quotations about antiquity
O, to bring back the great Homeric time,
The simple manners and the deeds sublime:
When the wise Wanderer, often foiled by Fate,
Through the long furrow drave the ploughshare straight.
MORTIMER COLLINS
Letter to Benjamin Disraeli
Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that, being nothing, art everything! When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity--then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern!
CHARLES LAMB
Essays of Elia
We are Ancients of the earth,
And in the morning of the times.
ALFRED TENNYSON
The Day Dream
Antiquity, what is it else (God only excepted) but man's authority born some ages before us? Now for the truth of things time makes no alteration; things are still the same they are, let the time be past, present, or to come.
JOHN HALES
Of Inquiry and Private Judgment in Religion
Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwrecks of time.
FRANCIS BACON
Advancement of Learning
Tonight the brightest moon in a hundred years
Floods the streets of Rome and I am standing here
Wondering where the ghosts of antiquity
Hide on nights like this once a century
Where do shadows fall when there's only light
Why'd you follow me halfway 'round the world tonight
What I'd give right now not to even care
And then this could be someone else's prayer
MARY CHAPIN CARPENTER
"Someone Else's Prayer"
Antiquity is the history of monstrosities.
ANTOINE GAUBIL
attributed, Day's Collacon
Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Essays
The spirit of antiquity--enshrined
In sumptuous Buildings, vocal in sweet Song,
In Picture, speaking with heroic tongue,
And with devout solemnities entwined--
Strikes to the seat of grace within the mind.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
Bruges
There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them.
BIBLE
Genesis 6:4
Asleep in lap of legends old.
JOHN KEATS
The Eve of St. Agnus
In the dark backward and abysm of time.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The Tempest
What was a fact became a legend
What was reality became a faded canvas
In the mausoleum of civilizations
Landscapes of untold antiquity
Unchanged are calling
To an orgy of colours and shapes
In a drunkenness with pure fantasy
Their names cause awe and awake
Forgotten senses
The eerie valley of PNATH
The majestic LEMURIA
SARNATH the doomed...
And names that echo
In the labyrinths and the cavernous
Dephts of chaos
Mystic Places of Dawn
SEPTIC FLESH
"Mystic Places of Dawn"
How cunningly nature hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and morning dews.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
address to the literary societies of Dartmouth College, July 22, 1863
All the epochs of the past are only a few of the front carriages, and probably the least wonderful, in the van of an interminable procession.
JOHN BAGNELL BURY
An Inaugural Lecture
Antiquity! I love your ruins better than your restorations.
JOSEPH JOUBERT
Pensées
Words borrowed of antiquity do lend a kind of majesty to style, and are not without their delight sometimes.
BEN JONSON
The Works of Ben Jonson
Antiquity is the stalking-horse on which knaves and bigots invariably mount when they want to ride over the timid and credulous.
PAUL CHATFIELD
attributed, Day's Collacon
For now I see the true old times are dead,
When every morning brought a noble chance,
And every chance brought out a noble knight.
ALFRED TENNYSON
The Passing of Arthur
Antiquity surrenders, defeated by new things.
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura