Bce In Quotes & Sayings

It is simply not true that "religion" is always aggressive. Sometimes it has actually put a brake on violence. In the ninth century BCE, Indian ritualists extracted all violence from the liturgy and created the ideal of ahimsa, "nonviolence." The medieval Peace and Truce of God forced knights to stop terrorizing the poor and outlawed violence from Wednesday to Sunday each week. Most dramatically, after the Bar Kokhba war, the rabbis reinterpreted the scriptures so effectively that Jews refrained from political aggression for a millennium. Such successes have been rare. Because of the inherent violence of the states in which we live, the best that prophets and sages have been able to do is provide an alternative. — Karen Armstrong

Non-injury to all living beings is the only religion." (first truth of Jainism) "In happiness and suffering, in joy and grief, we should regard all creatures as we regard our own self, and should therefore refrain from inflicting upon others such injury as would appear undesirable to us if inflicted upon ourselves." "This is the quintessence of wisdom; not to kill anything. All breathing, existing, living sentient creatures should not be slain, nor treated with violence, nor abused, nor tormented, nor driven away. This is the pure unchangeable Law. Therefore, cease to injure living things." "All living things love their life, desire pleasure and do not like pain; they dislike any injury to themselves; everybody is desirous of life and to every being, his life is very dear."
Yogashastra (Jain Scripture) (c. 500 BCE) — Anonymous

If the entire course of evolution were compressed into a single year, the earliest bacteria would appear at the end of March, but we wouldn't see the first human ancestors until 6 a.m. on December 31st. The golden age of Greece, about 500 BCE, would occur just thirty seconds before midnight. — Jerry A. Coyne

Charles Jencks is the most notable landscape and garden designer to carry forward the 3500 BCE-1800CE landscape and garden design agenda. — Tom Turner

Inhaling fumes directly from burning foliage, either in a confined space such as a cave or a tent, or scooping up and breathing in the vapors from psychoactive plant materials scattered on a bowl full of hot coals, must be an extremely ancient practice. Herodotus's account from the fifth-century BCE, describing the use of small tents by the Scythians (a northwestern Iranian tribe) for inhaling the smoke of cannabis, is probably the most famous account that confirms the antiquity of the use of cannabis as a ritual intoxicant. — John Rush

Pythagoras (550 BCE), with his theory of numbers, had been a source of inspiration for those who sought harmony in the Universe. His aim was to show in his philosophy that there was a high, structural, divine order to the Universe. This was a natural habitat for the souls. Mathematics was the tool to investigate this order. — Altay Birand

4. This silver coin was minted in 63 BCE, its design showing one of the Roman people voting on a piece of legislation, casting a voting tablet into a jar for counting. The differences in detail between the two versions well illustrate the differences in the die stamps. The name of the official in charge of the mint — Mary Beard

The Exile In July 587 BCE, Babylonian soldiers broke through Jerusalem's walls, ending a starvation siege that had lasted well over a year. They burned the city and Solomon's temple and took its king and many other leaders to Babylon as captives, leaving others to fend for themselves in the destroyed land. Many surrounding countries disappeared altogether when similar disasters befell them. But Judah did not. Instead, the period scholars most often call the "Babylonian exile" inspired religious leaders to revise parts of Scripture that had been passed down to them. It also sparked the writing of entirely new Scriptures and the revision of ideas about God, creation, and history. Much of what is called the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament was written, edited, and compiled during and after this national tragedy. — Walter Brueggemann

Here, new information, new empirical data, led to a direct challenge to the way in which the gods were envisioned. This new doubt encouraged a new kind of punishment for doubt. Set up about 438 BCE, the law against Anaxagoras's atheism held that society must denounce those who do not believe in the divine beings or who teach doctrines about things in the sky. — Jennifer Michael Hecht

It's important to keep in mind that when viewed against the full scale of our species' existence, ten thousand years is but a brief moment. Even if we ignore the roughly two million years since the emergence of our Homo lineage, in which our direct ancestors lived in small foraging social groups, anatomically modern humans are estimated to have existed as long as 200,000 years.* With the earliest evidence of agriculture dating to about 8000 BCE, the amount of time our species has spent living in settled agricultural societies represents just 5 percent of our collective experience, at most. As recently as a few hundred years ago, most of the planet was still occupied by foragers. — Christopher Ryan

The hypothesis [of Yahweh's Midianite-Kenite origin] is constructed on four bases:

[1] the narratives dealing with Moses' family and his Midianite in-laws;

[2] poetic texts which are understood to refer to the original residence of Yahweh;

[3] Egyptian topographical texts from the fourteenth to the twelfth century BCE dealing with the Edomite region in which the name Yahweh appears;

[4] and an interpretation of Cain as the eponymous ancestor of the Kenites and the mark of Cain as signifying affiliation to the Yahwistic cult community.

