In this post, you will find great Ancient Quotes from famous people, such as Sara Pascoe, Fidel Castro, Nikola Tesla, Patrick Stump, Lillian Smith. You can learn and implement many lessons from these quotes.
Written by the ancient Chinese philosopher of the same name, the ‘Zhuangzi’ is one long perplexing puzzle of a rambling collection of enigmatic short stories. It’s a strange feeling to laugh at a joke written by someone in the 4th century B.C.
Man, born of woman, has found it a hard thing to forgive her for giving him birth. The patriarchal protest against the ancient matriarch has borne strange fruit through the years.
The Ancient Games are relatively obscure to most Olympians, but to understand just what the Games are about, it is really necessary to investigate the roots and the meaning that has transformed culture and society for so many years.
Throughout its history, Islam has borrowed and adapted from other civilizations, both ancient and modern.
We’ve always known that our bodies are capable of healing themselves under the right conditions: Diet and exercise improve our health. But there are also ancient genetic survival pathways in every living thing.
Philosophy is at its most engaged when it is impure. What is being recovered from the Ancient Greek model is not some lost idea of philosophy‘s pure essence, but the idea that philosophy is mixed up with everything else.
The center of Western culture is Greece, and we have never lost our ties with the architectural concepts of that ancient civilization.
Think about what would happen if Indiana Jones and Google Earth had a love child. I use high-resolution and NASA satellites and look for subtle differences on the surface of the earth that locate buried ancient pyramids and towns and ancient tombs, which we then go and excavate.
Mother’s taste was eclectic and ranged from the ancient world to the contemporary from Europe to the U.S.
As a freshman in college, I was having a lot of trouble adjusting. I took a meditation class to handle anxiety. It really helped. Then as a grad student at Harvard, I was awarded a pre-doctoral traveling fellowship to India, where my focus was on the ancient systems of psychology and meditation practices of Asia.
The question of the composition of perceptible objects is one which already occupied the mind of the ancient Greeks.
The whole of ancient astrology owed its origin to conversation with the cosmic intelligences. But by the time of the first centuries after the rise of Christianity, ancient astrology – that is to say, conversation with cosmic intelligences – was a thing of the past.
The technological revolution is itself a direct descendant of the Ancient Greeks’ historia, and the web is populated by young people who want to dive into the past.
The surest method of being incomprehensible or, moreover, to be misunderstood is to use words in their original sense; especially words from the ancient languages.
As recognized since ancient times, the coexistence of very rich and very poor leads to two possibilities, neither a happy one. The rich can rule alone, disenfranchising or even enslaving the poor, or the poor can rise up and confiscate the wealth of the rich.
In every ancient culture, there are rituals to mortify the body as a way of understanding that the energy of the soul is indestructible. The more I think about energy, the simpler my art becomes, because it is just about pure presence.
The engine of ancient society was religion but the engine of contemporary society, as I see it, is advertising.
Many people say I believe aliens built the pyramids. I don’t. In fact I’m not a supporter of the ‘ancient alien‘ hypothesis at all. I think a lost human civilization is a much better explanation of the mysteries and paradoxes of ancient cultures.
A conservative is a man who will not look at the new moon out of respect for that ‘ancient institution‘ the old one.
If you really want to be a good archaeologist, you have to understand ancient DNA; you have to understand chemical analysis to figure out the composition of ancient pots. You have to be able to study human remains. You need to be able to do computer processing and, in some cases, computer programming.
The ancient world is always accessible, no matter what culture you come from. I remember when I was growing up in India and I read the ‘Iliad’ and the ‘Odyssey.’
It is good to learn from the ancients. I’m a bit of an ancient myself. They had a lot of time to think about architecture and landscape.
Nobody has ever convinced me that ancient aliens have visited Earth. Not even close.
I love monsters, I love creatures, I love beings, I love aliens. That’s more supernatural and more the stuff of fairy tales. Fairy tales are as ancient as we are. I love those stories. I think they’re really interesting because they always have more than simply the fright aspect. There’s something deeply psychological.
Singing connected with movements and action is a much more ancient, and, at the same time, more complex phenomenon than is a simple song.
I love yoga… I also see an Ayurvedic doctor, which is an ancient Indian thing. I go and see the doctor to balance my system twice a year; it’s preventative. They take my pulse, give me some herbs, and tell me what I should eat and what I should avoid. They rub oil on me too, it’s so lovely. It’s like a detox.
