Antiquity Quotes - page 5
Heron and Olympiodorus had pointed out in antiquity that, in reflection, light followed the shortest possible path, thus accounting for the equality of angles. During the medieval period Alhazen and Grosseteste had suggested that in refraction some such principle was also operating, but they could not discover the law.
Carl B. Boyer
But I am no longer trying to formulate a stylised version of anxiety such as we find in the Laocoon group and in so many other sculptures of the Silver Age of antiquity. I feel that these works are always a bit too melodramatic. If you really want to find the sources of my present style [1958] in antiquity, I must confess that you will find them in the remains of the life of the past rather than in those of its art. The fossilized corpses that have been unearthed in Pompeii.... if the whole earth is destroyed in our atomic age, I feel that the human forms which may survive as mere fossils will have become sculptures similar to mine.
Marino Marini
The Viper has always been so remarkable for its venom, that the most remote antiquity made it an emblem of what is hurtful and destructive. Nay, so terrible was the nature of these creatures, that they were very commonly thought to be sent as executioners of divine vengeance upon mankind for enormous crimes, which had escaped the common course of justice.
Richard Mead
Hegel's argument-and it is still the argument of those who entertain the old reluctance to confer the title "philosopher" upon the immortal thinkers of India and China-is that something is missing from the Oriental systems. When they are compared with Western philosophy, as developed in antiquity and in modern times, what is obviously lacking is the ever-renewed, fructifying close contact with the progressive natural sciences-their improving critical methods and their increasingly secular, nontheological, practically anti-religious, outlook on man and the world. This is enough, we are asked to agree, to justify the Western restriction of the classic term.
Heinrich Robert Zimmer
Transjordan, or Palestine east of the Jordan Rift is not sufficiently known and has therefore been in need of archeological study. ...these nations in antiquity belonged to a group of people called the Canaanites. Culturally and linguistically they were practically identical with the Judean and Israelite 'Canaanites' west of the Rift.
Cyrus H. Gordon
According to some of the pious writers of antiquity, they made large fires, which might be seen at a great distance, upon the vigil of this saint [John], in token that he was said in holy writ to be "a shining light." Others, agreeing with this, add also, these fires were made to drive away the dragons and evil spirits hovering in the air; and one of them gravely says, in some countries they burned bones, which was called a bone-fire; for "the dragons hattyd nothyng mor than the styncke of brenyng bonys." This, says another, habent ex gentilibus, they have from the heathens. The author last cited laments the abuses committed upon thes occasions. "this vigil," says he, "ought to be held with cheerfulness and piety, but not with such merriment as is shewn by the profane lovers of this world, who make great fires in the streets, and indulge themselves with filthy and unlawful games, to which they add glotony and drunkenness, and the commission of many other shameful indecencies."
Joseph Strutt
Training of bulls, bears, horses, and other animals, for the purpose of baiting them with dogs, was certainly practiced by the jugglers; and this vicious pastime has the sanction of high antiquity. Fitz-Stephen, who lived in the reign of Henry II, tells us that, in the forenoon of every holiday, during the winter season, the young Londoners were amused with boars opposed to each other in battle, or with bulls and full-grown bears baited by dogs. This author makes no mention of horses; and I believe the baiting of these noble and useful animals was never a general practice: it was, however, no doubt, partially performed...Asses also were treated with the same inhumanity; but probably the poor beasts did not afford sufficient sport in the tormenting, and therefore were seldom brought forward as the objects of this barbarous diversion.
Joseph Strutt
Euclid's work will live long after all the text books of the present day are superseded and forgotten. It is one of the noblest monuments of antiquity; no mathematician worthy of the name can afford not to know Euclid, the real Euclid as distinct from any revised or rewritten versions which will serve for schoolboys or engineers. And, to know Euclid, it is necessary to know his language, and, so far as it can be traced, the history of the "elements" which he collected in his immortal work.
Thomas Little Heath
Why and how did our country fall from its brilliant antiquity to the degradation of pre-British days? The answer is that defeat of the oppressed castes at the hands of the Brahminic overlordship, of materialism by idealism, constituted the beginning of the fall of India's civilization and culture which in the end led to the loss of national independence.
E. M. S. Namboodiripad
What the aristocratic civilization of Rome and Greece had meant, only those greater minds, Goethe and Nietzsche, grasped: but to none were those feelings of manly vigour more unintelligible than to the womanish Armageddon of serfs of the nineteenth century ; to none less clear than to those unnatural products of that unnatural time, the learned men.
The erudite was the absolute converse of the pagan positive. He studied the ancients because he could not feel them. ... But not to all did antiquity remain dry and lifeless. Nietzsche lighted upon the slumber-bound beauty, and awoke her to new life, and released her from the arm of her unloved wooer.
Oscar Levy
In the Napoleonic Museum in Arenenberg I was rather impressed just how richly clad in the costume of Antiquity the First Empire in fact was - dressed up even comically with its laurels and eagles and togas. Return to Rome wherever you look, though of course not to the Holy Roman Empire - to Caesar's Rome. But the French Revolution itself had fallen back on more or less genuine or imaginary classical models: Brutus and Tiberius Gracchus and Gaius Gracchus, the Gracchi, consuls and Roman virtues - even these revolutionaries couldn't resolve to start from scratch with something really new.
Ida Friederike Görres
Canned laughter: After some supposedly funny or witty remark you can hear the laughter and applause included in the soundtrack of the show itself - here we have the exact counterpart of the Chorus in classical tragedy; it is here that we have to look for 'living Antiquity.' That is to say, why this laughter? The first possible answer - that it serves to remind us when to laugh - is interesting enough, because it implies the paradox that laughter is a matter of duty and not of some spontaneous feeling; but this answer is not sufficient because we do not usually laugh. The only correct answer would be that the Other - embodied in the television set - is relieving us even of our duty to laugh - is instead laughing for us. So even if, tired from a hard days stupid work, all evening we did nothing but gaze drowsily into the television screen, we can say afterwards that objectively, through the medium of the other, we had a really good time.
Slavoj Žižek
And is there no possibility that there was a period, and several periods, when man existed, and yet was not an organic being - therefore could not have left any vestige of himself for exact science? Spirit leaves no skeletons or fossils behind, and yet few are the men on earth who doubt that man can live both objectively and subjectively. At all events, the theology of the Brahmans, hoary with antiquity, and which divides the formative periods of the earth into four ages, and places between each of these a lapse of 1,728,000 years, far more agrees with official science and modern discovery than the absurd chronological notions promulgated by the Councils of Nice and Trent.
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
