"Ancients" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... you and people like you, that a table overloaded with eatables is a real cut-throat; that, to be the true friends of those we invite, frugality should reign throughout the repast we give, and that according to the saying of one of the ancients, "We must eat to live, ...
— The Miser (L'Avare) • Moliere
... schooling how to appreciate the virtue therein, the rareness and the difficulty in the deliverance of such a period;—WE have really no right to the BIG period, we modern men, who are short of breath in every sense! Those ancients, indeed, were all of them dilettanti in speaking, consequently connoisseurs, consequently critics—they thus brought their orators to the highest pitch; in the same manner as in the last century, when all ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Theodora, protected letters; from that time they were constantly cultivated by the Greeks; so that Constantinople, utile it was taken by Mahomet, was never without its historians, poets, or philosophers. Compared with the writings of the ancients, their compositions seem lifeless and unnatural; we look among them in vain either for original genius or successful imitation. Still they are entitled to our gratitude; many of the precious remains of antiquity have come down to us only in their ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... said the Phoenix, 'during the silent watches of the night, and I could not avoid the conclusion that you were quite insufficiently astonished at my appearance yesterday. The ancients were always VERY surprised. Did you, by chance, EXPECT my egg ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... you, Miles Calhoun," replied his son sharply. "As the ancients said, 'alis volat propriis'—I will fly with my own wings. Come weal, come woe, come dark, come light, I have fixed my mind, and nothing shall change it. You loved my mother better than the rest of the world. You would have thought it no shame to have said so to your own father. Well, I say it ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... educated as those of their masters are.[885] Pischon says that Moslems cannot live without slavery. No free woman will do the menial housework, and no woman may be seen unveiled by a free man.[886] This is a repetition of the opinion of the ancients that slavery was indispensable (sec. 285). If all the women were free, some of them would do the housework. A modern Turk is a tyrant inside his own dwelling. For his wife he has a proverb that she should have "neither mouth nor tongue." The girls are not educated to be such wives. They find ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... against the Jews, and the stories used to be told against 'em, and what do you think one was? Why, that they're punished with a bad odor in their bodies; and that, says the author, date 1715 (I've just been pricing and marking the book this very morning)—that is true, for the ancients spoke of it. But then, he says, the other things are fables, such as that the odor goes away all at once when they're baptized, and that every one of the ten tribes, mind you, all the ten being concerned in the crucifixion, has got a particular punishment over and above ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... uninterrupted continuity was generated. Men found that in classical as well as Biblical antiquity existed an ideal of human life, both moral and intellectual, by which they might profit in the present. The modern genius felt confidence in its own energies when it learned what the ancients had achieved. The guesses of the ancients stimulated the exertions of the moderns. The whole world's history seemed once more to ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... the beasts which we for our venerial name, The hart among the rest, the hunter's noblest game: Of which most princely chase since none did e'er report, Or by description touch, to express that wondrous sport, (Yet might have well beseem'd the ancients' nobler songs) To our old Arden here, most fitly it belongs: Yet shall she not invoke the muses to her aid; But thee, Diana bright, a goddess and a maid: In many a huge-grown wood, and many a shady grove, Which oft hast borne thy bow (great ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... of the ancients observes, [Greek: to ton phoberon phoberotaton], of dreadful things the most dreadful: an evil, beyond which nothing can be threatened by sublunary power, or feared from human enmity or vengeance. This terrour should, therefore, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... The pulpit is losing influence. In the light of modern discovery the creeds are growing laughable. A theologian is an intellectual mummy, and excites attention only as a curiosity. Supernatural religion has outlived its usefulness. The miracles and wonders of the ancients will soon occupy the same tent. Jonah and Jack the Giant Killer, Joshua and Red Riding Hood, Noah and Neptune, will all go into the collection of ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... ancients believed that the Rock of Gibraltar was the pillar set up by Hercules on ...
— Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles - A First Latin Reader • John Kirtland, ed.
