Ancient Languages Quotes & Sayings

The enemy of the spirit is the selfish ego, which thinks that happiness can be gained through causing unhappiness and disharmony to others. In many ancient languages, the word for enemy means "one who falls out of rhythm; one who is not working in harmony with the larger group." — Sharon Gannon

To walk in Time, perhaps, as men walk on long roads ... to see the lie of old and even forgotten lands, to behold ancient men walking, and to hear their languages as they spoke them, in the days before the days, when tongues of forgotten lineage were heard in kingdoms long fallen by the shores of the Atlantic.
J.R.R. Tolkien: The Lost Road — J.R.R. Tolkien

In addition to English, at least one ancient language, probably Greek or Hebrew, and two modern languages would be required. — W. H. Auden

The surest method of being incomprehensible or, moreover, to be misunderstood is to use words in their original sense; especially words from the ancient languages. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Faithful I have sought to be in all my ways Since my conception in fire and in water.
"To be a fount of wisdom and purity of spirit
Far more prized than veins of gold and silver
And to this my soul has aspired.

"Not due to my own pursuits
That man named me the Faithful Elder.
A Higher Oath than mine has fixed
My pleasant boundaries
And the times of my bursting forth into the open
Not of my choosing.

"The countenances of multitudes I have beheld
And have seen them take delight in my greeting.
They throng close to my doorway
Men, women and children
Eager witnesses of my mystery.

"From every corner of the earth, bringing
The languages of ancient lands upon their lips
And their spices upon their garments.

"And what they find takes on a meaning of its own
Within each
Amidst the resplendent pillar. — Myrtle Brooks

The origin of the word knowledge itself is strongly tied to trees. "In the Germanic languages, most terms for learning, knowledge, wisdom, and so on are derived from the words for tree or wood," says Hageneder. "In Anglo Saxon we have witan (mind, consciousness) and witige (wisdom); in English, 'wits,' 'witch', and wizard'; and in modern German, Witz (wits, joke). These words all stem from the ancient Scandinavian root word vid, which means 'wood' (as in forest, not timber). — Manuel Lima

When it comes to the New Testament, we can be confident we are reading from accurate sources, because we have so many ancient copies to compare. For many ancient texts there are only a handful of manuscripts in existence. We have only nine or ten good copies of Julius Caesar's The Gallic Wars. The best-preserved, non-biblical ancient writing we have is Homer's Iliad, of which there are only 643 copies. Compare these numbers to the New Testament, which is based on nearly six thousand Greek manuscripts plus over nine thousand ancient copies in other languages. If that were not enough, even if all of these copies were lost, we could reconstruct all but eleven verses of the New Testament from ancient quotations of the Bible. — Douglas M. Beaumont

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

Jesus probably studied this same information, in his youth. The apostle Paul probably studied this same information. How can I make such a bold assertion? Because, without this knowledge, much of the New Testament would make no sense.
Many of the idioms used in the New Testament are the result of lessons learned from this ancient Hebrew education system. Unfortunately, what was common in their day, has become forgotten in ours. For a Hebrew, math doesn't get in the way. It blazes the way. Other languages are disconnected from this mathematical relationship ... and it shows. — Michael Ben Zehabe

The classical scholars have kept alive the tradition of the superiority of the ancient languages
a kaleidoscopic mass of suffixes and prefixes, supposed to represent an infinite shading of meaning. It is a character they share with the Ojibway and the Zulu. — Stephen Leacock

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

Grigoryevich...Not that he had any real talent himself - but what a lot of deaths of talented people he had witnessed. Young physicists and historians, specialists in ancient languages, philosophers, musicians, young Russian Swifts and Erasmuses - how many of them he had seen put on their "wooden jackets." Prerevolutionary literature had often lamented the fate of serf actors, musicians, and painters. But who was there today to write about the young men and women who had never had the chance to write their books and paint their paintings? The Russian earth is indeed fertile and generous. She gives birth to her own Platos, to her own quick-witted Newtons - but how casually and terribly she devours these children of hers. — Vasily Grossman

