Quotes & Sayings About Ancients

In the ancients, one sees the accomplished letter of entire poetry: in the moderns, one has the presentiment of the spirit in becoming. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Tanith: Serpine is used to the Elders taking forever to make their calm, thought-out decisions. So he won't be expecting anything as amazingly rash and reckless as this
Ghastly: That'll teach him to underestimate stupid people. — Derek Landy

Why did the ancients praise the Way? Did they not say it was because you find what you seek and are saved from your wrongdoings? — Laozi

It is not only the size of these redwoods but their strangeness that frightens them. And why not? For these are the last remaining members of a race that flourished over four continents as far back in geologic time as the upper Jurassic period. Fossils of these ancients have been found dating from the Cretaceous era while in the Eocene and Miocene they were spread over England and Europe and America. And then the glaciers moved down and wiped the Titans out beyond recovery. And only these few are left
a stunning memory of what the world was like once long ago. Can it be that we do not love to be reminded that we are very young and callow in a world that was old when we came into it? And could there be a strong resistance to the certainty that a living world will continue its stately way when we no longer inhabit it? — John Steinbeck

The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another; it is never the given that confers superiorities: 'virtue', as the ancients called it, is defined on the level of 'that which depends on us'. — Simone De Beauvoir

Science is one thing, wisdom is another. Science is an edged tool, with which men play like children, and cut their own fingers. If you look at the results which science has brought in its train, you will find them to consist almost wholly in elements of mischief. See how much belongs to the word "Explosion" alone, of which the ancients knew nothing. — Arthur Eddington

When the Bible is understood in its literary and historical context; errors, contradictions, and inconsistencies pose no threat to spirituality, whether that spirituality is theistic, non-theistic, or even explicitly Jesus-centered. The graver threat to what Christians call godliness may be fundamentalism - religion that flows from literalism and fear, religion based on anachronism and law. Fundamentalism teachers, in effect, that the tattered musings of our ancestors, those human words that so poorly represent the content of human thinking, somehow adequately describe God. Fundamentalism offers identity, security, and simplicity, but at a price: by binding believers to the moral imitations and cultural trappings of the Ancients, it precludes a deeper embrace of goodness, love, and truth - in other words, of Divinity. — Valerie Tarico

The ancients knew something, which we seem to have forgotten. — Albert Einstein

The institution of representative government to us seems an essential part of democracy, but the ancients never thought of it. Its immense merit was that it enabled a large constituency to exert indirect power, and thus made possible the distribution of political responsibility throughout the great states of modern times. — Bertrand Russell

The ancients waited for cherry blossoms, grieved when they were gone, and lamented their passing in countless poems. How very ordinary the poems had seemed to Sachiko when she read them as a girl, but now she knew, as well as one could know, that grieving over fallen cherry blossoms was more than a fad or convention. — Jun'ichiro Tanizaki

So if the worth of the arts were measured by the matter with which they deal, this art-which some call astronomy, others astrology, and many of the ancients the consummation of mathematics-would be by far the most outstanding. This art which is as it were the head of all the liberal arts and the one most worthy of a free man leans upon nearly all the other branches of mathe matics. Arithmetic, geometry, optics, geodesy, mechanics, and whatever others, all offer themselves in its service. — Nicolaus Copernicus

The ancients, even though they believed in destiny , believed primarily in nature , in which they participated wholeheartedly. To rebel against nature amounted to rebelling against oneself. It was butting one's head against a wall. — Albert Camus

In taste and imagination, in the graces of style, in the arts of persuasion, in the magnificence of public works, the ancients were at least our equals. — Thomas B. Macaulay

By comparing what we know today with what the ancients appear to have known we can guess at the kinds of wine they drank. — Alec Waugh

Is it what you call civilization that makes England flourish? Is it the universal development of the faculties of man that has rendered an island, almost unknown to the ancients, the
arbiter of the world? Clearly not. It is the inhabitants that have done this. It is an affair of race ... All is race, there is no other truth. — Benjamin Disraeli

The ancients said that for persons who cultivated body and mind, and who are virtuous and honorable, death is an experience of liberation, a long-awaited rest from a lifetime of labors. Death helps the unscrupulous person to put an end to the misery of desire. Death, then, for everyone is a kind of homecoming. That is why the ancient sages speak of a dying person as a person who is 'going home. — Liezi

