Quotes & Sayings About The Library Of Alexandria

Now we can travel with more books stored in our telephones than the ancient Egyptians kept in their vast library at Alexandria. — Mike Aquilina

If you crave for Knowledge, the banquet of Knowledge grows and groans on the board until the finer appetite sickens. If, still putting all your trust in Knowledge, you try to dodge the difficulty by specialising, you produce a brain bulging out inordinately on one side, on the other cut flat down and mostly paralytic at that: and in short so long as I hold that the Creator has an idea of a man, so long shall I be sure that no uneven specialist realises it. The real tragedy of the Library at Alexandria was not that the incendiaries burned immensely, but that they had neither the leisure nor the taste to discriminate ... but we may agree that, in reading, it is not quantity so much that tells, as quality and thoroughness of digestion. — Arthur Quiller-Couch

How DARE you and the rest of your barbarians set fire to my library? Play conqueror all you want, Mighty Caesar! Rape, murder, pillage thousands, even millions of human beings! But neither you nor any other barbarian has the right to destroy one human thought! — William Shakespeare

THOMASINA:
But then the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue! — Tom Stoppard

Like evolution itself, there have been rapid advances and crippling setbacks along the way. If the Library of Alexandria had never been burned to the ground it is possible to imagine that we would have built upon the achievements of the ancient Greeks to greater and earlier effect, and therefore it could have been in the time of a Cardano or a Newton or a Pascal that we first put a man on the moon. And we can only wonder where we would be. And at the planets we would have terraformed and colonised by the twenty-first century. Which medical advances we would have made. Maybe if there had been no dark ages, no switching off of the light, we would have found a way never to grow old, to never die. — Matt Haig

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew? — Tom Stoppard

The existence of any library, even mine, allows readers a sense of what their craft is truly about, a craft that struggles against the stringencies of time by bringing fragments of the past into their present. It grants them a glimpse, however secret or distant, into the minds of other human beings, and allows them a certain knowledge of their own condition through the stories stored here for their perusal. Above all, it tells readers that their craft consist of the power to remember, actively, through the prompt of the page, selected moments of the human experience. This was the great practice established by the Library of Alexandria. — Alberto Manguel

The Library of Alexandria?" I ask. "Didn't that burn down?"
Mrs Philipoulus scoffs. "Damn fool Hypatia. Athena tried to convince her to install a sprinkler system. But no-o-o, no one was going to tell the librarianatrix how to run her library. — Tera Lynn Childs

Well, when it became obvious that magic was going to wreck the computer networks, people tried to preserve portions of the Internet. They took snapshots of their servers and sent the data to a central database at the Library of Congress. The project became known as the Library of Alexandria, because in ancient times Alexandria's library was said to contain all the human knowledge, before some jackass burned it to the ground. — Ilona Andrews

At the time of Caliph Omar's invasion of Egypt, the Arab officer on duty in the destruction of the library of Alexandria used two stamps with which he marked the books. One said: 'Does not agree with the Koran - heretic, must be burned'. The other said: 'Agrees with the Koran - superfluous, must be burned'. — Nils Kjaer

... Because every ruler celebrated his conquests by setting torch to the nearest library. Did not Julius Caesar incinerate the scrolls in the great library at Alexandria during his campaign against the republicans in Africa? Or General Stilicho, leader of the Vandals, order the burning of the Sybillene prophecies in Rome? — Ross King

Merlin had, according to legend, created the White Council of Wizards from the chaos of the fall of the Roman Empire. He plunged into the flames of the burning Library of Alexandria to save the most critical texts, helped engineer the Catholic Church as a vessel to preserve knowledge and culture during Europe's Dark Ages, and leapt tall cathedrals in a single bound. — Jim Butcher

Lying there, I thought of my own culture, of the assembly of books in the library at Alexandria; of the deliberations of Darwin and Mendel in their respective gardens; of the architectural conception of the cathedral at Chartres; of Bach's cello suites, the philosophy of Schweitzer, the insights of Planck and Dirac. Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation? — Barry Lopez

