Quotes & Sayings About Ancient Ruins

On all sides, as far as the eye could reach, rose the grass-covered heaps marking the site of ancient habitations. The great tide of civilisation had long since ebbed, leaving these scattered wrecks on the solitary shore. Are those waters to flow again, bearing back the seeds of knowledge and of wealth that they have wafted to the West? We wanderers were seeking what they had left behind, as children gather up the coloured shells on the deserted sands. At my feet there was a busy scene, making more lonely the unbroken solitude which reigned in the vast plain around, where the only thing having life or motion were the shadows of the lofty mounds as they lengthened before the declining sun. — Austen Henry Layard

I do love these ancient ruins. We never tread upon them but we set Our foot upon some reverend history. — John Webster

A document from the reign of King Henry VIII described one of the two actual axes used for the beheadings. The story was that the relic was displayed in the church; it gave both the church and the street their odd names. In the early 1560s refugees from Spain used it as a place of worship but by then it was in a state of disrepair. It was demolished shortly thereafter, taken down to the foundation. Another building, the one which Thomas and Belinda Russell owned today, was built in 1620 on the ruins of the ancient church. — Bill Thompson

State Road 60 is one of those great old Florida drives. From Tampa on the west coast to Vero Beach on the east, rolling through Mulberry and Bartow and Yeehaw Junction. Phosphate mines and orange groves and cows loitering near water holes in vast open flats dotted with sabal palms, stretching for miles, making the sky big. Here and there were the kind of occasional, isolated farmhouses that made people subconsciously think: Do they get Internet? In the middle of one overgrown field stood a single concrete wall, several stories high, covered with grime and mildew, the ancient ruins of a drive-in theater. The top of the wall was the last thing to catch a warm glow from the setting sun. — Tim Dorsey

And above [the three of] them, Old Star and Old Mother rose into their appointed places and stared at each other across the starry ruins of their ancient broken marriage. — Stephen King

In English and Arabic. Clearly, even personal shoppers had him pegged as a complete geek. The shopper also managed to find some supplies for our magic bags - blocks of wax, twine, even some papyrus and ink - though I doubt Bes explained to her what they were for. After she left, Bes, Carter and I ordered more food from room service. We sat on the deck and watched the afternoon go by. The breeze from the Mediterranean was cool and pleasant. Modern Alexandria stretched out to our left - an odd mix of gleaming high-rises, shabby, crumbling buildings, and ancient ruins. The shoreline highway was dotted with palm trees and crowded with every sort of vehicle from BMWs to donkeys. From our penthouse suite, it all seemed a bit unreal - the raw energy of the city, the bustle and congestion below - while we sat on our veranda in the sky eating fresh fruit and the last melting bits of Lenin's head. — Rick Riordan

Frank had turned into a giant eagle to fly to Delos, but Leo hitched a ride with Hazel on Arion's back. No offense to Frank, but after the fiasco at Fort Sumter, Leo had become a conscientious objector to riding giant eagles. He had a one hundred percent failure rate. They found the island deserted, maybe because the seas were too choppy for the tourist boats. The windswept hills were barren except for rocks, grass, and wildflowers - and, of course, a bunch of crumbling temples. The rubble was probably very impressive, but ever since Olympia, Leo had been on ancient ruins overload. He was so done with white marble columns. He wanted to get back to the U.S., where the oldest buildings were the public schools and Ye Olde McDonald's. — Rick Riordan

If one is going to go traipsing around ancient giant ruins hunting for treasure, one should first make sure they are abandoned. — Julie Kagawa

The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anynymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond. — Cormac McCarthy

Twilight's soft dews steal o'er the village-green, With magic tints to harmonize the scene. Stilled is the hum that through the hamlet broke When round the ruins of their ancient oak The peasants flocked to hear the minstrel play, And games and carols closed the busy day. — Samuel Rogers

The sight of so many ruins destroys any desire to build shanties; all this ancient dust makes one indifferent to fame. — Gustave Flaubert

I'd like to see North America become a dry, sunny, sandy region inhabited mainly by lizards, buzzards and a modest human population - about 25 million would be plenty - of pastoralists and prospectors (prospecting for truth), gathering once a year in the ruins of ancient, mysterious cities for great ceremonies of music, art, dance, poetry, joy, faith and renewal. That's my dream of the American future. Like most such dreams, it will probably come true. That is why I'm still an optimist. — Edward Abbey

Geological facts being of an historical nature, all attempts to deduce a complete knowledge of them merely from their still, subsisting consequences, to the exclusion of unexceptionable testimony, must be deemed as absurd as that of deducing the history of ancient Rome solely from the medals or other monuments of antiquity it still exhibits, or the scattered ruins of its empire, to the exclusion of a Livy, a Sallust, or a Tacitus. — Richard Kirwan

Michael looked around the beautiful garden with its many colored flowers, fragrant lemon trees, the old statures of the gods dug from ancient ruins, other newer ones of holy saints, the rose-colored walls across the villa. It was a lovely setting for the examination of twelve murderous apostles. — Mario Puzo

