Quotes & Sayings About Byzantium

I am no slave. This is my city! "
Lada snorted. "And I am the queen of Byzantium." She turned on her heel, pulling Radu along.
"I will see you again!" the boy called. It was not a question, but a command.
"I will burn your city to the ground." Lada called back over her shoulder. — Kiersten White

We are not as the World sees us;
We are the Beloved of the Lord.
We are not as the Schedule pins us;
We are Immortal, Wing'd Creatures.

--St. Jabsha of Byzantium — Kate Betterton

There remain of Europe, first, Macedonia and the part of Thrace that are contiguous to it and extend as far as Byzantium; secondly, Greece; and thirdly, the Islands that are close by. Macedonia, of course, is a part of Greece, yet now, since I am following the nature and shape of the place geographically, I have decided to classify it apart from the rest of Greece and to join it with that part of Thrace ... — Strabo

Across the broken apses and shattered naves of a hundred ruined Byzantine churches, the same smooth, cold, neo-classical faces of the saints and apostles stare down like a gallery of deaf mutes; and through this thundering silence the everyday reality of life in the Byzantine provinces remains persistently difficult to visualise. The sacred and aristocratic nature of Byzantine art means that we have very little idea of what the early Byzantine peasant or shopkeeper looked like; we have even less idea of what he thought, what he longed for, what he loved or what he hated.
Yet through the pages of The Spiritual Meadow one can come closer to the ordinary Byzantine than is possible through virtually any other single source.

Dalrymple, William (2012-06-21). From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium (Text Only) (Kindle Location 248). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition. — William Dalrymple

Writing for children is as easy as describing the history of the Byzantium in three words. — Mo Willems

Woman is frequently praised as the more "creative" sex. She does not need to make poems, it is argued; she has no drive to make poems, because she is privileged to make babies. A pregnancy is as fulfilling as, say, Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium ... To call a child a poem may be a pretty metaphor, but it is a slur on the labor of art. — Cynthia Ozick

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come. — W.B.Yeats

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

Take the tail of the female tuna - and I'm talking of the large female tuna whose mother city is Byzantium. — Mark Kurlansky

Permanent bonds of culture began to be formed between the extreme East and the extreme West of Europe by intermarriage, by commerce, by the admission of the nobles of Byzantium within the orders of chivalry. — Joseph Jacobs

Sir Steven Runciman, whose history of the Crusades is an imperishable work, because it demonstrates that medieval Christian fundamentalism not only constituted a menace to Islamic civilization but also directly resulted in the sack of Byzantium, the retardation of Europe, and the massacre of the Jews. — Christopher Hitchens

I have read somewhere that in the Emperor's palace at Byzantium was a tree made of gold and silver, and artificial birds that sang. — William Butler Yeats

One day in Dipstick, Nebraska, or Landfill, Oklahoma, is worth more to me than an eternity in Dante's plastic Paradiso, or Yeats's gold-plated Byzantium. — Edward Abbey

Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
May unwind the winding path;
A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
("Byzantium") — W.B.Yeats

Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will find the name of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished.
Who raised it up so many times? In what houses
Of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live?
Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished
Did the masons go? Great Rome
Is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Had Byzantium, much praised in song,
Only palaces for its inhabitants? Even in fabled Atlantis
The night the ocean engulfed it
The drowning still bawled for their slaves. — Bertolt Brecht

Like most Istanbul Turks I had little interest in Byzantium as a child. I associated the word with spooky, bearded, black-robed Greek Orthodox priests, with the aqueducts that still ran through the city, with the Hagia Sophia and the red brick walls of old churches. To me, these were remnants of an age so distant there was little need to know about it. Even the Ottomans who conquered Byzantium seemed very far away. — Orhan Pamuk

Petchenegs versus Byzantium, said Jimmy, one memorable day. — Margaret Atwood

Travel releases spontaneity. You become a godlike creature full or choice, free to visit the stately pleasure domes, make love in the morning, sketch a bell tower, read a history of Byzantium, stare for one hour at the face of Leonardo da Vinci's 'Madonna dei fusi.' You open, as in childhood, and
for a time
receive this world. There's visceral aspect, too
the huntress who is free. Free to go, free to return home bringing memories to lay on the hearth. — Frances Mayes

I saw Byzantium in a dream and knew that I would die there.. and the golden towers of Byzantium would be my tomb ~ Aidan — Stephen R. Lawhead

...while cleverness is appropriate to rhetoric, and inventiveness to poetry, truth alone is appropriate to history. — Procopius Of Caesarea

The United States of America is logically the least magical place in the world. Planned by committee, not even a country, just a legal umbrella for fifty associated provinces, an elaborate polling system for creating other larger and more permanent committees. No mysteries; no demons; one God at the most. Sure, it had its own folklore and tall tales, but it wasn't the same. Its rulers weren't descended from men and women who spoke with birds and rode dragons. Johnny Appleseed and Paul Bunyan were hayseeds, folksy also-rans compared to the madness in the ancient royal blood going back to the Druids, to Byzantium, to Mithraic cults. — Austin Grossman

I can't claim to 'understand' 'Byzantium,' if any dance work can be 'understood,' but whenever I see it, I sense that it's charged with meaning. — Robert Gottlieb