I was already in my early twenties, but I looked much younger because I was fresh-faced and, well, short. So I did songs such as ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah’ and jokes such as describing current events as ‘ancient history.’ Boy, did the audience roar at that one.
In the more recently disclosed field of history in the ancient Near East, however, there has been no such sense of responsibility displayed by historians either in Europe or America.
I was in Wolf‘s Head, one of the ancient eight.
Artificial creatures date back to the ancient Chinese and Greeks. Renaissance automata were designed primarily to entertain, reflecting the value placed on leisure.
Seasonal changes, as it were, take place in history, when there is practically an almost universal death, a falling of the foliage of the tree of life. Such were the intervals between the ancient and mediaeval time, the mediaeval and the modern.
The ancients considered mechanics in a twofold respect: as rational, which proceeds accurately by demonstration, and practical. To practical mechanics all the manual arts belong, from which mechanics took its name.
Christianity in the Middle East is shattered. The ancient faith tradition lies beaten, broken, and dying.
In many traditions, hawks are sacred: Apollo‘s messengers for the Greeks, sun symbols for the ancient Egyptians and, in the case of the Lakota Sioux, embodiments of clear vision, speed and single-minded dedication.
My grandpa was a geologist, and I always had this fascination with not only earth sciences but ancient history.
We have a lot of historical and religious baggage in our culture. It’s ancient; we are clannish as a species. We like things to fit into boxes, and it’s unfortunate because humans are unique and should be celebrated and embraced as such.
Take the first A out of Abraham and put it at the end. You get Brahama. There’s the ancient connection right there.
Venus, ancient goddess of love and beauty, is an apparently irrelevant, invented deity of the long dead. But Venus merits scrutiny. Chart her life story across 5,000 years and you chart the evolution of our conflicted relationship with sex and with the female body.
No women in ancient Rome ever had the vote.
This is the launch of the ‘Doctor Strange’ film interpretation of – in my view – a classic, which has been interpreted many times by other graphic artists, and this is just our graphic interpretation of The Ancient One. I would say the whole approach is about a kind of fluidity.
Myths can’t be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.
I’ve met and sketched most of the great athletes from the past five decades and their movement, grace and energy have kept me captivated over the years. That’s what the ancient Greeks first saw and that’s what caught my interest.
Another important historical factor is the fact that this already very simple religion was further simplified and purified by the early philosophers of ancient China. Our first great philosopher was a founder of naturalism; and our second great philosopher was an agnostic.
The ku-magic is a very ancient magic. It predates Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism.
Capitalists seem uninterested in capitalism, even as eager entrepreneurs can’t get financing. Businesses and investors sound like the Ancient Mariner, who complained, ‘Water, water everywhere – nor any drop to drink.’
In English we must use adjectives to distinguish the different kinds of love for which the ancients had distinct names.
We are so fortunate, as Australians, to have among us the oldest continuing cultures in human history. Cultures that link our nation with deepest antiquity. We have Aboriginal rock art in the Kimberley that is as ancient as the great Palaeolithic cave paintings at Altamira and Lascaux in Europe.
I wanted to restore an ancient house in Kent, and that’s what I did. It was a heap – this Tudor building with the beams painted lime green, so hideous. And I had this idea that I’d love the small village life, with the Range Rover and the dogs and baking cookies for the Y.W.C.A. But then it got so boring.
Ancient Egyptian culture was so enduring. It went on for thousands of years.
I have a long view of history – my orientation is archaeological because I’m always thinking in terms of ancient Greece and Rome, ancient Persia and Egypt.
How natural that the errors of the ancient should be handed down and, mixing with the principles and system which Christ taught, give to us an adulterated Christianity.
There are certain things in ancient practices that are not worth adhering to.
The bedrock nature of space and time and the unification of cosmos and quantum are surely among science‘s great ‘open frontiers.’ These are parts of the intellectual map where we’re still groping for the truth – where, in the fashion of ancient cartographers, we must still inscribe ‘here be dragons.’
I grew up in a society with a very ancient and strong oral storytelling tradition. I was told stories, as a child, by my grandmother, and my father as well.
Ancient Egyptians went to great lengths to avoid change; they couldn’t entirely do so, of course, but did preserve a cultural continuity for almost four thousand years.
