Gaul Quotes & Sayings

All Gaul is divided into three parts. — Julius Caesar

When the Chinese Wall was built, where'd the masons go for lunch? When Caesar conquered Gaul, was there not even a cook in the army? When the Armada sank, King Philip wept. Were there no other tears? — Bertolt Brecht

The point of civilization is to be civilized; the purpose of action is to perpetuate society, for only in society can philosophy truly take place. — Iain Pears

The unnatural principle of human sacrifice was carried by the British Druids to a ruthless pitch. The mysterious priesthoods of the forests bound themselves and their votaries together by the most deadly sacrament that men can take. Here, perhaps, upon these wooden altars of a sullen island, there lay one of the secrets, awful, inflaming, unifying, of the tribes of Gaul. And whence did this sombre custom come? — Winston S. Churchill

Hung in the scales
with beauty and atrocity:
with the Dying Gaul
too strictly compassed
on his shield
with the actual weight
of each hooded victim,
slashed and dumped. — Seamus Heaney

For the benefit of your research people, I would like to mention (so as to avoid any duplication of labor): that the planet is very like Mars; that at least seventeen states have Pinedales; that the end of the top paragraph Galley 3 is an allusion to the famous "canals" (or, more correctly, "channels") of Schiaparelli (and Percival Lowell); that I have thoroughly studied the habits of chinchillas; that Charrete is old French and should have one "t"; that Boke's source on Galley 9 is accurate; that "Lancelotik" is not a Celtic diminutive but a Slavic one; that "Betelgeuze" is correctly spelled with a "z", not an "s" as some dictionaries have it; that the "Indigo" Knight is the result of some of my own research; that Sir Grummore, mentioned both in Le Morte Darthur ad in Amadis de Gaul, was a Scotsman; that L'Eau Grise is a scholarly pun; and that neither bludgeons nor blandishments will make me give up the word "hobnailnobbing". — Vladimir Nabokov

Aristotle affirms that philosophy did not pass from Greece to Gaul, that is to the Druids, but was received from them. — John Daniel

When the French nation gradually came into existence among the ruins of the Roman civilization in Gaul, a new language was at the same time slowly evolved. — Lytton Strachey

The earliest discussion of the authorship of Luke and Acts is from Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons in Gaul, writing in the late second century. He attributes the books to Luke, the coworker of Paul, and notes that the occurrence of the first-person narrative ("we") throughout the later chapters of Acts (starting at 16:10) indicates that the author of Acts was a companion of Paul and present with him on these occasions. These "we" passages in Acts are the key to the authorship of both Acts and the Gospel of Luke. — Anonymous

THE DYING GAUL is a Hollywood satire. But Hollywood is not the real subject matter here. My play uses that world of high-rolling big money - that crazy-making business - to examine a whole range of subjects.. — Craig Lucas

Julius Caesar owed two millions when he risked the experiment of being general in Gaul. If Julius Caesar had not lived to cross the Rubicon, and pay off his debts, what would his creditors have called Julius Caesar? — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Speaking of wine, beer never caught on with the ancient Greeks and Romans the way it did in Mesopotamia and Western Europe - at least among the privileged classes, who showed a strong preference for fermented grape juice.[11] Beer was seen as a drink of peasants and savages, earning the contempt of public intellectuals like Pliny the Elder, who, in reference to the people of Spain and Gaul (now France) fumed that, "The perverted ingenuity of man has given even to water the power of intoxicating where wine is not procurable. Western nations intoxicate themselves by means of moistened grain."[12] One wonders what Pliny would say today if you were to hand him a glass of the famous beer that now bears his name - Pliny the Elder IPA, brewed by California's Russian River Brewing Co. and renowned as one of the world's finest beers. — James Houston

The Greek Catholic inheritance has a profound ability to help a man transcend that time and place in which he happens to be and then grasp upward for something larger - that prodigious communion of believers in Christ Jesus composed of those who went before him, those who live now in other parts of the world, and those yet to come in future ages in every corner of the world. (Appendix II, page 144) — Matthew W. Gaul

The Roman historian Plutarch estimated that the civilized Romans under Julius Caesar, in his decade-long campaign in Gaul, destroyed 800 towns and villages and enslaved 3 million people. — Mark Kurlansky

Visigoth and Gaul, politics and plague. She fought on, struggling in tandem with antiquated interpretations and outmoded explanations, wondering at the senselessness of something so strong, so powerful, so immovable fading from history, disappearing, once and for all time, into shadow and dust. — Fiddles McMonkeypants

When I think of antiquity, the detail that frightens me is that those hundreds of millions of slaves on whose backs civilization rested generation after generation have left behind them no record whatever. We do not even know their names. In the whole of Greek and Roman history, how many slaves' names are known to you? I can think of two, or possibly three. One is Spartacus and the other is Epictetus. Also, in the Roman room at the British Museum there is a glass jar with the maker's name inscribed on the bottom, 'FELIX FECIT'. I have a mental picture of poor Felix (a Gaul with red hair and a metal collar round his neck), but in fact he may not have been a slave; so there are only two slaves whose names I definitely know, and probably few people can remember more. The rest have gone down into utter silence. — George Orwell

Perhaps if this abbey exists and if we still speak of the Holy Roman Empire, we owe it to the Irish. At that time, the rest of Europe was reduced to a heap of ruins; one day they declared invalid all baptisms imparted by certain priests in Gaul because they baptized 'in nomine patris et filae' [In the name of the Father and of the Daughter]--and not because they practiced a new heresy and considered Jesus a woman, but because they no longer knew any Latin....