... here to Tacitus, Dialogus c. 16, as an appreciation of historical perspective unusual in ancient writers: "The four hundred years which separate us from the ancients are almost a vanishing quantity if you compare them with the duration of the ages." See the whole passage, where the Magnus Annus of ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... speeding unseen through space, known to the ancients, by them called Erlik, after the Prince of Darkness, ruled at the birth of those myriad souls destined to be engulfed in the earthquake of the ages, or flung by it out of the ordered pathway of their lives into strange byways, stranger highways—into ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... season they required, an army to put down their opponents. We, men of Athens, are not only in these respects behindhand; we can not even be awaked; like men that have drunk mandrake [Footnote: Used for a powerful opiate by the ancients. It is called Mandragora also in English. See Othello, Act III. ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes
... farther, and with even greater boldness adds, "Whether there by KNOWLEDGE, it shall be done away." The wisdom of the ancients, where is it? It is wholly gone. A schoolboy to-day knows more than Sir Isaac Newton knew; his knowledge has vanished away. You put yesterday's newspaper in the fire: its knowledge has vanished away. You buy the old editions of the great ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... devoutly over them, and as he exhales the smoke upon them he formulates the prayers to the chiefs or powers, who not only control the paths or lives of all the people, but also preside over the six regions of space whence come all the necessaries of life. The ancients also occupy his thoughts during these devotions; he desires that all the pleasures they enjoyed while here may come to his people, and he reciprocally wishes the ancients to partake of all the enjoyments ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... doctors had it all their own way; and to work they went in earnest, and they gave the poor professor divers and sundry medicines, as prescribed by the ancients and moderns, from Hippocrates to ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... remarked, that it is no mystery why the decision should have gone pretty uniformly in favour of the ancients; for here is the dilemma:—A man, attempting this problem, is or is not a classical scholar. If he is, then he has already received a bias in his judgment; he is a bribed man, bribed by his vanity; ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... to some defect in their civil polity that the ancients were comparatively so easily put down by the Roman power, which might have been the superior civilisation. Possibly the great majority of the people may have been dissatisfied with their rulers, and gladly removed to another place and another form ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.19 • Various
... of the 18th of Fructidor (September 4, 1797). In 1795, on the dissolution of the Convention, the government of France was entrusted to a Directory of five persons, assisted by two councils—the Council of Ancients, and the Council of Five hundred. In course of time, the reactionary, or anti-revolutionary, party obtained a large majority in the councils, which were thus involved in continual disputes with the Directory. The army ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... I hope this little volume will be the means of making popular some of the best thoughts of one of the most interesting and thoughtful of the ancients, who often seems ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... so; and he quotes Horace, who tells us we should impute such venial errors to a pardonable inadvertency; and, as I recollect, Addison makes another very just remark, that the ancients, who were actuated by a spirit of candour, not of cavilling, invented a variety of figures of speech, on purpose to palliate ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... and parties were reorganized. A grave and radical difference of opinion arose as to whether Selma was on the east or the west bank of the Alabama river. Two intimate friends got into an argument regarding the relative excellence of the ancients and moderns in material civilization and the mechanical arts. The discussion lasted three weeks; during its continuance each alluded (in support of his position) to architectural and engineering triumphs, which the most learned encyclopedist ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... church. I say the Christian church of the nineteenth century must honor such men, if it would do a church's work; must take pains to make such men as these, or it is a dead church, with no claim on us, except that we bury it. A true church will always be the church of martyrs. The ancients commenced every great work with a victim! We do not call it so; but the sacrifice is demanded, got ready, and offered by unconscious priests long ere the enterprise succeeds. Did not Christianity begin with ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... ancients called a magician," interrupted Dr. Cairn quietly. "He is what was known in the Middle Ages as a wizard. What that means, exactly, few modern thinkers know; but I know, and one day others will know. Meanwhile his shadow ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... to be the twelve patriarchs and the twelve apostles, or the first fathers of the churches; for they are the elders of both the churches, that is, both of the Jewish and Gentile church of God; they are the ancients, as also they are called in the prophet Isaiah, which are in some sense the fathers of both these churches (Isa 24:23). These elders are well set forth by that four and twenty that you read of in the book of Chronicles, who had every one of them for sons twelve ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... in Seneca, his Natural Questions, that the ancients were so curious in the newness of their fish, that that semed not new enough that was not put alive into the guest's hand; and he says, that to that end they did usually keep them living in glass bottles ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... of an ancient Briton, who, flying from the invaders, into the recesses of the forest, had perished there alone. There was no appearance of his having been buried. No earthen vessels, or other remains, such as were usually found in the graves of the ancients, appeared to be contained in the bank. If he had died lying along the ground, his body would have decayed like other bodies, or been devoured by wild beasts. Perhaps he was drowned in one of the ponds or streams of the forest, and the body, being immediately washed over with sand or mud, ...
