Ancient Cultures Quotes & Sayings

There seems also to be a tremendous risk to indigenous cultures if we insist that all scholarship be conducted in English. We are, for example, dealing with ancient and very highly-developed cultures in Korea, Japan, China and the Middle East. What is the impact on cultural and scholarly vitality forcing everyone to do their work in English? I do not have an answer, but this issue has been very much on my mind. — Henry Rosovsky

Good teaching is an act of hospitality toward the young, and hospitality is always an act that benefits the host even more than the guest. The concept of hospitality arose in ancient times when this reciprocity was easier to see: in nomadic cultures, the food and shelter one gave to a stranger yesterday is the food and shelter one hopes to receive from a stranger tomorrow. By offering hospitality, one participates in the endless reweaving of a social fabric on which all can depend - thus the gift of sustenance for the guest becomes a gift of hope for the host. It is that way in teaching as well: the teacher's hospitality to the student results in a world more hospitable to the teacher. — Parker J. Palmer

Japan is a startling clash of the deeply traditional and the spiritual. The intensely current and the superficial. It's ancient, but futuristic. Conservative, yet hedonistic. Sleek skyscrapers graze the clouds like trees seeking sun in a man-made rainforest. Their concrete foundations often fertilized by the bodies of locals run afoul of the yakuza. It's a homogenous island nation with a quaint surface and a Twin Peaks underbelly. The polite, insular, and eerily innocuous, living symbiotically with the perverse, extroverted, and bizarre. Fashion-forward and fashion-retarded. You could make similar generalizations about most cultures of course, but Japan's beautiful contrasts were better than most."--Parker Choi — Robet Jung

The very general occurrence of the homosexual in ancient Greece, and its wide occurrence today in some cultures in which such activity is not taboo suggests that the capacity of an individual to respond erotically to any sort of stimulus, whether it is provided by another person of the same or opposite sex, is basic in the species. — Alfred Kinsey

I have always been spurred on by my not finding expressed anywhere the kinds of perspectives that I thought these issues most perspicuously needed and deserved; but that is just another way of saying that Americans have overwhelmingly expunged from their public understanding the strongest and most clarifying resources out of ancient and traditional European cultures. By far we prefer our familiar and user-friendly parochialisms, and there is no percentage in trying to pry these pachydermal plates apart. — Kenny Smith

I've just been around too much death today not to wonder why we find it appropriate to organize our festivities in and around the tombs of all these ancient cultures. — Linda Fairstein

What a vapid job title our culture gives to those honorable laborers the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians variously called Learned Men of the Magic Library, Scribes of the Double House of Life, Mistresses of the House of Books, or Ordainers of the Universe. 'Librarian' - that mouth-contorting, graceless grind of a word, that dry gulch in the dictionary between 'libido' and 'licentious' - it practically begs you to envision a stoop-shouldered loser, socks mismatched, eyes locked in a permanent squint from reading too much microfiche. If it were up to me, I would abolish the word entirely and turn back to the lexicological wisdom of the ancients, who saw librarians not as feeble sorters and shelvers but as heroic guardians. In Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian cultures alike, those who toiled at the shelves were often bestowed with a proud, even soldierly, title: Keeper of the Books. - p.113 — Miles Harvey

[To the cultures of Asia and the continent of Africa] it is the Western impact which has stirred up the winds of change and set the processes of modernization in motion. Education brought not only the idea of equality but also another belief which we used to take for granted in the West-the idea of progress, the idea that science and technology can be used to better human conditions. In ancient society, men tended to believe themselves fortunate if tomorrow was not worse than today and anyway, there was little they could do about it. — Barbara Ward, Baroness Jackson Of Lodsworth

Many people say I believe aliens built the pyramids. I don't. In fact I'm not a supporter of the 'ancient alien' hypothesis at all. I think a lost human civilization is a much better explanation of the mysteries and paradoxes of ancient cultures. — Graham Hancock

As we learn about the ancient Goddess religion and cultures, we get to re-evaluate the information that has come to us through patriarchal sources. We start to wake up to the fact that everything that was written about us is without us. — Tabby Biddle