Now as always - humility and terror. Fear that the working of my pen cannot capture the grinding of my brain. It is so easy to understand why the ancients prayed for the help of a Muse. And the Muse came and stood beside them, and we, heaven help us, do not believe in Muses. We have nothing to fall back on but our craftsmanship and it, as modern literature attests, is inadequate. May I be honest; may I be decent; may I be unaffected by the technique of hucksters. If invocation is required, let this be my invocation - may I be strong and yet gentle, tender and yet wise, wise and yet tolerant. May I for a little while, only for a little while, see with the inflamed eyes of a God. — John Steinbeck

If the ancients left us ideas, to our credit be it spoken that we moderns are building houses for them
structures which neither Plato nor Archimedes had dreamed possible. — Amos Bronson Alcott

Those ancients who in poetry presented
the golden age, who sang its happy state,
perhaps, in their Parnassus, dreamt this place.
Here, mankind's root was innocent; and here
were every fruit and never-ending spring;
these streams
the nectar of which poets sing. — Dante Alighieri

In English we must use adjectives to distinguish the different kinds of love for which the ancients had distinct names. — Mortimer Adler

To betray is to act against, I just haven't acted at all - China Sorrows — Derek Landy

Skulduggery: What do you get if you kill the Elders?
Stephanie: This sounds like a joke
Skulduggery: Valkyrie --
Stephanie: I don't know
Skulduggery: Yes, yes you do.. not think what would killing the Elders result in?
Stephanie: Panic, fear? Three empty spaces in the Sanctuary - Skulduggery Pleasant — Derek Landy

Knowing how to fight made men more bold, because no one fears doing what it seems to him he has learned to do. Therefore, the ancients wanted their citizens to be trained in every warlike action. — Niccolo Machiavelli

Serpine: Well, Skulduggery? Where is that tired old defiance - the taunting, the goading? Where are the endless heroic clinches? Aren't you going to look me in the eye and tell me to do my worst?
Skulduggery: Actually, I was going to ask that you go easy on me. I'm feeling kind of tender today
Serpine: This is your one chance. Tell me where the key is
Skulduggery:OK
Serpine: Really?
Skulduggery: No, only joking. Do your worst. — Derek Landy

We modern egalitarians are tempted to the primal sin of pride in the opposite way from the ancients. The old, aristocratic form of pride was the desire to be better than others. The new, democratic form is the desire not to have anyone better than yourself. It is just as spiritually deadly and does not even carry with it the false pleasure of gloating superiority. — Peter Kreeft

Into darkness will I fade,
Into a night that Man has made,
But through that gloom shall gleam the sun
When I am lost, and again am won.

Release! Release! I call to thee
In new lands across the sea:
Let, another on narrow pathways, come to me.

Furthest and Highest,
yet not beyond reach.
Choose thou well a path that will teach
How the sunken is raised
and emptiness is filled
and a wandering heart
can finally be stilled.

Seek the great stone! Mark it well,with a sign.
That the one who shall follow
Shall see it is mine,
and seeing, shall ponder and certainly know
As the Ancients have writ: "As above, so below."

And I shall guard the Source of Greatness;
Waiting by a teardrop
From neither joy nor sorrow born,
In silver bound, beneath the ground,
I am the spiral horn. — Michael Green

The sciences were financially supported, honoured everywhere, universally pursued; they were like tall edifices supported by strong foundations. Then the Christian religion appeared in Byzantium and the centres of learning were eliminated, their vestiges effaced and the edifice of Greek learning was obliterated. Everything the ancient Greeks had brought to light vanished, and the discoveries of the ancients were altered out of recognition. — Mas'udi

The more we know about this universe, the more mysterious it is. The old world that Job knew was marvelous enough, and his description of its wonders is among the noblest poetry of the race, but today the new science has opened to our eyes vistas of mystery that transcend in their inexplicable marvel anything the ancients ever dreamed. — Harry Emerson Fosdick

Do not take the yardstick of your ignorance to measure what the ancients knew, and call everything which you do not know lies. Do not call things untrue because they are marvelous, but give them a fair consideration. — Wendell Phillips

Some have narrowed their minds, and so fettered them with the chains of antiquity that not only do they refuse to speak save as the ancients spake, but they refuse to think save as the ancients thought. God speaks to us, too, and the best thoughts are those now being vouchsafed to us. We will excel the ancients! — Girolamo Savonarola

