or simply a lot of mistrust. What's it for, anyway, in this hard-edged, worried world? Into this cultural uncertainty Gregory Orr's spirited meditation on the surprisingly tensile strength of poetry in the face of profound suffering and grief presents a welcome fresh view of the ancient human instinct to cry out and to praise.

You can learn technological things, you can learn about specific things, but the real problems that people deal with in any subject, existential subjects or romantic subjects, you never learn anything. So you make a fool of yourself when you're 20, you make a fool of yourself at 40, at 60 at 80. The ancient Greeks were dealing with these problems. They screwed up all the time. People do now.

Treating other people as you would like to be treated. It is an ancient, universal ethical imperative. And it requires no supernatural beliefs.

But why should I cast myself in the ancient female part of victim of men's plots and passions?

When I was young, all the politicians looked like ancient Latin teachers or greengrocers. They were mumbly, stumbly men with their hair blowing in their eyes, walking into trees, opening the wrong door. They had no idea how to present themselves.

In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic. All of us, from the Governor of the Bank of England downwards, are now primarily interested in preserving the stability of business, prices, and employment, and are not likely, when the choice is forced on us, deliberately to sacrifice these to outworn dogma, which had its value once, of 3 pounds, 17 shill ings, 10 1/2 pence per ounce. Advocates of the ancient standard do not observe how remote it now is from the spirit and the requirements of the age. A regulated nonmetallic standard has slipped in unnoticed. It exists.

Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught.

The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.

While often being called transdisciplinary, theonomous reasoning is actually a first step back to ancient wisdom in which methodological sensation [or what we now know as science] has completely merged with methodological revelation [or totally known mystical knowledge in which every aspect of the occult has been overcome]. A true tradition has no occult or hidden phases left in its process. The creators and the audience are in perfect harmony.

The day is past when schools could afford to give sufficient time and attention to the teaching of the ancient languages to enable the student to get that enjoyment out of classical literature that made the lives of our grandfathers so rich.

The wilderness is near as well as dear to every man. Even the oldest villages are indebted to the border of wild wood which surrounds them, more than to the gardens of men. There is something indescribably inspiriting and beautiful in the aspect of the forest skirting and occasionally jutting into the midst of new towns, which, like the sand-heaps of fresh fox-burrows, have sprung up in their midst. The very uprightness of the pines and maples asserts the ancient rectitude and vigor of nature. Our lives need the relief of such a background, where the pine flourishes and the jay still screams.

The golden light of metaphor, which is the intelligence of poetry, was implicit in alchemical study. To change, magically, one substance into another, more valuable one is the ancient function of metaphor, as it was of alchemy.

It was one thing to snuggle a little when the world seemed about to end, and quite another to explain to her parents that she wanted to date an ancient magical horse.

The ancient codes were doubtless originally suggested by the discovery and diffusion of the art of writing.