Oh my God, not only is he older than the Grand Canyon, but he's like the pope and the Fae King and the president of the United States all rolled up into one. To some ancient cultures he had been a god.
He was going to hurt her so bad before he killed her so dead, and all she could think of was how hot his kiss had been in the dream and how delicate the touch of his finger was as it traced down her body. — Thea Harrison

Whenever I think about ancient cultures nostalgia seizes me. Perhaps this is nothing but envy of the sweet slowness of the history of that time. The era of ancient Egyptian culture lasted for several thousand years; the era of Greek antiquity for almost a thousand. In this respect, a single human life imitates the history of mankind; at first it is plunged into immobile slowness, and then only gradually does it accelerate more and more. — Milan Kundera

Hospitality is always an act that benefits the host even more than the guest. The concept of hospitality arose in ancient times when the reciprocity was easier to see: in nomadic cultures, the food and shelter one gave to a stranger yesterday is the food and shelter one hopes to receive from a stranger tomorrow. By offering hospitality, one participates in the endless reweaving of a social fabric on which all can depend-thus the gift of sustenance for the guest becomes a gift of hope for the host. — Parker J. Palmer

What you were supposed to hear when the record played backwards was the phrase wolf in white van. Nobody had a very firm idea of what that was supposed to mean, but they all agreed about what they were hearing: that it was a hellish picture to paint, and for young people to hear. Paul did ask what, exactly, it meant, and the guest talked about the symbol of the wolf in ancient cultures, but nothing got much clearer. It was a dark smudge of an idea shared among believers. — John Darnielle

All the demons of Hell formerly reigned as gods in previous cultures. No it's not fair, but one man's god is another man's devil. As each subsequent civilization became a dominant power, among its first acts was to depose and demonize whoever the previous culture had worshipped. The Jews attacked Belial, the god of the Babylonians. The Christians banished Pan and Loki anda Mars, the respective deities of the ancient Greeks and Celts and Romans. The Anglican British banned belief in the Australian aboriginal spirits known as the Mimi. Satan is depicted with cloven hooves because Pan had them, and he carries a pitchfork based on the trident carried by Neptune. As each deity was deposed, it was relegated to Hell. For gods so long accustomed to receiving tribute and loving attention, of course this status shift put them into a foul mood. — Chuck Palahniuk

Kafka's writings often display an insidious power to describe a wholly secular and "factical" world in which the eerie or "unheimlich" elements gang up behind or beneath the ego's awareness and immerse it in a waking dream of something Other, an alien world-order similar to ancient irrationalist cultures (in transition from primitivism to civilized mythos-culture). — Kenny Smith

Poetry transcends the nation-state. Poetry transcends government. It brings the traditional concept of power to its knees. I have always believed poetry to be an eternal conversation in which the ancient poets remain contemporary, a conversation inviting us into other languages and cultures even as poetry transcends language and culture, returning us again and again to primal rhythms and sounds. — Sam Hamill

Every decade archaeologists discover another few forgotten scripts. Some of them might prove to be even older than the Sumerian scratches in clay. But most of them remain curiosities because those who invented them failed to invent efficient ways of cataloguing and retrieving data. What set apart Sumer, as well as pharaonic Egypt, ancient China and the Inca Empire, is that these cultures developed good techniques of archiving, cataloguing and retrieving written records. — Yuval Noah Harari

Imagine looking back from a vantage point of one thousand years in the future, retrospectively evaluating our current, "sophisticated" medical and scientific procedures. One might see today's physician waving laser beams over a patient's body as a primitive, archaic, and incomprehensible healing technique, just as from some perspectives a medicine woman waving eagle feathers, or a curandera holding a crucifix over a patient, is viewed by some as archaic. The similarities are striking and compelling. Future generations may lose touch with the major assumptions underpinning contemporary western medicine, just as many of us have now lost touch with the assumptions integral to older cultures that continue to practice the ancient healing ways. Forgetting the assumptions on which a procedure is based may make the procedure incomprehensible, but it does not make it invalid. — H. Henrietta Stockel