(p. 133)

(from 'The Midianite-Kenite Hypothesis Revisited and the Origins of Judah', JSOT 33.2 (2008): 131-153) — Joseph Blenkinsopp

We don't know much about our hero before 325 BCE-he just sort of materialized out of thin air like a face-melting UFO or a vengeful, homicidal rainbow, but apparently he had some serious beef with people in charge ... — Ben Thompson

In the inscriptions of Darius I, who came to the Persian throne after the death of Cyrus's son Cambyses in 522 BCE, we find a combination of three themes that would recur in the ideology of all successful empires: a dualistic worldview that pits the good of empire against evildoers who oppose it; a doctrine of election that sees the ruler as a divine agent; and a mission to save the world. — Karen Armstrong

The mouth of a perfectly contented man is filled with beer. - Egyptian proverb, c. 2200 BCE — Tom Standage

By the mid second century BCE, the profits of warfare had made the Roman people by far the richest of any in their known world. Thousands upon thousands of captives became the slave labour that worked the Roman fields, mines and mills, that exploited resources on a much more intensive scale than ever before and fuelled Roman production and Roman economic growth. — Mary Beard

After the death of Archimedes in 212 BCE, the topic of motion was effectively abandoned; it did not resurface for another 1,400 years, when Gerard of Brussels revived the mathematical works of Euclid and Archimedes and came very close to defining speed as a ratio of distance to time. — Joseph Mazur

Hell has three hates: lust, anger and greed. — Anonymous

Pitiful are those who, acting, are attached to their action's fruits. The wise man lets go of all results, whether good or bad, and is focused on the action alone. ~ Bhagavad Gita, c. 400 BCE ~ 2:49-50 — Larry Chang

They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth. -Plato, philosopher (427-347 BCE) — Plato

During the first millennium BCE, even the beer-loving Mesopotamians turned their backs on beer, which was dethroned as the most cultured and civilized of drinks, and the age of wine began. — Tom Standage

A big heavy phrase is easier to handle if it comes at the end, when your work assembling the overarching phrase is done and nothing else is on you mind. (It's another version of the advice to prefer right-branching trees over left-branching and center-embedded ones.) Light-before-heavy is one of the oldest principles in linguistics, having been discovered in the fourth century BCE by the Sanskrit grammarian Panini. It often guides the intuitions of writers when they have to choose an order for items in a list, as in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle; and Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound! — Steven Pinker

An Egyptian medical scroll dating back at least 1,500 years BCE recommended treating migraines by using an electric catfish. In other cultures, electric eels were wrapped around a migraineur's head to ease the pain. — Carolyn Bernstein

I hate and I love. And if you ask me how, I do not know: I only feel it, and I am torn in two. — Catullus

Celebrate my heart, at ease or on fire, in my usual featherbrained way.

Horace, Roman Poet
Ode I-6, 23 BCE — Vivian Swift

Adam is definitely said to be vegetarian and not only that but even after the fall, Adam is seen as one who did not even covet flesh! Mankind eating flesh did not even enter the picture according to Genesis until Noah after the deluge.

[...]

The domestic cat would be at a loss to understand this herbivores' delight as being a paradise designed for it. This is because to the cat descended from African wild cats circa 8000 BCE in the Middle East would find it nearly impossible to believe it as true. — Leviak B. Kelly

THE EXILE AND AFTER This renewed catastrophe was a key event in the history of the people of Israel. Maybe if the exile in Babylon had lasted more than half a century, the impetus to preserve and enhance a Jewish identity might have been lost, but as it was the exiles who returned were able to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem; it was reconsecrated in 516 BCE. — Diarmaid MacCulloch

Saaremaa Crater Field KAALI, SAAREMAA Opinions vary on when it happened, but at some point between 5600 BCE and 600 BCE, a large meteor entered the atmosphere, broke into pieces, and slammed into the forest floor of the island of Saaremaa. The heat of the impact instantly incinerated trees within a 3-mile radius (5 km). A mythology developed — Joshua Foer

The chances of a small country on Assyria's periphery in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE not hosting a single shrine to an Assyrian god are about the same as the chances of a small modern country in America's sphere of influence having no McDonald's and no Starbucks. 96 (And the chances of no Israelites resenting those shrines are roughly the chances of no one resenting the cultural intrusion of a globally hegemonic America.) On — Robert Wright

It means that Rama was born on 10 January in 5114 BCE at precisely 12.30 pm.' 'And — Ashwin Sanghi

Why had Ovid lived in Ancient Rome in 20 BCE and not Chicago in 2006 CE? Would Ovid still have been Ovid if he had lived in America? No, he wouldn't have been, because he would have been a Native American or possibly and American Indian or a First Person or an Indigenous Person, and they did not have Latin or any other kind of written language then. So did Ovid matter because he was Ovid or because he lived in ancient Rome? — John Green

The quintessential emblem of religion - and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core - is the sacrifice of a child by a parent.
Almost all religious faiths incorporate the myth of such a sacrifice, and some have actually made it real. Lucretius had in mind the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father Agamemnon, but he may also have been aware of the Jewish story of Abraham and Isaac and other comparable Near Eastern stories for which the Romans of his times had a growing taste. Writing around 50 BCE he could not, of course, have anticipated the great sacrifice myth that would come to dominate the Western world, but he would not have been surprised by it or by the endlessly reiterated, prominently displayed images of the bloody, murdered son. — Stephen Greenblatt

Demon comes from daimon, which means 'intelligence' or 'individual destiny', whereas angel means messenger. Originally daimones were always perceived as being positive entities. The Greek philosopher Plato introduced the division between kakodaemons and eudaemons, or benevolent and malevolent daimons, in the fourth century BCE. Seven centuries later in the third century CE, the Neo-Platonic philosopher Porphyry made an interesting distinction, this being essentially that the good daimones were the ones who governed their emotions and being, whereas bad daimones were governed by them. — Stephen Skinner