Quotes About Ancients

“The Ancients understood the omnipotence of the underside of things.”

— Louis Pasteur

“The ancients were afraid that if they went to the end of the earth they would fall off and be consumed by dragons. But once we understand that Christianity is true to what is there, true to the ultimate environment - the infinite, personal God who is really there - then our minds are freed. We can pursue any question and can be sure that we will not fall off the end of the earth.”

— Francis A. Schaeffer

“Almost I feel the pulsebeat of the ages,
Now swift, now slow, beneath my fingertips.
The heartthrobs of the prophets and the sages
Beat through these bindings; and my quick hand slips
Old books from dusty shelves, in eager seeking
For truths the flaming tongues of the ancients tell;
For the words of wisdom that they still are speaking
As clearly as an echoing silver bell.
Here is the melody that lies forever
At the deep heart of living; here we keep
The accurate recorded discs that never
Can be quite silenced, though their makers sleep
The still deep sleep, so long as a seeker finds
The indelible imprint of their moving minds.”

— Grace Noll Crowell

“The ancients waited for cherry blossoms, grieved when they were gone, and lamented their passing in countless poems. How very ordinary the poems had seemed to Sachiko when she read them as a girl, but now she knew, as well as one could know, that grieving over fallen cherry blossoms was more than a fad or convention.”

— Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

“We are really so prejudiced by our educations, that, as the ancients deified their heroes, we deify their madmen.”

— Philip Dormer Stanhope

“But the sky! The sky is blue. Its limpidness is not marred by a single cloud. (How primitive was the taste of the ancients, since their poets were always inspired by these senseless, formless, stupidly rushing accumulations of vapor!)”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

“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

“The illustrious ancients,when they wished to make clear and to propagate the highest virtues in the world, put their states in proper order. Before putting their states in proper order, they regulated their families. Before regulating their families, they cultivated their own selves. Before cultivating their own selves, they perfected their souls. Before perfecting their souls, they tried to be sincere in their thoughts. Before trying to be sincere in their thoughts, they extended to the utmost their knowledge.”

— Will Durant

“The ancients had instincts and abilities that are lost to civilization today. Magic was real. It lived inside the shamans. Inside the priests. They passed it on from generation to generation. You have the dregs of that power in you. It it not the strength that it was, but you can access it. But to do so you must be willing to travel deep into your own darkness and be open to risk. To pull from the earth's energy.”

— M.J. Rose

“I have heard that the ancients used bows and arrows to their advantage.”

— Sun Tzu

“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

“In English we must use adjectives to distinguish the different kinds of love for which the ancients had distinct names.”

— Mortimer Adler

“Ancients pulled metals more precious than gold from the center of the earth - They spun into giant lacy wings that flew them to the stars and back
"Is that what you'd do with wings?"
She shook her head "No, I'd fly to the stars, but I'd never come back”

— Mary E. Pearson

“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

“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

“In the art of squeezing the last ounce of labor out of a two-legged animal, those primitive ancients were pretentious incompetents! Did they ever think of calling their slave "Monsieur" or letting him vote now and then, or giving him his newspaper? And especially had they thought of sending him to war to work off his passions? After twenty centuries of Christianity (as I personally can bear witness) your modern man simply can't control himself when a regiment passes before his eyes. It puts too many ideas into his head.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

“God's voice has been reduced to paper, and even that paper had to be moderated and deciphered by the proper authorities and intellects. It seemed that direct communication with God was something exclusively for the ancients and uncivilized, while the educated Westerners' access to God was mediated and controlled by the intelligentsia. Nobody wanted God in a box, just a book”

— Wm. Paul Young

“The best artifact was the calendar of the ancients, a great carved piece of stone as big as a kitchen, circular, bolted to the wall like a giant clock. In the center was an angry face looking out, as if he'd come through that stone from some other place to have a look at us, and not very pleased about it.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

“What the ancients called Bogan, as separate from Ashla.”

— James Luceno

“Olive trees are intimate creatures, eloquent in their twistedness. It's easy to understand why the ancients believed human spirits could be trapped inside them.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“The daily disappearance and the subsequent rise of the sun appeared to many of the ancients as a true resurrection; thus, while the east came to be regarded as the source of light and warmth, happiness and glory, the west was associated with darkness and chill, decay and death. This led to the custom of burying the dead so as to face the east when they rose again, and of building temples and shrines with an opening toward the east. To effect this, Vitruvius, two thousand years ago, gave precise rules, which are still followed by Christian architects.”