When one contemplates the streak of insanity running through human history, it appears highly probable that homo sapiens is a biological freak, the result of some remarkable mistake in the evolutionary process. The ancient doctrine of original sin, variants of which occur independently in the mythologies of diverse cultures, could be a reflection of man's awareness of his own inadequacy, of the intuitive hunch that somewhere along the line of his ascent something has gone wrong. — Arthur Koestler

Of all the great and minor faiths as religions that have evolved over the ages with humanity. Many had their birth at the death or near death of another religious faith. One day the anthropological phenomena of our predominant faiths may become naturally forgotten, demonized, if not
morph into another religious tradition altogether. What we historically call as mythology is for Ancient Greece,
Persia, or Mayan cultures were the Almighty religions of their age. So it will be again with our Epoch from today our renowned and accomplished heirs of thousands of years into
our combined futures. That will have regarded our present day Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as mythologies of their own future anthropological understanding. — Ivan Alexander Pozo-Illas

The great heroes of other ancient cultures were strong and clever and virtuous, but the great Jewish heroes copulated with slaves (Abraham), showed they were willing to allow others to have sex with their wives (also Abraham), cheated their brothers, seduced their in-laws, murdered, started civil wars through terrible family decisions, yet somehow-through a mixture of humility, near-insanity, and good fortune-served as conduits of God's action in the world. — William McDavid

It didn't take me long out there, in the landscapes my father had painted, to realize that as much as I loved my country [Australia], I barely knew it. I'd spent so many years studying the art of our immigrant cultures, and barely any time at all on the one that had been here all along ... So I set myself a crash course and became a pioneer in a new field: desperation conservation. My job became the documentation and preservation of ancient Aboriginal rock art, before the uranium and bauxite companies had a chance to blast it into rubble (pp. 345-346) — Geraldine Brooks

Clearly, when western cultures absorbed Christianity, they got an all-inclusive package: ancient Hebrew rituals and myths steeped in lost purpose, scantily recorded and broadly misinterpreted teachings of Jesus, revisions and distortions by Paul, twisted cosmology and superstitions supplied by priesthoods and bureaucratic/political distortions innate to man's traditional
endeavors. — Thomas Daniel Nehrer

It may seem absurd to believe that a 'primitive' culture in the Himalaya has anything to teach our industrialized society. But our search for a future that works keeps spiraling back to an ancient connection between ourselves and the earth, an interconnectedness that ancient cultures have never abandoned. — Helena Norberg-Hodge

I think brown marks a reunion of peoples, an end to ancient wanderings. Rival cultures and creeds conspire with Spring to create children of a beauty, perhaps of a harmony, previously unknown. Or long forgotten. — Richard Rodriguez

What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach. Many of the ancient cultures practiced careful rituals of approach. An encounter of depth and spirit was preceded by careful preparation.
When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us. Our real life comes to the surface and its light awakens the concealed beauty in things. When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us. The rushed heart and arrogant mind lack the gentleness and patience to enter that embrace. — John O'Donohue

We are so fortunate, as Australians, to have among us the oldest continuing cultures in human history. Cultures that link our nation with deepest antiquity. We have Aboriginal rock art in the Kimberley that is as ancient as the great Palaeolithic cave paintings at Altamira and Lascaux in Europe. — Kevin Rudd

Tahiti has been spoiled for many years, but Bali is one of the few cultures with origins in one of the great ancient cultures which is still alive. — Arthur Erickson

Design can successfully bind the ancient nomadic cultures with today's global marketplace, ensuring the preservation of traditions and knowledge for further generations. This aspect of research is obviously rich in its business potential as well. — Yelena Baturina

In ancient cultures, they didn*t practice theory in their dances; they wanted to arrive at a state of trance, and I think that's an appropriate approach for the arts: to create a work that is entrancing. — Reza Abdoh

No system in history capitalism has been more relentless in battering down ancient and fragile cultures, devouring the resources of whole regions, pulverizing centuries-old practices in a matter of years, and standardizing the varieties of human experience. — Michael Parenti

