Ancient Quotes
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Live the New Life 1:13. Men wore long robes and would tuck them into their belt, and thus “gird up their loins,” so they could move more freely and quickly. Although the image also occurs elsewhere in the *Old Testament, here Peter may specifically allude to the Passover (Ex 12:11): once God’s people had been redeemed by the blood of the lamb (1 Pet 1:19), they were to be ready to follow God forth until he had brought them safely into their inheritance (cf. 1:4), the Promised Land. Thus they were to be dressed and ready to flee. “Sobriety” in ancient usage meant not only literal abstinence from drink but also behaving as a nonintoxicated person should, hence with dignified self-control. 1:14
Craig S. Keener
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In ancient times there was no public education, except that of the forum, the theater, and the street, and the general degree of illiteracy was very high. The early men of science were left very much to themselves and such a phrase as "the scientific culture of Alexandria in the third century B.C." does not cover any reality. In a sense, this is still true today; the real pioneers are so far ahead of the crowd (even a very literate crowd) that they remain almost alone.
George Sarton
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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
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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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The art of beautiful motion is far and away the oldest. Before man learned how to use any instruments at all, he moved the most perfect instrument of all, his body. He did this with such abandon that the cultural history of prehistoric and ancient man is, for the most part, nothing but the history of the dance.
Gerard van der Leeuw
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While it may be impossible to 'disprove' the existence of some 'Higher Power' or abstract Creator, it is entirely possible — through analysis and research — to find discrepancies within the ancient, organized religious traditions that support the idea of a specific God.
David G. McAfee
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In the mountains, travelers were reduced to the speed of men on foot. Here, the ancient English sense of journey, 'a day's travel' (French journee), meant the same as the Old Persian word farsang, 'the distance a man could travel on foot in a day,' and the territory was in effect ungovernable.
Rory Stewart
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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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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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A broadsheet obituarist once pointed out to me that veteran soldiers die by rank. First to go are the generals, admirals and air marshals, then the brigadiers, then a bit of a gap and the colonels and wing commanders and passed-over majors, then a steady trickle of captains and lieutenants. As they get older and rarer, so the soldiers are mythologised and grow ever more heroic, until finally drummer boys and under-age privates are venerated and laurelled with honours like ancient field marshals. There is something touching about that.
Adrian Anthony Gill
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It's an ancient and honorable term for the final step in any engineering project. Turn it on, see if it smokes.
Lois McMaster
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In looking at these pots at the Field Museum, Alix MacKenzie and I both came to a conclusion individually but also collectively that the pots that really interested us were the pots that people had used in their everyday life, and we began to think - I mean, whether it was ancient Greece or Africa or Europe or wherever, the pots that people had used in their homes were the ones that excited us.
Warren MacKenzie
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In order to prove a friend to one's guests, frugality must reign in one's meals; and, according to an ancient saying, one must eat to live, not live to eat.
Moliere
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And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon England's mountains green? And was the holy Lamb of God On England's pleasant pastures seen?
William Blake
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Things thought too long can be no longer thought, For beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth, And ancient lineaments are blotted out.
William Butler Yeats
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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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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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That which the people called Quakers lay down as a main fundamental in religion is this- That God, through Christ, hath placed a principle in every man, to inform him of his duty, and to enable him to do it; and that those that live up to this principle are the people of God, and those that live in disobedience to it, are not God's people, whatever name they may bear, or profession they may make of religion. This is their ancient, first, and standing testimony: with this they began, and this they bore, and do bear to the world.
William Penn
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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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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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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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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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In ancient Boeotia brides were carried home in vehicles whose wheels were burned at the door, in token, that they would never again be needed.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
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I mean, even in terms of the Marvel universe, this [Ancient One character] is going on a side street into a major piazza that Marvel hasn't even been to before, because it's all about creation and not so much about destruction and forestalling destruction, it's about your mind.
Tilda Swinton