— The Settlers at Home • Harriet Martineau
... lightning through all that he said. In person he was short and broad, round-faced, ruddy-cheeked, and in truth a little inclined to be fat, though he would never confess to more than a pleasing plumpness, which was held, he said, to be the acme of manly beauty amongst the ancients. The stern test of common danger and mutual hardship entitle me to say that no man could have desired a stauncher or more trusty comrade. As he was destined to be with me in the sequel, it was but fitting that he ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... dipersed among an abundance of mucilage. Cabbages were commonly used among the ancients, and Cato wrote volumes on their nature. The Indians had so much veneration for them, that they swore by cabbages, and were therein as superstitious as the Egyptians, who gave divine honours to leeks and onions, for the great benefits ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 549 (Supplementary issue) • Various
... treated very seriously by the ancients, but until recently modern scientists, rejecting the ideas of the dark ages, have scouted dreams. To-day, however, we study them scientifically, for we believe that whatever is, has a reason. Dr. Ross, I think, is acquainted with the new and remarkable theories of Dr. Sigmund ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... modern student distinctly to grasp and understand the great work of Amenemhat. Whatever may be the truth regarding "Lake Moeris," as this great reservoir was called, it is certain that it furnished the ancients one of the least explicable of all the many problems that the remarkable land of the Nile presented to them. Herodotus added to the other marvels of the place a story about two sitting statues based upon pyramids, ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... [17] Some of the ancients call this famous tree, or grove, an oak others, a turpentine tree, or grove. It has been very famous in all the past ages, and is so, I suppose, at this day; and that particularly for an eminent mart or meeting of merchants there every year, ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... a continual flux, then immobility will seem a superficial abstraction hypostatized into states, concepts, and substances, and the old difficulties raised by the ancients, in regard to the problem of Change, will vanish, along with the problems attached to the notion of "substance" in modern thought, because there is nothing substantial but Change. Apart from Change there is no reality. ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... Oxus and other regions of the barbarians and what not else. He was a just King, a valiant and a generous, and loved table-talk[FN349] and tales and verses and anecdotes and histories and entertaining stories and legends of the ancients. Whoso knew a rare recital and related it to him in such fashion as to please him he would bestow on him a sumptuous robe of honour and clothe him from head to foot and give him a thousand dinars, and mount him on a horse saddled and bridled besides ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... did it with that moderation and accuracy with which we now see, in the works of Aristotle, Cicero, Horace, and Quintilian, the principles and experience of painting applied to eloquence and poetry. It is the privilege of the ancients never in any matter to do too much or ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... candid men of science, that these spiritual phenomena of the classical period cannot plausibly, nor even possibly, be attributed to the agency of rats, when we recall the fact that the rat was an animal unknown to the ancients. As the learned M. Selys Longch observes in his Etudes de Micromammalogie (Paris, 1839, p. 59), 'the origin of the rat is obscure, the one thing certain is that the vermin was unknown to the ancients, and that it arrived in Europe, introduced, ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... year made a curious discovery, that in a province of this kingdom, not fifty miles from its capital, a sort of devotion is still paid to Priapus, the obscene divinity of the ancients (though under another denomination), I have thought it a circumstance worth recording; particularly as it offers a fresh proof of the similitude of the Popish and Pagan religion, so well observed by Dr. Middleton in his celebrated Letter from Rome; therefore ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... heard thereof. She was a widow and was of a goodly countenance and very beautiful to behold, and she feared God greatly. Judith sent for the ancients of the city, and blamed them for provoking the Lord to anger by their lack of trust, and she promised that she would do a thing within the days before the city was to be delivered to their enemies which should go throughout all generations to the children ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... fulness of Christ all men receive according to the faith they have in Him; for it is written (Rom. 3:22) that "the justice of God is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe in Him." Now just as we believe in Him as already born; so the ancients believed in Him as about to be born, since "having the same spirit of faith . . . we also believe," as it is written (2 Cor. 4:13). But the faith which is in Christ has the power of justifying by reason of the purpose of the grace of God, according to Rom. 4:5: "But to him that worketh ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... reward had been likewise set upon his father's head in the year 1715, that yet he imagined that in proportion as the world grew in politeness they had done so in humanity, that it were unjust to call the ancients rude and savage etc., when no example could be given of their taking so mean and unmanly a way to get rid of their enemy. That he should have been far from ever thinking of such a device to exterminate the E[lector]s family did his success depend upon ...
— The Jacobite Rebellions (1689-1746) - (Bell's Scottish History Source Books.) • James Pringle Thomson
... sentiment, and liberality of mind, among those orders of citizens, who, by their condition, and their fortunes, are relieved from sordid cares and attentions. This was the description of a free man at Sparta; and if the lot of a slave among the ancients was really more wretched than that of the indigent labourer and the mechanic among the moderns, it may be doubted whether the superior orders, who are in possession of consideration and honours, do not proportionally fail in the dignity which befits their condition. If the pretensions ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... were practised with great care by the ancients. They formed part of the education of a gentleman. They give that physical beauty and grace which only spring from a fine muscular development. Among the Greeks and Romans, men frequented the gymnasium and the circus. Philosophers, judges, ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... felt his licence to be extreme. "In affecting the ancients," said Ben Jonson, "he writ no language." Daniel writes sarcastically, soon after the Faery Queen appeared, of ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... Rha of the ancients, the largest river in all Europe, is almost three thousand miles in length. Its waters, rather unwholesome in its upper part, are improved at Nijni-Novgorod by those of the Oka, a rapid affluent, issuing from the central provinces of Russia. The system of Russian canals ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... by the Lettonians and Lithuanians, who are according to some historians Slavic, and according to others Finnic-Scythic tribes.