When a young person is moved by a passion and feels compelled to go on this sort of quest, I think you have to let him. You can't stop him. In our culture we don't have formal rights of passage like in some ancient cultures. Subjecting yourself to risk ... may be something you have to go through to be a man or a woman. — Jon Krakauer

Greeks and Romans were anti-Mediterranean cultures, in the sense of being at odds with much of the political heritages of Persia, Egypt, and Phoenicia. While Hellenism was influenced - and enriched - at times by Near Eastern, Egyptian, and Persian art, literature, religion, and architecture, its faith in consensual government and free markets was unique. Greek and Latin words for "democracy," "republic," "city-state," "constitution," "freedom," "liberty," and "free speech" have no philological equivalents in other ancient languages of the Mediterranean (and few in the contemporary languages of the non-West as well). — Victor Davis Hanson

I learned that along with the towering achievements of the cultures of ancient Greece and China there stood the culture of Africa, unseen and denied by the imperialist looters of Africa's material wealth. — Paul Robeson

Dying, we tell ourselves, is like going to sleep. This figure of speech occurs very commonly in everyday thought and language, as well as in the literature of many cultures and many ages. It was apparently quite common even in the time of the ancient Greeks. — Raymond Moody

If you want to love, take the time to listen to your heart. In most ancient and wise cultures it is a regular practice for people to talk to their heart. There are rituals, stories, and meditative skills in every spiritual tradition that awaken the voice of the heart. To live wisely, this practice is essential, because our heart is the source of our connection to and intimacy with all of life. And life is love. This mysterious quality of love is all around us, as real as gravity ... Yet how often we forget about love ... — Jack Kornfield

Verse 12 [of Ex. 12) tells us that the judgment of Yahweh is not only on the Egyptians but also on their deities. This is probably an allusion to the fact that Egyptians would often pray for the safety of their firstborn, particularly firstborn sons, as was the custom in many ancient patriarchal cultures. The death of the firstborn would be seen as a sign of the anger or perhaps the impotence of their gods. This is worth pondering when it comes to the death of Jesus as God's only begotten, or beloved, Son. Would Jesus' contemporaries have assumed his death was a manifestation of God's wrath? Probably so. In any event, Yahweh is showing his superiority over the spirits behind the pagan deities, and thus we should not overlook the supernatural struggle that is implied to be behind the contest of wills between Moses and Pharaoh. — Ben Witherington III

Ancient philosophies were entranced by the order of the cosmos; they marveled at the mysterious power that kept the heavenly bodies in their orbits and the seas within bounds and that ensured that the earth regularly came to life again after the dearth of winter, and they longed to participate in this richer and more permanent existence. They expressed this yearning in terms of what is known as the perennial philosophy, so called because it was present, in some form, in most premodern cultures.11 Every single person, object, or experience was seen as a replica, a pale shadow, of a reality that was stronger and more enduring than anything in their ordinary experience but that they only glimpsed in visionary moments or in dreams. By ritually imitating what they understood to be the gestures and actions of their celestial alter egos - whether gods, ancestors, or culture heroes - premodern folk felt themselves to be caught up in their larger dimension of being. — Karen Armstrong

The study of the cultures of antiquity in general, and of ancient Egypt in particular, can serve to guide us out of the secular and dualistic impasse that we now face. — Jeremy Nadler

Religion, which was obviously created to give meaning and purpose to people, has become part of the oppression. This is true in both Eastern and Western religious traditions. The Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad were all revolutionaries who critiqued and attempted to dismantle the corrupt societal traditions of their time. Yet their teachings, like most things in human society, have been distorted and co-opted by the confused and power-hungry patriarchal tradition. What were wonce the creation myths of ancient cultures, have become doctrines of oppression. More blood has been spilled and more people oppressed in the name of religion than for any other reason in history. — Noah Levine

You must be thinking of stories from other cultures. Irish women tend to kick ass and do whatever they want. For exhibits A, B, and C, I give you the Morrigan, Brighid, and Flidais.
Fair enough. So who's the god of cooking among the Tuatha De Danann?
I don't think there is one.
So the ancient Irish had a god of brewing but not cooking?
We had our priorities straight. — Kevin Hearne