A good wife is like the ivy which beautifies the building to which it clings, twining its tendrils more lovingly as time converts the ancient edifice into a ruin. — Samuel Johnson

Natural causes, as we know, are at work, which tend to modify, if they do not at length destroy, all the arrangements and dimensions of the earth and the whole solar system. But though in the course of ages catastrophes have occurred and may yet occur in the heavens, though ancient systems may be dissolved and new systems evolved out of their ruins, the molecules [i.e. atoms] out of which these systems are built-the foundation stones of the material universe-remain unbroken and unworn. They continue to this day as they were created-perfect in number and measure and weight. — James Clerk Maxwell

Thus we conclude, that the strata both primary and secondary, both those of ancient and those of more recent origin, have had their materials furnished from the ruins of former continents, from the dissolution of rocks, or the destruction of animal or vegetable bodies, similar, at least in some respects, to those that now occupy the surface of the earth. — John Playfair

The shattered wall,
the broken tower
have a story to tell -
from the touchstones of ruins
and ancient texts
we make a pilgrimage.

from The Ruins — Michael Alexander

On the heights above the river Xzan, at the site of certain ancient ruins, Iucounu the Laughing Magician had built a manse to his private taste: an eccentric structure of steep gables, balconies, sky-walks, cupolas, together with three spiral green glass towers through which the red sunlight shone in twisted glints and peculiar colors. — Jack Vance

If you're dealing with some ancient ruins, He was there when they crumbled. He knows every detail. He knows exactly how you've been affected, and His expertise is reconstruction. After all, Christ was a carpenter by trade. Nothing has ever been allowed to crumble in a Christian's life or heritage that God cannot reconstruct and use. — Beth Moore

Decker went to Greece a few summers ago and showed me pictures from his trip.
"Aren't these awesome?" he had said, pointing out photographs of the ancient ruins.
"Awesome" I agreed, but I felt dizzy. The ruins were just a reminder that what had been was no longer. That everything we are will be gone someday. That I will be forgotten. — Megan Miranda

The most well known theory concerning the whereabouts of the Ark, made famous by the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, places it in the ruins of the ancient city of Tanis in Egypt. This theory proposes that the Ark was plundered by the Egyptians shortly after Solomon's death. According to the Old Testament, the pharaoh Sheshonq I of Egypt attacked Jerusalem, raided the Temple, and plundered its treasures (1 Kgs 14:26). Sheshonq I established Tanis as the new Egyptian capital, and so it is here that Indiana Jones discovers the lost Ark in Steven Spielberg's movie. — Graham Phillips

Looking for a great teacher who can tell you what will happen in the future? Ask the ancient ruins what will happen! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Some ruins of ancient times are much more beautiful than the best buildings of modern eras! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

All civilizations we know about have left a record of their history in material things. We know them through tablets or ruins dug up by archaeologists. But we know of the Jews in ancient times mostly from the ideas they taught and the impact which these ideas had upon other people and other civilizations. There are few Jewish tablets to tell of battles and few Jewish ruins to tell of former splendor. The paradox is that those people who left only monuments behind as a record of their existence have vanished with time, whereas the Jews, who left ideas, have survived. — Max I. Dimont

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

Stranger, think long before you enter,
For these corridors amuse not passing travellers.
But if you enter, keep your voice to yourself.
Nor should you tinkle and toll your tongue.
These columns rose not, for the such as you.
But for those urgent pilgrim feet that wander
On lonely ways, seeking the roots of rootless trees.
The earth has many flowery roads; choose one
That pleases your whim, and gods be with you.
But now leave! - leave me to my dark green solitude
Which like the deep dream world of the sea
Has its moving shapes; corals; ancient coins;
Carved urns and ruins of ancient ships and gods;
And mermaids, with flowing golden hair
That charm a patch of silent darkness
Into singing sunlight. — G.A. Kulkarni

I passed under an arch out of that region of slabs and columns, and wandered through the open country; sometimes following the visible road, but sometimes leaving it curiously to tread across meadows where only occasional ruins bespoke the ancient presence of a forgotten road. — H.P. Lovecraft

Seven Cities was an ancient civilization, steeped in the power of antiquity, where Ascendants once walked on every trader track, every footpath, every lost road between forgotten places. It was said the sands hoarded power within their sussurating currents, that every stone had soaked up sorcery like blood, and that beneath every city lay the ruins of countless other cities, older cities, cities that went back to the First Empire itself. It was said each city rose on the backs of ghosts, the substance of spirits thick like layers of crushed bone; that each city forever wept beneath the streets, forever laughed, shouted, hawked wares and bartered and prayed and drew first breaths that brought life and the last breaths that announced death. Beneath the streets there were dreams, wisdom, foolishness, fears, rage, grief, lust and love and bitter hatred. — Steven Erikson