The same thing which is now called Christian religion existed among the ancients. They have begun to call 'Christian' the true religion which existed before. — Saint Augustine

At the center of Zoroastrian theology was a unique monotheistic system based on the sole god, Ahura Mazda ("the Wise Lord"). Like most ancients, Zarathustra could not easily conceive of his god as being the source of both good and evil. He therefore developed an ethical dualism in which two opposing spirits, Spenta Mainyu ("the beneficent spirit") and Angra Mainyu ("the hostile spirit"), were responsible for good and evil, respectively. — Reza Aslan

Perhaps it is more generally true that in order to learn from tradition, one has to be able to push against it, and not be bowed by a surfeit of reverence. The point isn't to replicate the conclusions of tradition [ ... ], but rather to enter into the same problems as the ancients and make them one's own. That is how a tradition remains alive. — Matthew B. Crawford

May we attribute to the color of the herbage and plants, which no doubt clothe the plains of Mars, the characteristic hue of that planet, which is noticeable by the naked eye, and which led the ancients to personify it as a warrior? — Camille Flammarion

Some are so very studious of learning what was done by the ancients that they know not how to live with the moderns. — William Penn

We live behind our transparent walls that seem woven of gleaming air - we are always visible, always washed in light. We have nothing to hide from one another. Besides, this makes much easier the burdensome and noble task of the Guardians, for, Who knows what might happen otherwise? Perhaps it was precisely those bizarre, opaque dwellings of the ancients that gave rise to their psychology of individuality. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

The ancients say that one note of a song is twenty times more powerful than a single word, and that only in song can truth be clearly perceived, for though words can harbor lies, music cannot abide them. — Nicole Evelina

The quantum hologram is a mechanism to explain this concept of the ancients of the Akashic Records. It also explains Rupert Sheldrake's work among animals [his theory of morphic fields and morphic resonance, leading to a vision of a living, developing universe with its own inherent memory]. — Edgar Mitchell

The best soldiers are not warlike; the best fighters do not lose their temper. The greatest conquerors are those who overcome their enemies without strife. The greatest directors of men are those who yield place to others. This is called the Virtue of not striving, the capacity for directing mankind; this is being the compeer of Heaven. It was the highest goal of the ancients. — Laozi

Did he actually believe in this curse? A curse! He snorted. Deirdre stirred.
Impossible. Curses were for witches, spell casters and the weak-minded. — Jean M. Grant

In an age of global standardization, regional voices also remind both writer and reader that no life is lived generically. If the purpose of literature is truly, as the ancients insisted, to instruct and delight, then what better to understand and enjoy than the here and the now ? — Dana Gioia

there's always been heroes,
there's always been villains,
the stakes may have changed
but really there's no difference.

there's always been greed
and heartbreak and ambition.
jealousy, love,
trespass and contrition,

we're the same beings that began,
still living,
in all of our fury and foulness and friction.
Everyday odysseys.
Dreams vs decisions.
The stories are there if you listen. — Kate Tempest

Anyone who studies present and ancient affairs will easily see how in all cities and all peoples there still exist, and have always existed, the same desires and passions. Thus, it is an easy matter for him who carefully examines past events to foresee future events in a republic and to apply the remedies employed by the ancients, or, if old remedies cannot be found, to devise new ones based upon the similarity of the events. But since these matters are neglected or not understood by those who read, or, if understood, remain unknown to those who govern, the result is that the same problems always exist in every era. — Niccolo Machiavelli

The ancients had a term in the mystical tradition called the Akashic Records, which was suggestive that nature didn't lose it's experience, that the information accumulated was available forever. — Edgar Mitchell

Speak of the moderns without contempt and of the ancients without idolatry; judge them all by their merits, but not by their age — Lord Chesterfield

The word spirit comes from the Latin word for "breath" - spiritu - and the origin of the word spirituality has to do with breath and life force, the mysteries of the ancients and all this. The word is very suspect in much of the art world - the Western art world. Certainly, spirituality has become divorced from religious. — Chris Martin

At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena. So people stop short at natural laws as at something unassailable, as did the ancients at God and Fate.
And they both are right and wrong. But the ancients were clearer, in so far as they recognized one clear conclusion, whereas in the modern system it should appear as though everything were explained. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