[1] It appears, that the various nations which inhabited this country were by the ancients comprised under the name of Sarmatae. In the sixth, or according to others, in the seventh century, the Lekhes, a people kindred to the Czekhes, and coming like them from the Carpathian regions, whence they were urged forwards by the Bulgarians, settled on the ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... that man must be very feeble and sluggish, and his appetite for information very weak or depraved, who, when he compares the map of the world, as it was known to the ancients, with the map of the world as it is at present known, does not feel himself powerfully excited to inquire into the causes which have progressively brought almost every speck of its surface completely within our knowledge ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... all plants, or, indeed, with all natural objects known to the ancients, the Ivy was the subject of a myth or religious allegory, and in investigating this myth, we find ourselves in a labyrinth of strange mystery. The ordinary works on mythology, indeed, inform the reader that it was the plant sacred to Bacchus, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the common law arose not from a want of application to the science; since we learn from Fortescue that there were no fewer than two thousand students attending on the inns of chancery and of court, in the time of its writer. Gray's-inn, in the time of Henry VIII. was so incommodious, that "the ancients of this house were necessitated to lodge double." Indeed until the beginning of the last century the lawyers lived mostly in their inns of court, or about Westminster-hall. But a great change has been effected; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 269, August 18, 1827 • Various
... barren spot, destitute of all manner of fruit or corn, and so burnt up with drought, that you cannot have as much water for twelve pence as will satisfy one person for a whole day. Most part of their provisions are brought from Cairo in Egypt, by the Red Sea, or Mare Erythreum of the ancients, and is landed at the port of Gida, Joddah or Jiddah, which is about forty miles from Mecca. The rest of their provisions are brought from the Happy Arabia, or Arabia Felix, so named from its fruitfulness ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... of the ancients is the opprobrium of modern criticism. Nothing can show more evidently the fallibility of the human faculties, than the total ignorance we are in at present of the nature of the Latin and Greek accent."—Walker's Principles, No. 486; Dict., ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... impart to certain students a knowledge, as complete as possible, of the classical civilization as a whole. To a complete knowledge of this civilization belongs all that the ancients possessed or did, all that they thought or wrote, whether or not any particular part of it had an influence upon later times or is, in itself, interesting or valuable now. All parts alike are phenomena of the life of these ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... identical sensation if the idea of the ancients were to be upheld, who understood the external perception of bodies to result from particles detaching themselves from their bodies, and after a more or less lengthy flight, striking and entering into our organs ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... island in the Adriatic; one of those which the ancients called Insulae Diomedeae; it still retains the name of Tremiti. It lies near the coast of the Capitanate, a province of the kingdom of Naples, ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... posterity, when he secluded himself in Capri. Ought we, without a further word, to transcribe this sentence? There are, to be sure, no decisive arguments to prove false the accounts about the horrors of Capri which the ancients, and especially Suetonius, have transmitted to us; there are some, however, which make us mistrust and withhold our judgment. Above all, we have the right to ask ourselves how, from whom, and by access to what sources did Suetonius and the other ancients learn so many extraordinary details. It must ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... is visible from below. The actual roof of oak and lead was so flattened as to be invisible in accordance with the ideas of the architect. "No Roofs almost but Spherick raised to be visible." "The Ancients affected Flatness." "No Roofs can have Dignity enough to appear above a ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... of the stream—"out of his belly." Will you observe for a moment the rhetorical figure here? I used to suppose it meant "out of his heart." The ancients, you remember, thought the heart lay down in the abdominal region. But you will find that this book is very exact in its use of words. The blood is the life. The heart pumps the blood, but the stomach makes it. ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... prospect brightens, and we are led to expect some liveliness of imagery, some warmth of poetical colouring; but here is no such thing. There is no task more difficult to a poet than that of rejection. Ovid among the ancients, and Dryden among the moderns, were perhaps the most remarkable for the want of it. The latter, from the haste in which he generally produced his compositions, seldom paid much attention to the limae labor, "the labour of correction", and ...
— English Satires • Various
... Horace and Lydia have quite gratuitously been assumed to be the speakers. That is to say, he first assumes that the dialogue is not a mere exercise of fancy, but a serious fact, and, having got so far, concludes as a matter of course that the Chloe of the one ode is the Chloe of the other! "The ancients," as Buttmann has well said, "had the skill to construct such poems so that each speech tells us by whom it is spoken; but we let the editors treat us all our lives as schoolboys, and interline such dialogues, as we do our plays, with the names. Even in an English poem we should be ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... who had figged himself out in full puff, after the manner of the ancients, as if he had been going to church, instead of to fight; and who ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... saving him from himself, ever leading him upward and onward, his angelicized lady is an abiding presence with him whether he is deep in the contemplation of the study of philosophy and the learning of the ancients, or engaged in the activity of military or political life, or as homeless wayfarer in exile, making his way from place to place. When he falls from grace it is Beatrice who disturbs his peace of mind by "a battle of thoughts." It is the "strong image" of Beatrice who comes to him ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... were engraved upon it along with the name of the sun. For it was a fundamental idea of the Egyptian religion that the king was not only the son of the solar god, but also the visible human representative of his glory. This was a favourite conception of the ancients. The Incas of Peru regarded themselves as direct descendants of the sun; and the monarchs of the burning Asiatic lands, where the sun rules and dominates everything, assume the name and title of his sons, ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... acquires the merit of giving away gold in abundance. Proceeding next to Vetasika worshipped by the Grandsire, one obtaineth the merit of the horse-sacrifice and the state of