It’s a very ancient culture, British culture. You can’t be seen to be too wealthy, and you certainly can’t be seen to be giving away any of your wealth either because that’s sort of vulgar, too. It’s funny, that, because in New York, if you are wealthy, you have to be philanthropic to be successful.
The new history is really ancient history newly discovered. Journalists are taking crash courses in the blood-drenched background of Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, North Ossetians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis.
The history of art is not just the history of artists; it is also the history of the people who viewed art. And that wider perspective can help us see some of the reasons why the art of the ancient world should still matter to us.
We make two mistakes about the ancient world. One is to assume they were better than us – that, for instance, the ancient Olympics didn’t involve money-making. The opposite mistake, and just as common, is to think our Olympics are much more civilised than ancient sporting competitions. Neither is true.
More immediately, I’m currently working on another Dracula in which there will be connections with ancient Egypt. That’s about as far as I want to go in commenting on current work.
Nature’s God really descends from an ancient Greek tradition that was passed along to the early modern philosophers. And these were quite radical thinkers who were really challenging the ways of thinking of their time and the established religion.
The number of stressors has multiplied exponentially: traffic, money, success, work/life balance, the economy, the environment, parenting, family conflict, relationships, disease. As the nature of human life has become far more complicated, our ancient stress response hasn’t been able to keep up.
Ancient Rome was a violent place.
The stress response is incredibly ancient evolutionarily. Fish, birds and reptiles secrete the same stress hormones we do, yet their metabolism doesn’t get messed up the way it does in people and other primates.
I learned to interpret the ancient pictograph codices and read Nahuatl, the Aztec language.
The conceptual artist Ai WeiWei illustrates the schizoid society that rapid change has produced – sometimes by reassembling Ming-style furniture into absurd and useless arrangements, or by carefully painting and antiquing a Coca-Cola logo on an ancient Chinese pot.
Venus’s life story across 5,000 years reminds us not to trivialise the power of desire: the ancients were right to never underestimate its influence.
I try to write in plain brown blocks of American speech but occasionally set in an ancient word or a strange word just to startle the reader a little bit and to break up the monotony of the plain American cadence.
While Pickstown may not be what it once was, it still is framed by the natural beauty of the ancient river, the sweep of the Great Plains, and the long, unbroken shoreline of the lake behind the dam. It gave me a 19th-century childhood in a modern mid-20th-century town, and for that I will always be grateful.
The ancient Greek view of happiness was really defined by leading a productive life: It’s not about how much you have, it’s about what you do with it.
When I was four years old, my father, who was a colonel in the army, was stationed in Salzburg, Austria. Across the street from our house was an ancient castle on a cliff. So when I first heard fairy tales, I felt as if the magic of ‘Cinderella‘ or ‘Sleeping Beauty’ was taking place right in my own neighborhood.
It was always presumptuous to expect Russia, an ancient nation-state and proud empire of distinct culture with a tradition of autocracy, to become an Anglo-American democracy overnight – just as it is naive to expect it in other parts of the world.
Even if these stories are 3,000 years old, there’s still so much about the characters, about the dilemmas, about their understanding of the universe that still resonates. The whole idea of order and chaos, which is really central to the ancient Egyptian understanding of the world, is still very much with us.
It is an ancient need to be told stories. But the story needs a great storyteller. Thanks for all of it, Jo.
Superficial similarities exist between Christianity and some ancient pagan religions. But careful study reveals that there are far more dissimilarities.
Visit USA.gov and you’ll find thousands of directorates, agencies, boards, offices, and services replete with overlapping responsibilities, ancient priorities, and divided accountability.
As an undergraduate, I had an opportunity to go on a number of archeological digs. So I had experience excavating, digging up remains of ancient Indian villages in the Midwest and in the Southwest.
I fantasize that our politicians have been moved by the dialogues of Plato, and thus contemplate the ancient conflict of the sophists versus the lovers of truth.
What satellites help to show us is we’ve actually only found a fraction of a percent of ancient settlements and sites all over the world… It’s the most exciting time in history to be an archaeologist.
The idea of copyright did not exist in ancient times, when authors frequently copied other authors at length in works of non-fiction. This practice was useful, and is the only way many authors’ works have survived even in part.
