Ancient Quotes
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There are many kinds of conceit, but the chief one is to let people know what a very ancient and gifted family one descends from.
Benvenuto Cellini
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Liar! Liar!" shrieked suddenly from the now open trap door. Miracle Max whirled. "Back, Witch--" he commanded. "I'm not a witch, I'm your wife--" she was advancing on him now, an ancient tiny fury--"and after what you've just done I don't think I want to be that any more--
William Goldman
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The tricky or boastful gods of ancient myths and primitive folk tales are characters of the same kind that turn up in Faulkner or Tennessee Williams.
Northrop Frye
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We say that flowers return every spring, but that is a lie. It is true that the world is renewed. It is also true that that renewal comes at a price, for even if the flower grows from an ancient vine, the flowers of spring are themselves new to the world, untried and untested. The flower that wilted last year is gone. Petals once fallen are fallen forever. Flowers do not return in the spring, rather they are replaced. It is in this difference between returned and replaced that the price of renewal is paid. And as it is for spring flowers, so it is for us.
Daniel Abraham
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Wales was in ancient times divided into three parts nearly equal, consideration having been paid, in this division, more to the value than to the just quantity or proportion of territory.
Gerald of Wales
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Astronomy is ... the only progressive Science which the ancient world produced.
William Whewell
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I read once that the ancient Egyptians had fifty words for sand & the Eskimos had a hundred words for snow. I wish I had a thousand words for love, but all that comes to mind is the way you move against me while you sleep & there are no words for that.
Brian Andreas
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Even if these stories are 3,000 years old, there's still so much about the characters, about the dilemmas, about their understanding of the universe that still resonates. The whole idea of order and chaos, which is really central to the ancient Egyptian understanding of the world, is still very much with us.
Rick Riordan
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I kept.. ..returning to the (ancient Roman) wall paintings with their veiled melancholy and elegant plasticity.
William Baziotes
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At bottom, textual criticism for virtually all other ancient literature relies on creative conjectures, or imaginative guesses, at reconstructing the wording of the original. Not so with the New Testament.
Daniel B. Wallace
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Well 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 Swinton
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What satellites help to show us is we've actually only found a fraction of a percent of ancient settlements and sites all over the world... It's the most exciting time in history to be an archaeologist.
Sarah Parcak
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More than sixty years ago, mathematical logicians, by defining precisely the concept of an algorithm, gave content to the ancient human idea of an effective calculation. Their definitions led to the creation of the digital computer, an interesting example of thought bending matter to its ends.
Interesting Computer Ancient Creation Mathematical Sixty Algorithms Bending Defining Definitions Digital Ends Example Humans Ideas Matter Years Calculations Concepts Years Ago
David Berlinski
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I summon to the winding ancient stair;
Set all your mind upon the steep ascent
William Butler Yeats
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It is a true observation of ancient writers, that as men are apt to be cast down by adversity, so they, are easily satiated with prosperity, and that joy and grief produce the same effects. For whenever men are not obliged by necessity to fight they fight from ambition, which is so powerful a passion in the human breast that however high we reach we are never satisfied.
Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli
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Ancient portraits are symbolic images without any immediate relation to the individuals represented; they are not portraits as we understand them. It is remarkable that philologists who are capable of carrying accuracy to the extremes in the case of words are as credulous as babies when it comes to "images," and yet an image is so full of information that ten thousands words would not add up to it.
George Sarton
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The ancient city, like all human society, had ranks, distinctions, and inequalities.
Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges
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It is most important that we should keep in this country a certain leisured class. I am of the opinion of the ancient Jewish book which says there is no wisdom without leisure.
William Butler Yeats
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Prudence is one of the virtues which were called cardinal by the ancient ethical writers.
William Fleming
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That a thing made by hand, the work and thought of a single craftsman, can endure much longer than its maker, through centuries in fact, can survive natural catastrophe, neglect, and even mistreatment, has always filled me with wonder. Sometimes in museums, looking at a humble piece of pottery from ancient Persia or Pompeii, or a finely wrought page from a medieval illuminated manuscript toiled over by a nameless monk, or a primitive tool with a carved handle, I am moved to tears. The unknown life of the maker is evanescent in its brevity, but the work of his or her hands and heart remains.
Susan Vreeland
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Alas, how right the ancient saying is: We, who are old, are nothing else but noise And shape. Like mimicries of dreams we go, And have no wits, although we think us wise.
Euripides
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None but the most blindly credulous will imagine the characters and events in this story to be anything but fictitious. It is true that the ancient and noble city of Oxford is, of all the towns of England, the likeliest progenitor of unlikely events and persons. But there are limits.
Edmund Crispin