You can have the most advanced and efflorescent cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933 ... Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns. — Charles Krauthammer

The classical heritage as shaped by and filtered through Roman culture had two great flaws. First, it prevented the very rich oral cultures of the ancient Mediterranean from surviving from antiquity into later times. All that was left as creative forces were Greek philosophy and Roman law. These were very substantial cultures but they represented a great narrowing of what could be passed on from antiquity to later centuries...
"Second, another deficiency of classical culture was its lack of social conscience, its obliviousness to the slavery, poverty, disease, and everyday cruelty endured by more than half of the fifty million people who inhabited the empire. The classical heritage represented a narrow and insensitive social and political theory reinforcing a miserably class-ridden and technologically stagnant society. — Norman F. Cantor

In our rapid and externalized world, language has become ghostlike, abbreviated to code and label. Words that would mirror the soul carry the loam of substance and the shadow of the divine. The sense of silence and darkness behind the words in more ancient cultures, particularly in folk culture, is absent in the modern use of language. Language is full of acronyms; nowadays we are impatient of words that carry with them histories and associations. — John O'Donohue

Historically, shamans have always been part of the society where they lived, taking care of its problems, whenever they were allowed to operate. For centuries shamanic cultures have been persecuted in the western world until they were almost entirely exterminated. They have managed to survive in secrecy or through complex esoteric camouflage. Nowadays there seems to be more freedom and this ancient knowledge can re-emerge and be used in our own cultural context and not relegated somewhere else. The world needs shamans able to function on the roads, among the electronic equipment and engines, in the squares and markets of our contemporary society. — Franco Santoro

Internationally, ancient Rome and Greece cultures are just so fascinating. I don't think audiences will ever tire of it, because it's such an advanced society. — Jeremy Bolt

It is not brains or intelligence that is needed to cope with the problems with Plato and Aristotle and all of their successors to the present have failed to confront. What is needed is a readiness to undervalue the world altogether. This is only possible for a Christian ... All technologies and all cultures, ancient and modern, are part of our immediate expanse. There is hope in this diversity since it creates vast new possibilities of detachment and amusement at human gullibility and self-deception. There is no harm in reminding ourselves from time to time that the "Prince of this World" is a great P.R. man, a great salesman of new hardware and software, a great electric engineer, and a great master of the media. It is his master stroke to be not only environmental but invisible for the environmental is invincibly persuasive when ignored. — Marshall McLuhan

It is possible to speak with our heart directly. Most ancient cultures know this. We can actually converse with our heart as if it were a good friend. In modern life we have become so busy with our daily affairs and thoughts that we have lost this essential art of taking time to converse with our heart. — Jack Kornfield

it is worth asking what standards we can reasonably expect of the Bible, seeing that it is an ancient Near Eastern document and not a modern one. Are the early stories in the Old Testament to be judged on the basis of standards of modern historical inquiry and scientific precision, things that ancient peoples were not at all aware of? Is it not likely that God would have allowed his word to come to the ancient Israelites according to standards they understood, or are modern standards of truth and error so universal that we should expect premodern cultures to have made use of them? — Peter Enns

Above all, what is our culture, and what has remained of it? Is European culture perhaps nothing more than the technology and trade civilization that has marched triumphantly across the planet? Or is it instead a post-European culture born on the ruins of the ancient European cultures?
There is a paradoxical synchrony in these developments. The victory of the post-European techno-secular world and the universalization of its lifestyle and thinking have spread the impression (especially in Asia and Africa) that Europe's value system, culture, and faith (in other words, the very foundations of its identity) have reached the end of the road and have indeed already disappeared. — Pope Benedict XVI

If diversity is a source of wonder, its opposite - the ubiquitous condensation to some blandly amorphous and singulary generic modern culture that takes for granted an impoverished environment - is a source of dismay. There is, indeed, a fire burning over the earth, taking with it plants and animals, cultures, languages, ancient skills and visionary wisdom. Quelling this flame, and re-inventing the poetry of diversity is perhaps the most importent challenge of our times. — Wade Davis