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

Ancient and modern languages teem with happily expressed sentiments of more or less force and beauty, sufficiently individualized and excellent to warrant their reproduction and classification. — Maturin Murray Ballou

The day is past when schools could afford to give sufficient time and attention to the teaching of the ancient languages to enable the student to get that enjoyment out of classical literature that made the lives of our grandfathers so rich. — James Loeb

Preface WITH THE ADVENT OF multiple modern English translations of the Bible being published over the last fifty years, Christians have come to realize that there can be a wide range of meanings and renderings of various words from the Bible in the original language. As a Hebrew teacher and student of ancient languages one of the most common questions I get is, "What is the best translation?" This is usually followed by the question, "Which translation is the closest to the original Biblical language?" The answer I give to both questions is, "All of them." With few exceptions, every translation and paraphrase of the Bible is done with much scholarship and prayer by the translators. Every translator is convinced that he or she has presented the best renderings for each word and firmly believes they have given the rendering that is closest to the original language. So we now ask the question as to why there are — Chaim Bentorah

I want you to go to the Ancient Languages Department at Trinity College tomorrow morning, Ms.Lane. — Karen Marie Moning

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

I do not read the ancient languages, but I am beginning to study Greek. — Anne Rice

From every ancient source, we have testimony to Cleopatra's irresistible charm, as Plutarch has it, to her ability to speak many languages including, as he puts it, the language of flattery and essentially, to be able to turn people to her will - really a great political genius, in that respect. — Stacy Schiff

Archaism, in the linguistic order, is not, in any event, synonymous with simplicity of structure, very much to the contrary. Languages generally grow poorer with the passing oftime by gradually losing the richness of their vocabulary, the ease with which they can diversify various aspects of one and the same idea, and their power of synthesis, which is the ability to express many things with few words. In order to make up for this impoverishment, modern languages have become more complicated on the rhetorical level; while perhaps gaining in surface precision, they have not done as as regards content. Language historians are astonished by the fact that Arabic was able to retain a morphology attested to as early as the Code of Hammurabi, for the nineteenth to the eighteenth century before the Christian era, and to retain a phonetic system which preserves, with the exception of a single sound, the extremly rich sound-range disclosed by the most ancient Semitic alphabets discovered, [...] — Titus Burckhardt

There is no better recreation for the mind than the study of the ancient classics. Take any one of them into your hand, be it only for half an hour, and you will feel yourself refreshed, relieved, purified, ennobled, strengthened; just as if you had quenched your thirst at some pure spring. Is this the effect of the old language and its perfect expression, or is it the greatness of the minds whose works remain unharmed and unweakened by the lapse of a thousand years? Perhaps both together. But this I know. If the threatened calamity should ever come, and the ancient languages cease to be taught, a new literature shall arise, of such barbarous, shallow and worthless stuff as never was seen before. — Arthur Schopenhauer

The knowledge of the ancient languages is mainly a luxury. — John Bright

He'd been about to turn away when she lifted her face to the moon and sang.
It was not in any language that he knew. Not in the common tongue, or in Eyllwe, or in the languages of Fenharrow or Melisande, or anywhere else on the continent
This language was ancient, each word full of power and rage and agony.
She did not have a beautiful voice. And many of the words sounded like half sobs, the vowels stretched by the pangs of sorrow, the consonants hardened by anger. She beat her breast in time, so full of savage grace, so at odds with the black gown and veil she wore. The hair on the back of his neck stood as the lament poured from her mouth, unearthly and foreign, a song of grief so old that it predated the stone castle itself.
And the the song finished, its end as butal and sudden as Nehemia's death had been.
She stood there a few moments, silent and unmoving. — Sarah J. Maas

He was fluent in nineteen modern languages, five ancient languages and the one true universal language - pain. — Tiffany Reisz

It was just as the 1914 War burst on me that I made the discovery that 'legends' depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the 'legends' which it conveys by tradition ... Volapuk, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c &c are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends ... — J.R.R. Tolkien