Eratosthenes was the director of the great library of Alexandria, the Centre of science and learning in the ancient world. Aristotle had argued that humanity was divided into Greeks and everybody else, whom he called barbarians and that the Greeks should keep themselves racially pure. He thought it was fitting for the Greeks to enslave other peoples. But Erathosthenes criticized Aristotle for his blind chauvinism, he believed there was good and bad in every nation. — Carl Sagan

We can roam the bloated stacks of the Library of Alexandria, where all imagination and knowledge are assembled; we can recognize in its destruction the warning that all we gather will be lost, but also that much of it can be collected again; we can learn from its splendid ambition that what was one man's experience can become, through the alchemy of words, the experience of all, and how that experience, distilled once again into words, can serve each singular reader for some secret, singular purpose. — Alberto Manguel

To accept the story of the Arab destruction of the library of Alexandria, one must explain how it is that so dramatic an event was unmentioned and unnoticed not only in the rich historical literature of medieval Islam, but even in the literatures of the Coptic and other Christian churches, of the Byzantines, of the Jews, or anyone else who might have thought the destruction of a great library worthy of comment. That the story still survives, and is repeated, despite all these objections, is testimony to the enduring power of a myth. — Bernard Lewis

Like the burning of the ancient library at Alexandria or the supremely ignorant incineration of stacks of invaluable Mayan codices, the loss of knowledge we are experiencing as the last of the traditional elders pass from this physical plane of existence without heirs to their knowledge- as well as the very environment in which sacred plants grow- is a tragedy occurring right now as you read these lines, one that could well be beyond redemption. — Jonathon Miller Weisberger

I'm up for the Julius Caesar Author of the Year Award this year. I'm tremendously proud, considering Caesar is the guy who burned down the Library of Alexandria. — Jarod Kintz

I love you," Kenneth said, with terrible dispassion, "but I would not burn the Library of Alexandria for you"; and Anita, drily sobbing, cried, "You son of a bitch. — Jincy Willett

When I think of the library of Alexandria and of the fact that, although it burnt down, people continue to sort the letters of the alphabet according to that tradition, then that makes certain expressions of modernity, even of interventions on the textual level, possible. — Alexander Kluge

Do you know why we will win this war?" Vosch asks us after we're locked inside. "Why we cannot lose? Because we know how you think. We've been watching you for six thousand years. When the pyramids rose in the Egyptian desert, we were watching you. When Caesar burned the library at Alexandria, we were watching you. When you crucified that first-century Jewish peasant, we were watching. When Columbus set foot in the New World ... when you fought a war to free millions of your fellow humans from bondage ... when you learned how to split the atom ... when you first ventured beyond your atmosphere ... What — Rick Yancey

The valuable library of Alexandria was pillaged or destroyed; and near twenty years afterwards, the appearance of the empty shelves excited the regret and indignation of every spectator whose mind was not totally darkened by religious prejudice. The compositions of ancient genius, so many of which have irretrievably perished, might surely have been excepted from the wreck of idolatry, for the amusement and instruction of succeeding ages. — Edward Gibbon

They say that Caliph Omar, when consulted about what had to be done with the library of Alexandria, answered as follows: 'If the books of this library contain matters opposed to the Koran, they are bad and must be burned. If they contain only the doctrine of the Koran, burn them anyway, for they are superfluous.' Our learned men have cited this reasoning as the height of absurdity. However, suppose Gregory the Great was there instead of Omar and the Gospel instead of the Koran. The library would still have been burned, and that might well have been the finest moment in the life of this illustrious pontiff. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

In the year 415, the woman scientist Hypatia, head of the legendary Alexandria library, was beaten to death by Christian monks who considered her a pagan. The leader of the monks, Cyril, was canonized a saint. — James A. Haught

The destruction of Dan's Star Wars collectibles would have been mourned with more intensity by their owner than the burning of the library at Alexandria. — Adam Nevill

The opportunity before all of us is living up to the dream of the Library of Alexandria and then taking it a step further - universal access to all knowledge. Interestingly, it is now technically doable — Brewster Kahle

Perhaps the various burnings of the Alexandria Library were necessary, like those Australian Forest Fires without which the new seeds cannot burst their shells and make a young, healthy forest. — William Golding

But only at Antquarium did I feel a sense of what the library at Alexandria might have been: an accumulation of evidence and suggestions. — Amy Halloran