Vikings from the Far North came down along the rivers to sack Rome. The pagan temples were falling into ruins, and the Christian ones did not yet exist. It was only the monks of Hibernia in their monasteries who wrote and read, read and wrote, and illuminated, and then jumped into little boats made of animal hide and navigated towards these lands and evangelized them as if you people were infidels, you understand? — Umberto Eco

He said there is a place in Gaul, the oldest church in their part of the world, where some of the Latin monks have outwitted death by secret means. He offered to sell me their secrets, which he has inscribed in a book."
The abbot shudders. "God preserve us from such heresies," he says hastily. "I am certain, my son, that you refused this temptation."
Dracula smiles. "You know I am fond of books. — Elizabeth Kostova

Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it, in appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history preexist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but one at a time. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

You perceive, do you not, that our national fairy tales reflect the inmost desires of the Briton and the Gaul? — Rudyard Kipling

Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres. Gaul as a whole is divided into three parts. — Irving Caesar

The omission of an expected conjunction is called an asyndeton. Caesar is supposed to have said about Gaul: I came, I saw, I conquered. Lincoln concluded the Gettysburg Address, That government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.Caesar seems to have omitted his conjunction to speed things up; he is emphasizing how quickly the conquest of a place follows from its being sighted by a great and ambitious general. Lincoln's omission is more subtle — Arthur Quinn

The gigantic Gaul derided the Roman soldiers as a band of pigmies. — John Lothrop Motley

Such, under the reign of the Antonines, were the six provinces of Gaul; the Narbonnese, Aquitaine, the Celtic, or Lyonnese, the Belgic, and the two Germanies. We — Edward Gibbon

Philologists, who chase A painting syllable through time and space Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark, To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's Ark. — William Cowper

Somewhere in the middle of the second glass that Mad Sweeney himself began to throw both details and irrelevancies into Ibis's narrative (" ... such a girl she was, with breasts cream-colored and spackled with freckles, with the tips of them the rich reddish pink of the sunrise on a day when it'll be bucketing down before noon but glorious again by supper ... ") and then Sweeney was trying, with both hands, to explain the history of the gods in Ireland, wave after wave of them as they came in from Gaul and from Spain and from every damn place, each wave of them transforming the last gods into trolls and fairies and every damn creature until Holy Mother Church herself arrived and every god in Ireland was transformed into a fairy or a saint or a dead king without so much as a by-your-leave ... Mr. — Neil Gaiman

Nearly all the Gauls are of a lofty stature, white, and of ruddy complexion; terrible from the sternness of their eyes, very quarrelsome, and of great pride and insolence. A whole troop of foreigners would not be able to withstand a single Gaul if he called his wife to his assistance, who is usually very strong, and with blue eyes — Ammianus Marcellinus

It's very hard even for a student with good academic study habits to perform well under circumstances where they are working the equivalent of a full-time job. It's incredibly stressful, especially for football players. — Gilbert M. Gaul

To the followers of the murdered Caesar:
Do you march against Decimus Brutus Albinus in Gaul, or against the son of Caesar in Rome? Ask Marcus Antonius.
Are you mobilized to destroy the enemies of your dead leader, or to protect his assassins? Ask Marcus Antonius.
Where is the will of the dead Caesar which bequeathed to every citizen of Rome three hundred pieces of silver coin? Ask Marcus Antonius.
The murderers and conspirators against Caesar are free by an act of the Senate sanctioned by Marcus Antonius.
The murderer Gaius Cassius Longinus has been given the governorship of Syria by Marcus Antonius.
The murderer Marcus Junius Brutus has been given the governorship of Crete by Marcus Antonius.
Where are the friends of the murdered Caesar among his enemies?
The son of Caesar calls to you. — John Edward Williams

In Gaul were two orders, the nobility and the priesthood, while the people, says Caesar, were all slaves. — John Lothrop Motley

In France, successive waves of Gaul, Visigoth, and Frank have swept over the land and have dominated it. But the fair hair and blue eyes and the clear skin of the conquering races have been submerged by the rising and overflow of the dusky blood of the original population. — Sabine Baring-Gould

Why do you call me 'wetlander'?" Gaul gestured toward the river; even Perrin's eyes could not be sure in the moonlight, but he thought the Aiel looked uneasy for the first time. — Robert Jordan