Epochs Quotes & Sayings

There are two essential epochs in any enterprise - to begin, and to get done. — Liberty Hyde Bailey

When you vote, you only change the names of the cabinet. When you shoot, you pull down governments, inaugurate new epochs, abolish old orders and set up new. — George Bernard Shaw

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The Bible became the book of books, but it is not one document. It is a mystical library of interwoven texts by unknown authors who wrote and edited at different times with widely divergent aims. This sacred work of so many epochs and so many hands contains some facts of provable history, some stories of unprovable myth, some poetry of soaring beauty, and many passages of unintelligible, perhaps coded, perhaps simply mistranslated, mystery. Most of it is written not to recount events but to promote a higher truth - the relationship of one people and their God. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

There were epochs in the history of humanity in which the writer was a sacred person. He wrote the sacred books, universal books, the codes, the epic, the oracles. Sentences inscribed on the walls of the crypts; examples in the portals of the temples. But in those times the writer was not an individual alone; he was the people. — Augusto Roa Bastos

As the strata of the earth preserve in succession the living creatures of past epochs, so the shelves of libraries preserve in succession the errors of the past and their expositions, which like the former were very lively and made a great commotion in their own age but now stand petrified and stiff in a place where only the literary palaeontologist regards them. — Arthur Schopenhauer

The paleontological evidence before us today clearly demonstrates ordered progressive change with the successive development of new faunal and floral assemblages through the changing epochs of our earth's history. There should be no real conflict between science, which is the search for truth, and Christ's teachings, which I hold to be truth itself. It is only when scientists remove God from creation that the Christian is faced with an irreconcilable situation. — Wendell Phillips

Our world, like a charnel-house, is strewn with the detritus of dead epochs. — Le Corbusier

As Mr. R. U. Sayee has well said: 'It should be clear a priori that fairy lore must have developed as a result of modifications and accretions received in different countries and at many periods, though we must not overlook the part played by tradition in providing a mould that to some extent determines the nature of later additions.' It must also be self-evident that a great deal of confusion has been caused by the assumption that some spirit-types were fairies which in a more definite sense are certainly not of elfin provenance. In some epochs, indeed, Faerie appears to have been regarded as a species of limbo to which all 'pagan' spirits - to say nothing of defeated gods, monsters, and demons - could be banished, along with the personnel of Olympus and the rout of witchcraft. Such types, however, are usually fairly easy of detection. — Lewis Spence

These are the oldest memories on earth, the time codes carried in every chromosome and gene. Every step we've taken in our evolution is a milestone inscribed with organic memories. From the enzymes controlling the carbon-dioxide cycle, to the organization of the brachial plexus and the nerve pathways of the pyramid cells of the mid-brain. Each is a record of a thousand decisions taken in a chemical crisis. Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs. — J.G. Ballard

The great epochs of our life are at the points when we gain courage to rebaptize our badness as the best in us. — Friedrich Nietzsche

By trying to adjust to the findings that it once tried so viciously to ban and repress, religion has only succeeded in restating the same questions that undermined it in earlier epochs. What kind of designer or creator is so wasteful and capricious and approximate? What kind of designer or creator is so cruel and indifferent? And - most of all - what kind of designer or creator only chooses to "reveal" himself to semi-stupefied peasants in desert regions? — Christopher Hitchens

Shouldn't we rather recognize that each person is a sort of unconscious anthology of all epochs of man; and that he may at times be moving simultaneously among different epochs? — Nick Joaquin

These memories are the memorials and pledges of the vital hours of a lifetime. These hours of afflatus in the human spirit, the springs of art, are, in their mystery, akin to the epochs of history, when a race which for centuries has lived content, unknown, behind its own frontiers, digging, eating, sleeping, begetting, doing what was requisite for survival and nothing else, will, for a generation or two, stupefy the world; commit all manner of crimes, perhaps; follow the wildest chimeras, go down in the end in agony, but leave behind a record of new heights scaled and new rewards won for all mankind; the vision fades, the soul sickens, and the routine of survival starts again. — Evelyn Waugh

Think'st thou existence doth depend on time? It doth; but actions are our epochs. — Lord Byron

A contemporary artist can use the findings of all epochs and all styles, from the most primitive literary expressions up to the most refined products of the baroque. — Juan Goytisolo

We are privileged to live in, and if we are lucky to influence, one of the most critical epochs in the history of the human species. — Carl Sagan

