Quotes on Antiquity

You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

Live in rooms full of light. Avoid heavy food. Be moderate in the drinking of wine. Take massage, baths, exercise, and gymnastics. Fight insomnia with gentle rocking or the sound of running water. Change surroundings and take long journeys. Strictly avoid frightening ideas. Indulge in cheerful conversation and amusements. Listen to music.

Without the concepts, methods and results found and developed by previous generations right down to Greek antiquity one cannot understand either the aims or achievements of mathematics in the last 50 years. [Said in 1950]

To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity is to continue in a state of childhood all our days.

Everyone who wants to know what will happen ought to examine what has happened: everything in this world in any epoch has their replicas in antiquity.

Middle-earth is our world. I have (of course) placed the action in a purely imaginary (though not wholly impossible) period of antiquity, in which the shape of the continental masses was different.

Science is a cooperative enterprise spanning the generations. It's the passing of a torch from teacher to student to teacher. A community of minds, reaching back to antiquity and forward to the stars.

Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity.

Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.

Oddly enough, my favorite genre is not fiction. I'm attracted by primary sources that are relevant to historical questions of interest to me, by famous old books on philosophy or theology that I want to see with my own eyes, by essays on contemporary science, by the literatures of antiquity.

It is an unscrupulous intellect that does not pay to antiquity its due reverence.

While the business of education in Europe consists in lectures upon the ruins of Palmyra and the antiquities of Herculaneum , or in disputes about Hebrew points, Greek particles, or the accent and quantity of the Roman language, the youth of America will be employed in acquiring those branches of knowledge which increase the conveniences of life.

Astrology is assured of recognition from psychology, without further restrictions, because astrology represents the summation of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity.

The antiquity and general acceptance of an opinion is not assurance of its truth.

Teach nothing new, but instill into all men's breasts those things which the Fathers of revered memory have with harmony of statement taught... Preach nothing else than what we received from our forefathers... Accordingly, both in the rule of faith and in the observance of discipline, let the standard of antiquity be maintained throughout.

Have you not a moist eye, a dry hand, a yellow cheek, a white beard, a decreasing leg, an increasing belly? Is not your voice broken, your wind short, your chin double, your wit single, and every part about you blasted with antiquity?

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

There is indeed the possibility that the evolutionary process has, in gray antiquity, bred into us an excess of aggression.

What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground.

If our titles recall the known myths of antiquity, we have used them again because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas.

We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.