HYDRA, n. A kind of animal that the ancients catalogued under many heads. — Ambrose Bierce

Some think that even the ancients who lived long before the present generation, and first framed accounts of the Gods, had a similar view of nature; for they made the Oceanus and Tethys the parents of creation, and described the oath of the Gods as being by water, to which they give the name of Styx; for what is oldest is most honourable, and the most honourable thing is that by which one swears — Mary Hunter Austin

EZE7.26 Mischief shall come upon mischief, and rumour shall be upon rumour; then shall they seek a vision of the prophet; but the law shall perish from the priest, and counsel from the ancients. — Anonymous

We are like dwarfs [the moderns] sitting on the shoulders of giants [the ancients]. Our glance can thus take in more things and reach farther than theirs. It is not because our sight is sharper nor our height greater than theirs; it is that we are carried and elevated by the high stature of the giants. — Bernard Of Chartres

Tis no wonder, says one of the ancients, that chance has so great a dominion over us, since it is by chance we live. — Michel De Montaigne

To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it. — C.S. Lewis

For architecture, among all the arts, is the one that most boldly tries to reproduce in its rhythm the order of the universe, which the ancients called "kosmos," that is to say ornate, since it is like a great animal on whom there shine the perfection and the proportion of all its members. And praised be our Creator who, as the Scriptures say, has decreed all things in number, weight, and measure. — Umberto Eco

Skulduggery: The fate of the world may depend on whether or not you can bring yourself to visit your relatives
Stephanie: It may depend
Skulduggery: Valkyrie--
Stephanie: Fine I'll go -
Skulduggery: Being a detective isn't all about torture and murder and monster. Sometimes it gets truly unpleasant. — Derek Landy

The territory through which we passed had been overbuilt in the days over the Secular Ancients, but only a few traces of that exuberant time remained, and a whole forest had grown up since then, maple and birch and pine, its woody roots no doubt entwined with artifacts from the Efflorescence of Oil and with the bones of the artifacts' owners. What is the modern world, Julian once asked, but a vast Cemetery, reclaimed by nature? Every step we took reverberated in the skulls of our ancestors, and I felt as if there were centuries rather than soil beneath my feet. — Robert Charles Wilson

For the first time, I understood the ancients' need to find explanations for why things happen. It's a quintessential human imperative. Random is not emotionally satisfying. Therefore, lightning was the bolt from an angry god. Crop failure was punishment for failing to honor the gods with a fatted calf. The plague happened because you took the Lord's name in vain or coveted your neighbor's wife. Going to church regularly and praying could forestall illness. And on and on. — Alanna Mitchell

Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue; but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse. — C.S. Lewis

The journey of the hero is about the courage to seek the depths; the image of creative rebirth; the eternal cycle of change within us; the uncanny discovery that the seeker is the mystery which the seeker seeks to know. The hero journey is a symbol that binds, in the original sense of the word, two distant ideas, the spiritual quest of the ancients with the modern search for identity, always the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find. — Phil Cousineau

I take it to be true that pure thought can grasp the real, as the ancients had dreamed. — Albert Einstein

We have heard much about the poetry of mathematics, but very little of it has as yet been sung. The ancients had a juster notion of their poetic value than we. The most distinct and beautiful statements of any truth must take at last the mathematical form. We might so simplify the rules of moral philosophy, as well as of arithmetic, that one formula would express them both. — Henry David Thoreau

How Not to Spend Your Senior Year,
Rule #3:
No matter how dire things get,
do not panic.

It will only make a bad situation even worse. Besides, by the time you've reached the hit-the-panic-button stage, it's way too late. Nothing you do will make a difference anyhow.
This is a phenomenon known to the ancients as irony. You may be more familiar with the contemporary expression of this concept: Life sucks.
Particularly weekends. — Cameron Dokey

Medical research in the twentieth century mostly takes place in the lab; in the Renaissance, though, researchers went first and foremost to the library to see what the ancients had said. — Peter Lewis Allen

The ancients, by their system of colonization, made themselves friends all over the known world; the moderns have sought to make subjects, and therefore have made enemies. — Jean-Baptiste Say

Paradox is thus a much deeper and universal concept than the ancients would have dreamed. Rather than an oddity, it is a mainstay of the philosophy of science. — William Poundstone