Usanas. Going next to the tirtha called Sundarika, worshipped by the Siddhas, one obtaineth personal beauty as witnessed by the ancients. Proceeding next to Brahmani with subdued senses and observing the Brahmacharya vow, a person ascendeth to the region of Brahma on a lotus-hued car. One should repair next to the sacred Naimisha, worshipped ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Shakespeare will agree, I think, that this ability to shift scenes, which after all, is only that which the novelist or poet has always possessed and still possesses, enables the dramatist to impart a breadth of view that was impossible under the ideas of unity that governed the drama of the Ancients. Greek tragedy was drama in concentration, a tabloid of intense power—a brilliant light focussed on a single spot of passion or exaltation. The Elizabethan drama is a view of life; and life does not focus, it is diffuse—a congeries ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... well, sir. I hear you are a great scholar, Latin and all that, quite pat. Damme, sir, those ancients understood things. They knew how to honour the gods, for they made soldiers of 'em and set 'em fighting in the clouds. There's divinity for you! You've ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... others he published or translated. A catalogue of his works cannot be expected here. The most celebrated are his volume on the primitive Lithuanians (Wilna 1808); on the condition of Science and Arts in Poland before the invention of printing; on the Geography of the Ancients; on the Commerce of the Phoenicians, Carthaginians and Romans; on the history of the ancient Indians; on the discoveries of the Carthaginians and Greeks (Warsaw 1829), etc. Also a Polish Bibliography (Warsaw ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... Theories of an Evolution in Animated Nature. Ideas of evolution among the ancients In the early Church In the medieval Church Development of these ideas from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries The work of De Maillet Of Linneus Of Buffon Contributions to the theory of evolution at the close of the eighteenth century The work of Treviranus and Lamarck Geoffroy ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... means the River Styx, Martha," she explained. "Don't you know? The river of the dead, that the ancients believed in, ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... malleability of the metal—we may try in vain at a guinea, or louis d'or. The operation of separating silver ore from gold by the powers of aqua fortis, precipitating the first-named metal by suspension of a copper plate in the liquid, and called quartation; was I believe wholly unknown to the ancients, who got much earlier at the art of weighing gold in water, testified by the old story of King ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... surprised when some one told me that it was actually to be found in the same department, and at a given number of miles from Combray, as I had been on the day when I had learned that there was another fixed point somewhere on the earth's surface, where, according to the ancients, opened the jaws of Hell. Nor could we ever reach that other goal, to which I longed so much to attain, Guermantes itself. I knew that it was the residence of its proprietors, the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... to two distinct mineral substances, the one a hydrous sulphate of lime and the other a carbonate of lime. The former is the alabaster of the present day, the latter is generally the alabaster of the ancients. The two kinds are readily distinguished from each other by their relative hardness. The modern alabaster is so soft as to be readily scratched even by the finger-nail (hardness 1.5 to 2), whilst the stone called ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... in opposition to the prevalent ungoverned and irresponsible Renaissance spirit. Jonson believed that there was a professional way of doing things which might be reached by a study of the best examples, and he found these examples for the most part among the ancients. To confine our attention to the drama, Jonson objected to the amateurishness and haphazard nature of many contemporary plays, and set himself to do something different; and the first and most striking thing that ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... and then, speaking of some other writings bearing the name of Peter, "We know," he says, "that they have not been delivered down to us in the number of Catholic writings, forasmuch as no ecclesiastical writer of the ancients, or of our times, has made use of testimonies out of them." "But in the progress of this history," the author proceeds, "we shall make it our business to show, together with the successions from the apostles, what ecclesiastical writers, in every age, have used such writings as these which are ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... that semen should be discharged by sexual activity. On the contrary, a large part of it can be reabsorbed by the body and used up in mental and physical activities to the great benefit of the body and the enrichment of life. That is why the ancients taught that Diana is the natural born enemy of Venus. The man who takes plenty of regular exercise employs his vital forces in a way that lessens the strain of his moral conflict. And though it is true ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... Caucasus. Again, in the South we discover the wandering Arabs, the pirates of the desert, and the mountaineers of Lebanon, who live in a state of perpetual discord. Over this immense line of countries centuries have passed, and left no trace behind; all that the ancients and the crusaders have related to us of them, is typical of their condition at this day. The bows and arrows, the armour, exhibited as objects of curiosity in our museums, are still in use among them. It is only by chance, or by profiting by their intestine divisions, that the ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... this region. The writer has seen large clusters of it blooming upon the margin of the "Bloody Pond," in this neighborhood—so called from the circumstance, of the slain being thrown into this pond, after the defeat of Baron Dieskau, by Sir William Johnson. The ancients would have constructed a beautiful legend from this incident, and sanctified the ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... to Mrs. Thrale, has a laugh at her. He had mentioned Shakespeare, nature and friendship, and continues:—'Now, of whom shall I proceed to speak? Of whom but Mrs. Montagu? Having mentioned Shakespeare and Nature, does not the name of Montagu force itself upon me? Such were the transitions of the ancients, which now seem abrupt, because the intermediate idea is lost to modern understandings. I wish her name had connected itself with friendship; but, ah Colin, thy hopes are in vain.' Piozzi Letters, ii. 101. See ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... that was my aim, three books in the form of a discussion in dialogue "On the Orator," which, I think, will be of some service to your Lentulus. For they differ a good deal from the current maxims, and embrace a discussion on the whole oratorical theory of the ancients, both that of Aristotle and Isocrates. I have also written in verse three books "On my own Times," which I should have sent you some time ago, if I had thought they ought to be published—for they are witnesses, and will be eternal witnesses, ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... the direction of the intrepid General. He walks into the Council of Ancients and jerks out with vivid flashes of oratory the object of his visit. The members see at a glance its meaning. They become inarticulate with rage begotten of fear. He thunders out, "I am here to demand a Republic founded on true liberty," and swears that ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... found in Watson's Bibliography of the Pre-Columbian Discoveries of America, appended to Anderson's America not discovered by Columbus, 3d ed., Chicago, 1883, pp. 121-164; and see the learned chapters by W. H. Tillinghast on "The Geographical Knowledge of the Ancients considered in relation to the Discovery of America," and by Justin Winsor on "Pre-Columbian Explorations," in Narr. and Crit. ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... find the leaves of the bay laurel, forming the victorious wreaths of the ancients. The oil produced is the oil of bay laurel, oil of sweet bay. This must not be confounded with the oil of bays of the West Indies, the produce of the Myrcia acris; nor yet with the cherry laurel, a member of yet ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... have no doubt the ancients were right when they felt certain animals to be types of good and others of evil. I think it is true, in detail and variety. I have the same feeling. And in like manner, carrying out the principle, I hear one bird say one thing and ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... a different class, and perhaps of one not so high as their predecessors. By this remark I do not mean anything invidious, and if any of the moderns are correctly to be classed with the ancients, the Brothers Gregory must be spoken of next, as being the fittest to head a secondary list. Augustus Gregory was in the West Australian field of discovery in 1846. He was a great mechanical, as well as a geographical, discoverer, for to him we are indebted for our modern horses' pack-saddles ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... thoroughly successful administrator. In the intervals of his official labours, he occupied himself with inquiries into a wide range of subjects—history, politics, philology, anthropology, and antiquarianism. His works on 'The Astronomy of the Ancients,' and 'Essays on the Formation of the Romanic Languages,' might have been written by the profoundest of German SAVANS. He took especial delight in pursuing the abstruser branches of learning, and found in them his chief pleasure and recreation. Lord Palmerston ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... impelling force which we call GRAVITATION. It is gravitation which causes unsupported bodies to fall to the ground, which gives them weight, and which fastens us to the earth on which we live. Ignorance of this cause was the sole obstacle which prevented the ancients from believing in the antipodes. "Can you not see," said St. Augustine after Lactantius, "that, if there were men under our feet, their heads would point downward, and that they would fall into the sky?" The bishop of Hippo, who thought ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... his fame among his contemporaries far rather to the fact that he was a kind of living representative of antiquity, that he imitated all styles of Latin poetry, endeavored by his voluminous historical and philosophical writings not to supplant, but to make known, the works of the ancients, and wrote letters that, as treatises on matters of antiquarian interest, obtained a reputation which to us is unintelligible, but which was natural enough in an age without handbooks. Petrarch himself trusted and hoped that his Latin writings would bring him ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... well known to the ancients, no allusion unquestionably referring to L. vera has been found in the writings of classical authors, the earliest mention of this latter plant being in the twelfth century, by the Abbess Hildegard, who lived near Bergen-on-the-Rhine. Under the name of Llafant or Llafantly, it was known ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 799, April 25, 1891 • Various
... is not for me to settle the question between two such men as Professor Hugg and Sir William Whisky as to whether Notting Hill means Nutting Hill (in allusion to the rich woods which no longer cover it), or whether it is a corruption of Nothing-ill, referring to its reputation among the ancients as an Earthly Paradise. When a Podkins and a Jossy confess themselves doubtful about the boundaries of West Kensington (said to have been traced in the blood of Oxen), I need not be ashamed to confess a similar doubt. I will ask you to excuse me from further history, and to assist me with your ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... a truth which will hardly be contested, that Christianity, whenever it has at all prevailed, has raised the general standard of morals to a height before unknown. Some actions, which among the ancients were scarcely held to be blemishes in the most excellent characters, have been justly considered by the laws of every Christian community, as meriting the severest punishments. In other instances, virtues formerly rare have become common; and in particular a merciful and courteous temper ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... praise snowy women as they will, but the compelling woman is she of the warm blood. The snowy woman is the lifeless seed, the rainless cloud, the unmagnetic lodestone, the drossful iron. The great laws of nature affect her but passively. If there is aught in the saying of the ancients, "The best only in nature can survive," the day of her extermination will come. Fire is as chaste as snow, ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... to the ancients as Thessaly, William, and now, with this war, the spirit matter is rolling between the hills like thunder." He paused, seemed to listen, smiled, jerked his head ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... have been impossible for any one to reconcile the existence of evil with the perfections of God. It has been truly said, that "An attention to the internal operations of the human mind, with a view to analyze its principles, is one of the distinctions of modern times. Among the ancients scarcely anything of the sort was known."—Robert Hall. Yet without a correct analysis of the powers of the human mind, and of the relations they sustain to each other, as well as to external objects ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... another. The printing-press and the reporter, the consultation in the jury-room, the reflection in the Judge's chamber, the delay of the election to a day long after the speech, are protections against the mischief of mere oratory, which the ancients did not enjoy. ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... and the woman that made it, and the young man who brings it to fainting folk. Have a suck, my girl, while I relate to our young host the history and virtues of this his sovereign compound. This corroborative, young sir, was unknown to the ancients: we find it neither in their treatises of medicine, nor in those popular narratives, which reveal many of their remedies, both in chirurgery and medicine proper. Hector, in the Ilias, if my memory does not ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... places one from another; for otherwise there is neither first nor last in the round earth. But some place must bee appointed where to beginne the account and those Ilands haue beene thought fittest, because no part of the World that lay westward was knowne to the Ancients further then that: and as they began to reckon there, we follow them. This circle is called in greeke ...