Humans are a young species, and my little life abides in a very big place, where epochs glide by as swiftly as the mongoose. And strangely enough, when we put our human concerns into their proper, small place, we can turn our attention completely to the small things. To a cricket hidden in a crack of lava. To each other. — Sallie Tisdale

Elizabeth set an example to the monarchs of her day and of subsequent epochs, in that she never arrogated to herself the position of ruler of England, but assumed the more modest role of administrator, of carrier-out of the folk-will, of servitor to the national mission; she understood the trends of the epoch that was emerging from an autocratic regime into a constitutional regime. — Stefan Zweig

I am opposing it with an idea of the history of philosophy as a history of philosophers, that is, a history of mortal, fragile and limited creatures like you and I. I am against the idea of clean, clearly distinct epochs in the history of philosophy or indeed in anything else. I think that history is always messy, contingent, plural and material. I am against the constant revenge of idealism in how we think about history. — Simon Critchley

It is a hopeless endeavor to make the form and content of earlier architectural epochs usable for our time; in this, even the strongest artistic talent must fail. We see repeatedly how the outstanding builders fail to achieve an effect because their work does not serve the will of the age. — Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

I held Angie Luna in that room for hours, and I remember the different times we made love like epochs in a civilization, each movement and every touch, apex upon abyss. In the luxury of our bed, we tried every position and every angle. I explored the curves on her body and delighted in seeing the freedom of her ecstasy. Her desperate whispers and pleas. I told her I loved her, and she said she loved me too. We lay in bed with our limbs entangled, in a pacific silence that reminded me of existing on a beach just for the sake of such an existence. I couldn't imagine the world ever becoming better, and for some strange reason the thought slipped into my head that I had suddenly grown to be an old man because I could only hope to repeat, but never improve on, a night like this. I finally took her home sometime when the interstate was empty, and the bridges seemed to lead to nowhere, for they were desolate too. — Sergio Troncoso

In justice to desponding men, it is as well to remember that the brighter endurance of women at these epochs - invaluable, sweet, angelic, as it is - owes more of its origin to a narrower vision that shuts out many of the leaden-eyed despairs in the van, than to a hopefulness intense enough to quell them. — Thomas Hardy

background extinction." In ordinary times - times here understood to mean whole geologic epochs - extinction takes place only very rarely, more rarely even than speciation, and it occurs at what's known as the background extinction rate. This rate varies from one group of organisms to another; often it's expressed in terms of extinctions per million species-years. — Elizabeth Kolbert

I photograph in public and semi-public spaces that date from various epochs. These are spaces accessible to everyone. They are places where you can meet and communicate, where you can share or receive knowledge, where you can relax and recover. They are spas, hotels, waiting rooms, museums, libraries, universities, banks, churches and, as of a few years ago, zoos. All of the places have a purpose, as for the most part do the things within them. — Candida Hofer

It is interesting to transport one's self back to the times when Astronomy began; to observe how discoveries were connected together, how errors have got mixed up with truth, have delayed the knowledge of it, and retarded its progress; and, after having followed the various epochs and traversed every climate, finally to contemplate the edifice founded on the labours of successive centuries and of various nations. — Jean Sylvain Bailly

Light. Space. Light and space without time, I think, for this is a country with only the slightest traces of human history. In the doctrine of the geologists with their scheme of ages, eons and epochs all is flux, as Heraclitus taught, but from the mortally human point of view the landscape of the Colorado is like a section of eternity- timeless. In all my years in the canyon country I have yet see a rock fall, of its own volition, so to speak, aside from floods. To convince myself of the reality of change and therefore time I will sometimes push a stone over the edge of a cliff and watch it descend and wait- lighting my pipe- for the report of its impact and disintegration to return. Doing my bit to help, of course, aiding natural processes and verifying the hypotheses of geological morphology. But am not entirely convinced. — Edward Abbey

The best men of the best epochs are simply those who make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins. — Thomas Huxley

I have always believed that astrophysics should be the extrapolation of laboratory physics, that we must begin from the present universe and work our way backward to progressively more remote and uncertain epochs. — Hannes Alfven

Our thoughts are epochs in our lives; all else is but as a journal of the winds that blow while we are here. — Henry David Thoreau

Anachronism is not the inconsequential juxtaposition of epochs, but rather their inter-penetration, like the telescoping legs of a tripod, a series of tapering structures. Since it's quite far from one end to the other they can be opened out like an accordion; but they can also be stacked inside one another like Russian dolls, where the walls around time periods are extremely close to one another. The people of other centuries hear our phonographs blaring, and through the walls of time we see them raising their hands towards the deliciously prepared meal. — Elisabeth Lenk

I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet. The — G.K. Chesterton

May we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization - possibly the whole of mankind - have become 'neurotic'? — Sigmund Freud

In the experimental sciences, the epochs of the most brilliant progress are almost always separated by long intervals of almost absolute repose. — Francois Arago

Heroes abound at the dawn of civilizations, during pre-Homeric and Gothic epochs, when people, not having yet experienced spiritual torture, satisfy their thirst for renunciation through a derivative: heroism. — Emil Cioran

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)] — Carl Sagan

The great epochs of our life come when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Hackney at certain epochs has given itself suburban airs and graces, before being slapped down and consigned once more to the dump bin of aborted ambition. — Iain Sinclair

Our lives feel like these epochs, but really, we are dust in the wind. — Justin Vernon

Human nature is universial, and it endures through all cultures and epochs. This is the secret of perenniality of certain poems and books. — Octavio Paz

Zachariah, Zachariah,' whispers Rachel, casting a practised eye over the back of his head and down the length of him, from the shoulder blades where his wings once grew, epochs ago, in some other guise: angel - guardian, avenging - or great vagrant bird - Daurian Jackdaw, Chimney Swift, Pacific Loon! — Emma Richler

Scenes which make vital changes in our neighbors' lot are but the background of our own, yet, like a particular aspect of the fields and trees, they become associated for us with the epochs of our own history, and make a part of that unity which lies in the selection of our keenest consciousness. — George Eliot

That is all. Two epochs met.
A silly little girl and an old poet. — Lina Kostenko

Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised
and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy. — Doris Lessing

Allan thought it sounded unnecessary for the people in the seventeenth century to kill each other. If they had only been a little patient they would all have died in the end anyway. Julius said that you could say the same of all epochs — Jonas Jonasson

We live in one of the few epochs of humanity where life isn't just a painful cycle of toil, fatigue, and collapse. Now pleasure gyrates us through those stages. — Bauvard

No age is compelled to take its beauty from preceding epochs. — Willis Polk

Music is either sacred or secular. The sacred agrees with its dignity, and here has its greatest effect on life, an effect that remains the same through all ages and epochs. Secular music should be cheerful throughout. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

We deliberate about the parcels of life, but not about life itself, and so we arrive all unawares at its different epochs, and have the trouble of beginning all again. And so finally it is that we do not walk as men confidently towards death, but let death come suddenly upon us. — Seneca The Younger

There are lone figures armed only with ideas, sometimes with just one idea, who blast away whole epochs in which we are enwrapped like mummies. Some are powerful enough to resurrect the dead. Some steal on us unawares and put a spell over us which it takes centuries to throw off. Some put a curse on us, for our st idity and inertia, and then it seems as if God himself were unable to lift it. — Henry Miller

Unshakable faith is only that which can face reason in all human epochs. — Allan Kardec

A voice from other epochs belongs in a graveyard of other epochs. — H.P. Lovecraft

This is the way history happens: it is measured out in days rather than epochs. — Charles Nicholl

All pursuit of commodity production becomes at the same time pursuit of the exploitation of labour-power; but only capitalist commodity production is an epoch-making mode of exploitation, which in the course of its historical development revolutionizes the entire economic structure of society by its organization of the labour process and its gigantic extension of technique, and towers incomparably above all earlier epochs. — Karl Marx

Why has not anyone seen that fossils alone gave birth to a theory about the formation of the earth, that without them, no one would have ever dreamed that there were successive epochs in the formation of the globe. — Georges Cuvier

Hobbes took the madness of his age, considered it "normal," and projected it back into prehistoric epochs of which he knew next to nothing. What Hobbes called "human nature" was a projection of seventeenth-century Europe, where life for most was rough, to put it mildly. Though it has persisted for centuries, Hobbes's dark fantasy of prehistoric human life is as valid as grand conclusions about Siberian wolves based on observations of stray dogs in Tijuana. — Christopher Ryan