It has been observed that a dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant will see farther than the giant himself; and the moderns, standing as they do on the vantage ground of former discoveries and uniting all the fruits of the experience of their forefathers, with their own actual observation, may be admitted to enjoy a more enlarged and comprehensive view of things than the ancients themselves. — Charles Caleb Colton

The ancients said: Hulk to be whole. — Laozi

The ancients were afraid that if they went to the end of the earth they would fall off and be consumed by dragons. But once we understand that Christianity is true to what is there, true to the ultimate environment - the infinite, personal God who is really there - then our minds are freed. We can pursue any question and can be sure that we will not fall off the end of the earth. — Francis A. Schaeffer

God's voice has been reduced to paper, and even that paper had to be moderated and deciphered by the proper authorities and intellects. It seemed that direct communication with God was something exclusively for the ancients and uncivilized, while the educated Westerners' access to God was mediated and controlled by the intelligentsia. Nobody wanted God in a box, just a book — Wm. Paul Young

The daily disappearance and the subsequent rise of the sun appeared to many of the ancients as a true resurrection; thus, while the east came to be regarded as the source of light and warmth, happiness and glory, the west was associated with darkness and chill, decay and death. This led to the custom of burying the dead so as to face the east when they rose again, and of building temples and shrines with an opening toward the east. To effect this, Vitruvius, two thousand years ago, gave precise rules, which are still followed by Christian architects. — Isaac Newton

Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Damn it, I have to stop this bleeding. Oh, Will I would truly love to kick your ass for this. If you die, I swear, I'm going to kill you again." A Fine Line the Ancients (Part I). — J.C. Brennan

That public virtue which among the ancients was denominated patriotism, is derived from a strong sense of our own interest in the preservation and prosperity of the free government of which we are members. Such a sentiment, which had rendered the legions of the republic almost invincible, could make but a very feeble impression on the mercenary servants of a despotic prince; and it became necessary to supply that defect by other motives, of a different, but not less forcible nature; honour and religion. — Edward Gibbon

Our present addiction to pollsters and forecasters is a symptom of our chronic uncertainty about the future ... We watch our experts read the entrails of statistical tables and graphs the way the ancients watched their soothsayers read the entrails of a chicken. — Eric Hoffer

He thought about science, about faith, about man. He thought about how every culture, in every country, in every time, had always shared one thing. We all had the Creator. We used different names, different faces, and different prayers, but God was the universal constant for man. God was the symbol we all shared ... the symbol of all the mysteries of life that we could not understand. The ancients had praised God as a symbol of our limitless human potential, — Dan Brown

I believe in Supreme Being, a Creator, whoever he may be, it's of no importance to me, who put us here on earth to do our duty as citizens and fathers; but I don't need to go to church and kiss silver platters and dig into my pocket to fatten up a lot of humbugs who eat better than you or I do! Because he can be worshiped just as well in a wood, a field, or even just gazing at the ethereal vault, like the ancients. — Gustave Flaubert

If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism; if from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition. — Charles Caleb Colton

To be fully human is to be wild. Wild is the strange pull and whispering wisdom. It's the gentle nudge and the forceful ache. It is your truth, passed down from the ancients, and the very stream of life in your blood. Wild is the soul where passion and creativity reside, and the quickening of your heart. Wild is what is real, and wild is your home. — Victoria Erickson

Or how does it happen that trade, which after all is nothing more than the exchange of products of various individuals and countries, rules the whole world through the relation of supply and demand - a relation which, as an English economist says, hovers over the earth like the fate of the ancients, and with invisible hand allots fortune and misfortune to men, sets up empires and overthrows empires, causes nations to rise and to disappear - while with the abolition of the basis of private property, with the communistic regulation of production (and implicit in this, the destruction of the alien relation between men and what they themselves produce), the power of the relation of supply and demand is dissolved into nothing, and men get exchange, production, the mode of their mutual relation, under their own control again? — Karl Marx

The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The ancients had little doubt about the true shape of the earth: "It's [the world's] shape has the rounded appearance of a perfect sphere. This is shown first of all by the name of 'orb' which is bestowed upon it by the general consent of mankind ... Our eyesight also confirms this belief, because the firmament presents the aspect of a concave hemisphere equidistant in every direction, which would be impossible in the case of any other figure." — Pliny The Elder

But money itself is a commodity, an external object, capable of becoming the private property of any individual. Thus social power becomes the private power of private persons. The ancients therefore denounced money as subversive of the economic and moral order of things.[106] Modern society, which, soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth,[107] greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life. — Karl Marx