— A Briefe Introduction to Geography • William Pemble
... you what that bird was—a kingfisher, the celebrated halcyon of the ancients, about which so many tales are told. It lives on fish, which it catches in the manner you saw. It builds in holes in the banks, and is a shy, retired bird, never to be seen far from ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... adjacent to the Canary-Islands; but, owing to the want of seasonable rains, the produce of the latter is not rapid or abundant, although the quality is excellent. It has been suggested, that the orchilla was probably the Gertulian purple of the ancients; a conjecture which is strengthened by the fact, that the coast of Africa, where the orchilla abounds, was formerly called Gertulia. That the vivid dye which resides in this weed was known to the ancients, does not ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... mountain-ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which were last gilded by his rays. The island of Atlantis, and the islands and gardens of the Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial paradise, appear to have been the Great West of the ancients, enveloped in mystery and poetry. Who has not seen in imagination, when looking into the sunset sky, the gardens of the Hesperides, and the foundation of all ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... the golden lamp of love? to inculcate the virtue of valor? Can heroes be forged only with the hammer of Thor? Is genius the child of blood and tears? Are wars the tidal waves in the mighty social sea, ordained by the Deity to prevent putrefaction? Was the Phoenix of the ancients but an old civilization, enervated by luxury and corrupted by peace, that could only be purified of its foul dross and infused with new energy by fire? Was that poet inspired who declared that, "Whatever is, is right?" ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... of no true musical delight: which consists only in apt Numbers, fit quantity of Syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one Verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoyded by the learned Ancients both in Poetry and all good Oratory This neglect then of Rime so little is to be taken for a defect though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar Readers, that it rather is to be esteem'd an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... appearance of the old roads is one of the best proofs of their antiquity, and one is inclined to wonder at their windings, but in following the tracks across the Forest moors one gets an insight into the way roads originated. The ancients simply adopted the line of least resistance by avoiding hills, boggy places, and the deep parts of streams, choosing the shallow fordable spots for crossing. The winding road is, of course, much more interesting and beautiful than the later straight roads of the Romans, though no doubt ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... thousand ways, and continually fighting off the menacing waters, they succeeded in bringing Holland to a state of cultivation not inferior to that of more favored regions. That Holland, that sandy, marshy country which the ancients considered all but uninhabitable, now sends out yearly from her confines agricultural products to the value of a hundred millions of francs, possesses about one million three hundred thousand head of cattle, and in proportion to the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... every country were accustomed to mount their horses from the right side of the animal, that they might the better grasp the mane, which hangs on that side, a practice universally changed in modern times. The ancients generally leaped on their horse's backs, though they sometimes carried a spear, with a loop or projection about two feet from the bottom which served them as a step. In Greece and Rome, the local magistracy were bound to see that blocks for mounting (what the Scotch call loupin-on-stanes) ...
— The Arabian Art of Taming and Training Wild and Vicious Horses • P. R. Kincaid
... invent it myself though; but a commander in our militia, a great scholar, I assure you, says that there is no meaning in the common oaths, and that nothing but their antiquity makes them respectable;—because, he says, the ancients would never stick to an oath or two, but would say, by Jove! or by Bacchus! or by Mars! or by Venus! or by Pallas, according to the sentiment: so that to swear with propriety, says my little major, the oath should be an echo to the sense; and this we call the oath referential, ...