The human juggernaut is permanently eroding Earth’s ancient biosphere.
Unfortunately, a lot of the concepts in the Bible are based on ancient mythology that doesn’t fit the findings of science.
In particular, Australia, because of its ancient geography, soil profile and distinctive weather patterns, is more adversely affected by climate variability than some other continents.
Like lots of baby boomers, I was brought up on archaic anthropomorphism. Upstanding Christian dogs. Rabbits with family values. Because the ancient texts and pictures were sacred – Potter, Milne and the rest. Even concerned parents who knew Freud and Jung never saw the contradictions in feeding us on them.
Mongolia is a country of rich and ancient heritage, unique culture and astounding natural beauty. It is a land of free and brave, peace-loving and hard-working people.
These ancient stories in religion speak to our desire. But they move us toward hope.
Entire generations of Americans have come of age since the ancient time when the president‘s power was constrained by a duty of candor to the American people.
In ‘Seven Ancient Wonders,’ Jack West and his team break someone out of Guantanamo Bay. I’m not going to preach to people and say, ‘Guantanamo Bay, bad’, but I will have my hero go and break somebody out of it, and maybe people will think about it that way.
Islamists and their sympathizers hate us, and they will not stop hating us until we convert to ancient Islam. There is no middle ground or accommodation.
What I find very interesting is, we’re not enthralled by the ancient world, and we’ve escaped all kinds of ancient preconceptions and assumptions and prejudices. But, nevertheless, we still make that connection between authoritative speech and male speech.
If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism; if from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition.
A western audience might not appreciate ‘Chanakya’s Chant’ because of its dependence on history and ancient statecraft. My book is a modern-day thriller that draws on a bedrock of history. My primary object is to entertain, not educate.
I do not read the ancient languages, but I am beginning to study Greek.
I remember going to a monastery library when I was very young and being surrounded by ancient books. I fell in love.
Elephants are not human, of course. They are something much more ancient and primordial, living on a different plane of existence. Long before we arrived on the scene, they worked out a way of being in the world that has not fundamentally changed and is sustainable, and not predatory or destructive.
The Temple of Diana is in the vicinity of the fountain, which has given rise to the conjecture that it originally constituted a portion of the ancient baths.
Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading.
The food we ate was Indian, and both my mother and father were very deep into the ancient philosophy of India, so it could well have been an Indian household.
After finishing the gymnasium in Muenchen with 9 years of Latin and 6 years of ancient Greek, history and philosophy, I decided to become a physicist. The great theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, an university colleague of my late father, advised me to begin with an apprenticeship in precision mechanics.
I don’t believe there’s anything in life you can’t go back and fix. The ancient Vedas – the oldest Hindu philosophy – and modern science agree that time is an illusion. If that’s true, there’s no such thing as a past or a future – it’s all one huge now. So what you fix now affects the past and the future.
The territorial state is such an ancient form of society – here in Europe it dates back thousands of years – that it is now protected by the sanctity of age and the glory of tradition. A strong religious feeling mingles with the respect and the devotion to the fatherland.
Universalism as an ideal is as old as nay, is probably much more ancient than the Christian ideal.
I was sick and tired of reading other people’s epigraphs. They all seemed to be in ancient Greek, middle French or, when they were translated, they never seemed to relate to the book at hand. Basically, they seemed to be there just to baffle you and to impress you with how smart the writer is.
It is better to imitate ancient than modern work.
I think storytelling in general is how we really deeply know things. It’s ancient.
The gloomiest way of describing the ancient world is it is misogyny from A to Z, really.
Raft Point is among the greatest examples of ancient indigenous art we know of.
Oil is ancient wealth in the ground.
The romantic image of the ancient world is very inspiring, as is nature itself, but I think the dissatisfaction with our modern world is the strongest force keeping me going.
With a name like Cush Jumbo, you never get forgotten. The ‘Jumbo’ is from my father, who is Nigerian, and ‘Cush’ was a king in ancient Egypt. It’s a name that took a few years to grow into, but now I feel it was meant to be. It’s absolutely who I am, and I love it.
That’s what I want to do, ultimately: figure out a way to get the world engaged with discovery and protecting these ancient sites.
A lot of church music really inspired me. A lot of ancient music that’s made for God. If you get really into the history of music, inevitably you’re going to have to get into sacred religious music.