— Isaac Newton

“The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.”

— Confucius

“I am not one who was born with great wisdom. I love the ancients and diligently seek wisdom among them.”

— Confucius

“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

“When I became thoroughly acquainted with the Greek and Roman authors, I thought it incumbent upon me to do something towards the honor of the place of my nativity, and to vindicate the rhetoric of this ancient forum of our Metropolis from the aspersions of the illiterate by composing A Treatise of the Alercation of the Ancients; wherein I have demonstrated that the purity, sincerity, and simplicity of their diction is nowhere so well preserved as amongst my neighbourhood.”

— John Arbuthnot

“Seek not the paths of the ancients;
Seek that which the ancients sought.”

— Matsuo Basho

“Some have narrowed their minds, and so fettered them with the chains of antiquity that not only do they refuse to speak save as the ancients spake, but they refuse to think save as the ancients thought. God speaks to us, too, and the best thoughts are those now being vouchsafed to us. We will excel the ancients!”

— Girolamo Savonarola

“We are like dwarfs [the moderns] sitting on the shoulders of giants [the ancients]. Our glance can thus take in more things and reach farther than theirs. It is not because our sight is sharper nor our height greater than theirs; it is that we are carried and elevated by the high stature of the giants.”

— Bernard Of Chartres

“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

“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

“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

“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

“I take it to be true that pure thought can grasp the real, as the ancients had dreamed.”

— Albert Einstein

“The ancients, even though they believed in destiny , believed primarily in nature , in which they participated wholeheartedly. To rebel against nature amounted to rebelling against oneself. It was butting one's head against a wall.”

— Albert Camus

“Let us prepare for that blessed day when He will come again. Let us be as wise as those ancients who watched for His coming.”

— Dieter F. Uchtdorf

“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

“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

“HYDRA, n. A kind of animal that the ancients catalogued under many heads.”

— Ambrose Bierce

“The quantum hologram is a mechanism to explain this concept of the ancients of the Akashic Records. It also explains Rupert Sheldrake's work among animals [his theory of morphic fields and morphic resonance, leading to a vision of a living, developing universe with its own inherent memory].”

— Edgar Mitchell

“That public virtue which among the ancients was denominated patriotism, is derived from a strong sense of our own interest in the preservation and prosperity of the free government of which we are members. Such a sentiment, which had rendered the legions of the republic almost invincible, could make but a very feeble impression on the mercenary servants of a despotic prince; and it became necessary to supply that defect by other motives, of a different, but not less forcible nature; honour and religion.”

— Edward Gibbon

“The ancients, sir, are the ancients, and we are the people of today.”

— Moliere

“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

“So if the worth of the arts were measured by the matter with which they deal, this art-which some call astronomy, others astrology, and many of the ancients the consummation of mathematics-would be by far the most outstanding. This art which is as it were the head of all the liberal arts and the one most worthy of a free man leans upon nearly all the other branches of mathe matics. Arithmetic, geometry, optics, geodesy, mechanics, and whatever others, all offer themselves in its service.”

— Nicolaus Copernicus

“This is that eloquence the ancients represented as lightning, bearing down every opposer; this the power which has turned whole assemblies into astonishment, admiration and awe- - that is described by the torrent, the flame, and every other instance of irresistible impetuosity.”

— Oliver Goldsmith

“We have our arts, the ancients had theirs ... We cannot raise obelisks a hundred feet high in a single piece, but our meridians are more exact.”

— Voltaire

“At first critics classified authors as Ancients, that is to say, Greek and Latin authors, and Moderns, that is to say, every post-Classical Author. Then they classified them by eras, the Augustans, the Victorians, etc., and now they classify them by decades, the writers of the '30's, '40's, etc. Very soon, it seems, they will be labeling authors, like automobiles, by the year.”

— W. H. Auden

“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

“To avoid a future of war, crime, and bankruptcy, the individual must begin to plan his own destiny, and the best source for the necessary information comes down to us through the writings of the ancients. The greatest knowledge of all time should be available ... in a book that would be a monument, not merely a coffin.”

— Manly Hall

“Foolish the doctor who despises the knowledge acquired by the ancients.”

— Hippocrates

“Yield and overcome; Bend and be straight; Empty and be full; Wear out and be new; Have little and gain; Have much and be confused ... The ancients say, "Yield and overcome." Is that an empty saying? Be really whole, And all things will come to you.”

— Laozi