Adam Nicolson Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 31 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Adam Nicolson.
Famous Quotes By Adam Nicolson
Homer then has the bard - a blind man whose name is Demodocus, which means "popular with the people" - say something that drives far into the center of what Homer means and why Homer matters: "The gods did this and spun the destruction of people / For the sake of the singing of men hereafter." The song, this poem, this story, is the divine — Adam Nicolson
Eric Schlosser's book on the economy and strategies of the fast-food business should be read by anyone who likes to take their children to fast-food restaurants. I shall certainly never do that again. He employs a long, cold burn, a quiet and impassioned accumulation of detail, with calm, wit and clarity. ( ... ) Fast Food Nation is witness to the rigour and seriousness of the best American journalism, readable, reliable and extremely carefully done. — Adam Nicolson
T's [King James Bible] subject is majesty, not tyranny, and it's political purpose was unifying and enfolding, to elide the kingliness of God with the godliness of kings, to make royal power and divine glory into one invisible garment which could be wrapped around the nation as a whole. — Adam Nicolson
The earliest complete Odyssey to have survived is from the late tenth century, now in Michelangelo's Laurentian Library in Florence, — Adam Nicolson
Odysseus is always slipping out, the man who has been everywhere, seen everything, done everything, — Adam Nicolson
For them, and for Homer, impermanence is life's central sorrow and the source of its most lasting pain. — Adam Nicolson
The 19th century had chosen only to remember the happy warrior. The 20th century only the blood come gargling. Both are essential to any understanding of Trafalgar. — Adam Nicolson
Unlike Virgil, Homer is no part of the classical age, has no truck with judicious distinction or the calm management of life and society. He precedes that order, is a preclassic, immoderate, uncompromising, never sacrificing truth for grace. — Adam Nicolson
Very occasionally, a simplified form of communion and of adult baptism for new members of the church would be enacted but no Separatist was ever married in church, because there is no hint of a marriage ceremony in scripture and the primitive church had not considered marriage a sacrament before AD 537. — Adam Nicolson
As the generation of leaves, so too is the generation of men. And as for leaves, the winds scatter some on the earth, But the new wood puts forth others, and spring comes again. So it is with men: as one generation is born, another dies. — Adam Nicolson
A poet who knew that a war leader in his speech on the eve of battle will be both a man of civilization and its raging opposite. — Adam Nicolson
There are 201 words in the Iliad and the Odyssey that occur only once in Homer and never again in the whole of Greek literature. — Adam Nicolson
The language of the King James Bible is the language of patriarchy, of an instructed order, of richness as a form of beauty, of authority as a form of good; the New English Bible is motivated by the opposite, an anxiety not to bore or intimidate. It is driven, in other words, by the desire to please and, in that way, is a form of language which has died. — Adam Nicolson
The Enquiry in England,' Blake said, 'is not whether a man has talents and genius, but whether he is passive and polite and a virtuous ass and obedient to noblemen's opinions in arts and science. — Adam Nicolson
Recognizing that I had understood something that evening: the banality of one's own death, so much less terrible than the death of someone you love; — Adam Nicolson
At that level through out the 18th century, another vision of admirable behavior persisted. The mob did not want the smooth conformable man, the slick hypocrite who could so politely maneuver his way into the rewards of high politics and high society. They wanted his very opposite, the clever thief. The man who thrived not by using the well oiled wheels of society but by opposing them and cheating them; by attending to the well-being of his own heroic self. — Adam Nicolson
These are the two possibilities for human life. — Adam Nicolson
One eighteenth-century bard was given a lovely estate in Harris by his MacLeod chief, — Adam Nicolson
We are wanderers, place shifters, the cosmic homeless. This is not a modern truth, and Achilles is not some new kind of existentialist hero. It is the oldest truth of all, surviving uncomfortably into the modern world of cities and overkings, diplomacy and accommodation, the power structures and the proliferation of stuff which the Mediterranean world provides. — Adam Nicolson
It is, in other words, the King James Bible's exact contemporary, the product of precisely the same cultural moment, produced from precisely the same court culture, with precisely the same intention of celebrating and in a certain sense 'housing' James I and his dream of majesty. Can Hatfield House, then, be read as a companion to the Bible whose genesis is so close to its own? — Adam Nicolson
In those days, now it was in those days, In those nights, now it was in those nights, In those years, now it was in those years — Adam Nicolson
The field is a halfway house, halfway between the detail of those intimately known places and the ignorance of a landscape view ... The essence of a field is that the cultural accommodates the natural there. The human being makes room for and makes use of those organisms that are not him. In that way the field is a poem to symbiosis, and a human contract with the natural. — Adam Nicolson
There will be no peace until the violence is done. Peace is inaccessible without the violence, because violence is righteousness in action. — Adam Nicolson
The first printed Greek Homer had appeared in 1488, in Florence, published by an Athenian, Demetrius Chalcondyles, — Adam Nicolson
Iliad's subject is not war or its wickedness but a crisis in how to be. — Adam Nicolson
in 1944 the Germans executed brutal, slaughtering attacks on the people of mountain Crete. — Adam Nicolson
This was all evidence of the tradition at work, of Homer being more interested in epic music than its meaning. — Adam Nicolson
A puritan is such a one as loves God with all his soul, but hates his neighbor with all his heart. — Adam Nicolson