In a country like France, so ancient, their history is full of outstanding people, so they carry a heavy weight on their back. Who could write in French after Proust or Flaubert?
Just as the common law derives from ancient precedents – judges‘ decisions – rather than statutes, baseball‘s codes are the game’s distilled mores. Their unchanged purpose is to show respect for opponents and the game. In baseball, as in the remainder of life, the most important rules are unwritten. But not unenforced.
The ancient universities was not as based on how many credit hours you’re taking and whether you’ve completed your credit hours. The ancient universities were much more interested in customized, personalized learning… Where you have a mentor and where you’re learning at your own pace.
Ancient eschatological texts are actually maps of the inner territories of the psyche that seem to transcend race and culture and originate in the collective unconscious.
A modern arboretum brings us that ancient forest and, with it, a changed apprehension of time, a renewed appreciation of the elegance of natural form and a renewed sense of wonder at the variety of the world we inhabit.
Perhaps many of the perplexing problems of the new music could be put into a new light if we were to reintroduce the ancient idea of music being a reflection of nature.
The great majority of the nobility and gentry of England clung to the doctrine and ceremonies of the ancient church, and yet were united in determination to oppose the papal claims.
Hobbits are an unobtrusive but very ancient people, more numerous formerly than they are today; for they love peace and quiet and good tilled earth: a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favourite haunt.
Islamism is not Islam. Islamism is the politicisation of Islam, the desire to impose a version of this ancient faith over society.
When immortality becomes for us no longer a matter of academic discussion, but the most vital of all questions; we shall find our comfort where so many before us have found it, in the ancient words.
I can’t imagine seeing Batman in black and white. It was such a colourful TV series. I know. I’m ancient. It wasn’t abnormal to be without a television in those days. People who had colour were special.
In Old Europe and Ancient Crete, women were respected for their roles in the discovery of agriculture and for inventing the arts of weaving and pottery making.
I became an environmentalist at 16 when I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest Action Network. At 27 I helped save the last unprotected ancient redwoods in California. In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to invest $90 billion into them.
I think writers from both East and West have long been fascinated by the ancient tales and the opportunity to reinterpret them.
The ancients understood the regulation of power better than the regulation of liberty.
‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ had a formative effect on me. I think it’s one of those works that if you encounter it very early you’re doubly enchanted by the beauty of the language and the strangeness of the vision. It stays with you.
It more or less has the shape of a love song, but ‘Crescent Moon’ reflects more my longing for an ancient romantic context that includes wild animals, fire, danger of death, stellar navigation, and seasonal intuition.
The ancient superficial idea of the uniform and progressive growth of the human personality has remained unaltered, and the erroneous belief has persisted that it is the duty of the adult to fashion the child according to the pattern required by society.
The same thing which is now called Christian religion existed among the ancients. They have begun to call ‘Christian’ the true religion which existed before.
I think horror or science fiction is another way of telling a modern myth – it’s like Ancient Greece; it’s like kids couldn’t wait for the next ‘Orpheus’ story, the next ‘Jason and the Argonauts.’
The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones.
Like many astronomers who use the great telescopes on Mauna Kea, I have participated personally and joyfully in ceremonies to celebrate the profound cosmic understanding that comes from joining ancient Hawaiian navigator traditions with the techniques of modern astronomy.
No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.
I was taught about slavery, but it was the ancient Egyptians. That’s the closest I got to African history.
My day job is working on Roman history and ancient Roman history.
Only with maturity did I come to appreciate my own Chinese roots: not just the food and the ancient history, but also the philosophy of child-rearing and the respect for education and knowledge.
I am also well aware that literature only has a minimal influence on political disputes or economic crises in the world, but its significance to human beings is ancient.
The mineral world is a much more supple and mobile world than could be imagined by the science of the ancients. Vaguely analogous to the metamorphoses of living creatures, there occurs in the most solid rocks, as we now know, perpetual transformation of a mineral species.
The story of Ilium, the ancient city of Troy, has always gripped me.
Nothing truly convincing – which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill – has been written against the ancients as yet; especially not against their poetry.
There’s something ancient and inevitable about this desire to do whatever you can to protect your child.
When you’re 16, 30 seems ancient. When you’re 30, 45 seems ancient. When you’re 45, 60 seems ancient. When you’re 60, nothing seems ancient.