Moral epochs have their course as well as the seasons. We can no more hold them fast than we can hold sun, moon, and stars. Our faults perpetually return upon us; and herein lies the subtlest difficulty of self-knowledge. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born. — George Eliot

We simply thought that we would be considerably poorer in Europe if we didn't have the sacred buildings of earlier epochs. It's still possible to experience the Gothic period, not to mention the Romantic. Only nothing remains of the industrial age. So we thought that our photos would give the viewer the chance to go back to a time that is gone forever. — Bernd Becher

Nature, I have constantly argued in my work, is the real superpower of this godless universe. It is the ultimate disposer of human fate, randomly recarving geography over 10,000-year epochs. — Camille Paglia

In a flash of self-comprehension, Roger Brevard knew that he would never, as he had hped, leave Salem. He was abstemious man, one of a family of long lives, and he would linger here, increasingly unimportant, for a great while, an old man in new epochs, isolated among strange people and prejudices. Whatever the cause - the small safety or an inward flaw - he had never been part of the corporate sweating humanity where, in the war of spirit and flesh, the vital rewards and accomplishments were found. — Joseph Hergesheimer

Days in the past cover up little by little those that preceded them and are themselves buried beneath those that follow them. But each past day has remained deposited in us, as in a vast library where, even of the oldest books, there is a copy which doubtless nobody will ever ask to see. And yet should this day from the past, traversing the translucency of the intervening epochs, rise to the surface and spread itself inside us until it covers us entirely, then for a moment names resume their former meaning, people their former aspect, we ourselves our state of mind at the time, and we feel, with a vague suffering which however is endurable and will not last for long, the problems which have long ago become insoluble and which caused us such anguish at the time ... Incessant upheavals raise to the surface ancient deposits. — Marcel Proust

It isn't polls or public opinion at the moment that counts. It is right and wrong and leadership
men with fortitude, honesty, and a belief in the right that makes epochs in the history of the world. — Harry S. Truman

Political convulsions, like geological upheavings usher in new epochs of the world's progress. — Wendell Phillips

There are innumerable civilized people who would shrink from murder or incest, and who yet do not hesitate to gratify their avarice, their aggressiveness and their sexual lusts, and who have no compunction in hurting others by lying, fraud and calumny, so long as they remain unpunished for it; and no doubt this has been so for many cultural epochs. If — Sigmund Freud

I will not go so far as to say that to construct a history of thought without profound study of the mathematical ideas of successive epochs is like omitting Hamlet from the play which is named after him. That would be claiming too much. But it is certainly analogous to cutting out the part of Ophelia. This simile is singularly exact. For Ophelia is quite essential to the play, she is very charming ... and a little mad. — Alfred North Whitehead

Epochs later, the curtains grew dusty and brittle, the deep, vicious colour of a bruise. The floorboards creaked and we were civilized. We were no longer the wild, ravening voices of the world, howling our shame and indignation at the sky. — Brenna Yovanoff

Unceasing warfare gives rise to its own social conditions which have been similar in all epochs. People enter a permanent state of alertness to ward off attacks. You see the absolute rule of the autocrat. All new things become dangerous frontier districts - new planets, new economic areas to exploit, new ideas or new devices, visitors - everything suspect. Feudalism takes firm hold, sometimes disguised as a politbureau or similar structure, but always present. Hereditary succession follows the lines of power. The blood of the powerful dominates. — Frank Herbert

I am excessively slothful, and wonderfully industrious-by fits. There are epochs when any kind of mental exercise is torture, and when nothing yields me pleasure but the solitary communion with the 'mountains & the woods'-the 'altars' of Byron. I have thus rambled and dreamed away whole months, and awake, at last, to a sort of mania for composition. Then I scribble all day, and read all night, so long as the disease endures. — Edgar Allan Poe

The ascetic ideal has an aim - this goal is, putting it generally, that all the other interests of human life should, measured by its standard, appear petty and narrow; it explains epochs, nations, men, in reference to this one end; it forbids any other interpretation, any other end; it — Friedrich Nietzsche

The moment of meeting, and that of parting are the two greatest epochs of life as sayeth the great book of Zend. — Voltaire

At certain epochs, man has felt conscious of something about himself - body and spirit - which was outside the day-to-day struggle for existence and the night-to-night struggle with fear; and he has felt the need to develop these qualities of thought and feeling so that they might approach as nearly as possible to an ideal of perfection - reason, justice, physical beauty, all of them in equilibrium. He has managed to satisfy this need in various ways - through myths, through dance and song, through systems of philosophy and through the order that he has imposed upon the visible world. — Kenneth Clark