Bacchus, n.: A convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for getting drunk. — Ambrose Bierce

Consider, I pray, whether you are not renouncing all shame and sincerity to advance such principles. Because a comet appears in a group of stars which the ancients thought fit to call the Virgin, therefore, shall our women be barren, or have frequent miscarriages, or die old maids. I know of nothing which hangs so ill together! To offer such things in seriousness, shows the greatest contempt of mankind, and the most scandalous lying impunity. — Pierre Bayle

In the last fifty years science has advanced more than in the 2,000 previous years and given mankind greater powers over the forces of nature than the ancients ascribed to their gods. — John Boyd Orr

...It wasn't only the color that suggested war to the ancients - it was the strange motion of Mars and the other visible disks that did not behave like the stars, seemingly fixed in the firmament, but advanced and retreated and advanced again along their paths. These disks were given the name planets, meaning wanderers. — Meg Howrey

The Weirdos

On our first date, he bought me a taco, talked at length about the ancients' theories of light, how it streams at all angles to align events in space and time, that it is the source of all information, determines every outcome, how we can reflect it to summon aliens using mirrored bowls of water. — Ottessa Moshfegh

The reading of the ancients awakened new delight in the melody and beauty of language: men became intoxicated with words. The practice of rhetoric was universal and it quickly coloured all literature. It — George Herbert Mair

The ancients, who in these matters were not perhaps such blockheads as some may conceive, considered poetical quotation as one of the requisite ornaments of oratory. — Isaac D'Israeli

Seek not the paths of the ancients;
Seek that which the ancients sought. — Matsuo Basho

My pawing over the ancients and semi-ancients has been one struggle to find out what has been done, once and for all, better than it can ever be done again, and to find out what remains for us to do, and plenty does remain, for if we still feel the same emotions as those who launched a thousand ships, it is quite certain that we came on these feelings differently, through different nuances, by different intellectual gradations. Each age has its own abounding gifts yet only some ages transmute them into matters of duration. — Ezra Pound

The ancients sought their gods in temples, in worldly goods, in the technology they created, and lastly in the stars. They found neither gods nor enlightenment in the materials of the universe, nor will any wise soul find aught in such but the reflection of sorrow. — L.E. Modesitt Jr.

Thousands of years ago the ancients had an advanced mathematical understanding of universe that is revealed in many sources. There is a consistent link to knowledge of the golden mean, but the way in which the ancients were able to formulate and use this information speaks of a technical grasp of the subject that exceeds what we know about it in the present day. — Alison Charlotte Primrose

We are really so prejudiced by our educations, that, as the ancients deified their heroes, we deify their madmen. — Philip Dormer Stanhope

Stephanie: I wouldn't mind a sister either
Tanith: Any chance of that happening?
Stephanie: I can't see what would be in it for my parents. I mean, they have the perfect daughter already - What more could they want? — Derek Landy

Whereas the ancients held that garlick hindred the attraction of the Loadstone, he contradicts this by experience; but I cannot think the ancient Sages would write so confidently of that which they had no experience; of, being a thing so obvious and easie to try; therefore I suppose they had a stronger kind of garlick, then is with us — Alexander Ross

But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions. — Vladimir Nabokov

Running, close companion to death, summons us to the most vivid acts of life. Our ancestors (we have forgotten) ran for food and for love, love and lust. For us, a prime symbol of sexuality is the automobile. For the ancients it was the chase, the foot race. Satyr and nymph, maiden and god, hot pursuit. The mythic hunters, Diana and Atalanta, available only to the males, men or gods, who could outrun them; death to all others. — George Leonard

We have to pray as the ancients prayed. We are women now, not children, and are expected to pray with maturity. The words most often used to describe urgent, prayerful labor are wrestle, plead, cry, and hunger...In some sense, prayer may be the hardest work we will ever be engaged in, and perhaps it should be. — Patricia T. Holland

I began to entertain a suspicion, that no man in this age was sufficiently qualified for such an undertaking; and that whatever any one should advance on that head would, in all probability, be refuted by further experience, and be rejected by posterity. Such mighty revolutions have happened in human affairs, and so many events have arisen contrary to the expectation of the ancients, that they are sufficient to beget the suspicion of still further changes. — David Hume