In ancient African cultures, a young man was not considered a full member of the tribe, an elder, a man. He couldn't marry and he couldn't own land until he had killed a lion. It was symbolic. — John Eldredge

Great cycles of history began with vigorous cultures awakening to the needs of children, but collapsing with frayed family ties. Have we failed to learn lessons which Ancient China, Greece and Rome learned too late - about day care and death houses for old folks? Do we without protest accept accelerating preschool and nursing home cultures which warn ominously that the earlier you institutionalize your child, the earlier he will institutionalize you! — Raymond S. Moore

It almost looks like a halo of spikes," he said. "The sun crown isn't just a Christian symbol," Emily said. "In many cultures as far back as ancient Egyptian, and including Roman and Christian, crown of thorns and halo both derive from the tradition that identifies every newly-crowned king with the sun. The halo nimbus represents the rays of the rising sun. It's a sign that its wearer plays the life-giving role of the sun in his subjects' existence. The Greek sun god Apollo was driving his chariot across the heavens wearing the sun crown when Rome was just a huddle of huts. — Kenneth Atchity

Greek customs such as wine drinking were regarded as worthy of imitation by other cultures. So the ships that carried Greek wine were carrying Greek civilization, distributing it around the Mediterranean and beyond, one amphora at a time. Wine displaced beer to become the most civilized and sophisticated of drinks - a status it has maintained ever since, thanks to its association with the intellectual achievements of Ancient Greece. — Tom Standage

The discovery of America was the foundational event of the Scientific Revolution. It not only taught Europeans to favour present observations over past traditions, but the desire to conquer America also obliged Europeans to search for new knowledge at breakneck speed. If they really wanted to control the vast new territories, they had to gather enormous amounts of new data about the geography, climate, flora, fauna, languages, cultures and history of the new continent. Christian Scriptures, old geography books and ancient oral traditions were of little help. — Yuval Noah Harari

Trickster foxes appear in old stories gathered from countries and cultures all over the world
including Aesop's Fables from ancient Greece, the "Reynard" stories of medieval Europe, the "Giovannuzza" tales of Italy, the "Brer Fox" lore of the American South, and stories from diverse Native American traditions. — Terri Windling

For all the casual slurs about 'cultural imperialism', British imperialists were more interested in other cultures than anybody before or since, and, if they hadn't dug it up and taken care of it, we'd know hardly anything about the ancient world. What's important about a nation's past is not what it keeps walled up in the museum but what it keeps outside, living and breathing as every citizen's inheritance. — Mark Steyn

Like the elite of ancient Egypt, most people in most cultures dedicate their lives to building pyramids. Only the names, shapes and sizes of these pyramids change from one culture to the other. They — Yuval Noah Harari

Although the disappearance of the true wildwood [in the British Isles] occurred in the Neolithic period, before humanity began to record its own history, creation myths in almost all cultures look fabulously back to a forested earth. In the ancient Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, the quest-story which begins world literature, Gilgamesh sets out on his journey from Uruk to the Cedar Mountains, where he has been charged to slay the Huwawa, the guardian of the forest. The Roman empire also defined itself against the forests in which its capital city was first established, and out of which its founders, the wolf-suckled twins, emerged. It was the Roman Empire which would proceed to destroy the dense forests of the ancient world. — Robert Macfarlane

I think ancient cultures incorporated death into the experience of life in a more natural way than we have done. In our obsessive focus on youth, on celebrity, our denial of death makes it harder for people who are grieving to find a place for that grief. — Edward Hirsch

Other big questions tackled by ancient cultures are at least as radical. What is real? Is there more to reality than meets the eye? Yes! was Plato's answer over two millennia ago. In his famous cave analogy, he likened us to people who'd lived their entire lives shacked ina a cave, facing a blank wall, watching the shadows cast by things passing behind them, and eventually coming to mistakenly believe that these shadows were the full reality. Plato argued that what we humans call our everyday reality is similarly just a limited and distorted representation of the true reality, and that we must free ourselves from our mental shackles to comprehending it. — Max Tegmark