On a level, they might be perfect for one another, but it's a theoretical perfection only, compromised by timing. Their bests passed one another on the way to here, and now exist epochs apart. — Billy O'Callaghan

It takes time for change to take place. But then when huge changes are taking place, they are extraordinary. And it requires a kind of philosophical thinking, thinking in terms of epochs. — Grace Lee Boggs

Various epochs of the past have had their own characteristic struggles and interests. Each of these great epochs has left behind itself a kind of cultural deposit, like a geologic stratum. These deposits have found their way into educational institutions in the form of studies, distinct courses of study, distinct types of schools. — John Dewey

The ancient Roman code belongs to a class of which almost every civilised nation in the world can show a sample, and which, so far as the Roman and Hellenic worlds were concerned, were largely diffused over them at epochs not widely distant from one another. — Henry James Sumner Maine

Our thoughts are the epochs in our lives, all else is but as a journal of the winds that blew while we were here. — Henry David Thoreau

Architecture wrote the history of the epochs and gave them their names. — Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

Basketball's eras are defined by teams - Celtics, Lakers, Bulls - and baseball's epochs are defined by players - Ruth, Robinson, Mantle - but with football, it's the sideline strategists, the nutty professors and top coated Lears. — J.R. Moehringer

The more we gained knowledge of these new totalitarian systems of mass-rule, the more we realized not only their similarity of structure, but also the fact that we had to do with a type of dominance that had been known in earlier epochs. We discovered that what the ancients called "tyrannis," or 'cheirokratia," what Sulla or the tyrants of the Italian Rennaissance had practised, and what finally alarmed the world in the French Revolution and under Napoleon, had surprisingly many similarities with modern totalitarianism, although this latter had elements with which they cannot be compared, and although it possessed means of domination unknown in past ages. — Wilhelm Ropke

Even though the world as a whole progresses, youth must always start again from the beginning, and as individuals go through the epochs of the world's culture. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The arts speak across epochs. If you think that people started to build a cathedral in 1315 and the people worked on that cathedral, it wasn't going to be finished until 1585. So they were thinking 200 years from now. Maybe by the time I die, this wall might be put up. — Wynton Marsalis

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic. — Carl Sagan

Nadine. The simple reduction of Nadine's primary core self could shunt her potential energy where it would better serve. Instead of living (pointlessly), Nadine could provide 1.2 terajoules of energy to an active volcano on the seafloor of the Pacific Ocean. Just enough power to tip it over the erupting point, eventually creating 762 square miles of new land. That land would erode in time, but if the goal is survival, the land would last through epochs, while Nadine would last a paltry few years longer on the street. The untapped energy called "Nadine" could foster the survival of a much larger entity for hundreds of thousands of years. Or — Robert Brockway

Great men, great events, great epochs, it has been said, grow as we recede from them; and the rate at which they grow in the estimation of men is in some sort a measure of their greatness. — John Campbell Shairp

And, inevitably, like the iron and the magnet with sweet obedience to their precise, immutable laws, I poured myself into her. There was no pink ticket, there were no calculations, there was no One State, there was no me. There were only gentle, sharp, clenched teeth and there were gold eyes thrown wide open to me- and through them I slowly went inside, deeper and deeper still. And silence- except in the corner, thousands of miles away, where drops were dripping into the sink. I was the universe, and eras and epochs passed as drop followed drop ... — Yevgeny Zamyatin

The life of a woman may be divided into three epochs; in the first she dreams of love, in the second she makes love in the third she regrets it. — Prosper Of Aquitaine

It is not architectural achievement that makes the structures of earlier times seem to us so full of significance but the circumstance that antique temples, Roman basilicas, and even the cathedrals of the Middle Ages are not the works of single personalities but creations of entire epochs. — Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

The startings and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs in the village day. — Henry David Thoreau

I don't deny," he said, "that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet. — G.K. Chesterton

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. — Karl Marx

In reference to Persepolis and all palaces, cities and temples of the past: could these wonders have come into being without that suffering? without the overseer's whip, the slave's fear, the ruler's vanity? was not the monumentality of past epochs created by that which is negative and evil in man? — Ryszard Kapuscinski