— The Rivals - A Comedy • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... resolving it into a group of stars thirty-six in number, and all of comparatively large magnitude. The disappearance of Praesepe in consequence of the condensation of vapour in the atmosphere was regarded by the ancients as a sure indication of approaching rain. In the same constellation, near the Crab's southern claw, there is another rich cluster, which consists of 200 stars of the ninth ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... PYRAMIDS WERE BUILT.—This is beyond modern conjecture, so imperfect is our understanding of the extent of the mechanical knowledge of the ancients. Their appliances are believed to have been of the simplest order, and their implements exceedingly crude, and yet they were able to convey these enormous blocks of stones for vast distances, over routes most difficult, and having accomplished ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... and a Juvenal in the person of the admirable Boileau, whose numbers are excellent, whose expressions are noble, whose thoughts are just, whose language is pure, whose satire is pointed, and whose sense is just. What he borrows from the ancients he repays with usury of his own, in coin as good ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... chariots, and the manner of harnessing horses to draw them, is ascribed to Ericthonius of Athens, B.C. 1486. The chariots of the ancients were like our phaetons, and drawn by one horse. The invention of the chaise, or calash, is ascribed to Augustus Caesar, about A.D. 7. Postchaises were introduced by Trajan about A.D. 100. Carriages were known in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... favour of the hostess of the Inn! Have I not offered toast on frothing toast Looking toward the melancholy host; Praised the old wall-eyed mare to please the groom; Laughed to the laughing maid and fetched her broom; Stood in the background not to interfere When the cool ancients frolicked at their beer; Talked only in my turn, and made no claim For recognition or by voice or name, Content to listen, and to watch the blue Or grey of eyes, or ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... Persian Shahs, Turkish Sultans; there was no language they did not understand. The bear, he insisted, was the wisest of animals, the most susceptible of education, the most capable and willing in service. This the ancients understood better than the moderns, for in recognition of his superiority they had twice exalted him to the Heavens, and in both instances near the star that knew no deviation. The hamari was a master of amplification, and his ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... was not present to sing, i.e., to win the grasshopper's prize, he was to give a choenix of barley to the ass. Well might Clearchus say "the investigation of riddles is not unconnected with philosophy, for the ancients used to display ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... vein runs from south to north, from pieces of which, dissolved in water, there results a tint which, by evaporation, forms into grains, and produces the same effect as the tint of China. In Cucurpe is amianto, or incombustible crystal, which the ancients so much valued. Marbles of various classes and colors, as well as alabasters and jaspers, are found in Opasura, Hermosillo, Uores, La Campana, and other points; but we do not know as yet the place from which the Aztecs obtained the beautiful reddish ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... supposed to have him or her in my eye (as the saying is)—seemed yet to Mrs. Wilbur a sufficient objection to the engraving of the aforesaid painting. We read of many who either absolutely refused to allow the copying of their features, as especially did Plotinus and Agesilaus among the ancients, not to mention the more modern instances of Scioppius Palaeottus, Pinellus, Velserus, Gataker, and others, or were indifferent ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... Italy. The verso sciolto, it is well known, does not answer; it is not sufficiently familiar. The verse of twelve syllables, with a sdrucciolo termination selected by Ariosto, is much better, resembling the trimeter of the ancients, but is still somewhat monotonous. It has been, however, but little cultivated. The Martellian verse, a bad imitation of the Alexandrine, is a downright torture to the ear. Chiari, and occasionally Goldoni, came at last to use it, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... already mentioned, he was much caressed by the literati of Albany; particularly by Mr. John Cook, who entertained him very hospitably at his circulating library and reading-room, where they used to drink Spa water, and talk about the ancients. He found Mr. Cook a man after his own heart—of great literary research, and a curious collector of books At parting, the latter, in testimony of friendship, made him a present of the two oldest works in his collection; which were, the earliest edition of the Heidelberg Catechism, ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... why there are so few instances of heroism in modern times is the total decay of political virtue: we are broken up into small parties and associate only with our families, thus forgetting the public, in our regard for private interest: the ancients were taught rather to live for the benefit of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 534 - 18 Feb 1832 • Various
... exclaimed. "Oh! I forgot: that is the lady moon's name in your tongue, is it not? Well, come, Quilla, and I will wed and worship you, as 'tis said the ancients did, and never turn to look upon another, be she woman, or goddess, or both. Only come and take me from this accursed isle and in payment I'll die for you, if need be, when first I've taught you how to love as star or woman ...
— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard
... late the fashion for any one who writes of his own life to see himself against a dark background, to see his development frustrated by some shadow of heredity or some horror of environment. But Gilbert saw his life rather as the ancients saw it when pietas was a duty because we had received so much from those who brought us into being. This Englishman was grateful to his country, to his parents, to his home for all ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... Since writing the above, we have received a report that the French Directory has proposed a declaration of war against the United States to the Council of Ancients, who have rejected it. Thus we see two nations who love one another affectionately, brought by the ill temper of their executive administrations, to the very brink of a necessity to imbrue their hands in the blood of each ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... "Kamis" from low Lat. "Camicia," first found in St. Jerome:— "Solent militantes habere lineas, quas Camicias vocant." Our shirt, chemise, chemisette, etc., was unknown to the Ancients of Europe. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... strong feeling—by the narrow loins, turgid muscles of the breast, thighs, and calves of the legs, will all find reason to believe they are copied from the above-mentioned statue." Greece, it must be owned, possessed musicians long anterior to Homer: Chiron the Centaur, regarded by the ancients as one of the inventors of medicine, botany, and chirurgery, who, when eighty-eight years of age, formed the constellations for the use of the Argonauts; Linus, the preceptor of Hercules, who added a string to the lyre, and is said to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... appeared in 1803. The Braut von Messina was an experiment; an attempt to exhibit a modern subject and modern sentiments in an antique garb. The principle on which the interest of this play rests is the Fatalism of the ancients: the plot is of extreme simplicity; a Chorus also is introduced, an elaborate discussion of the nature and uses of that accompaniment being prefixed by way of preface. The experiment was not successful: with a multitude of individual beauties this Bride of Messina is ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... universe at various periods, how they explained the phenomena of nature, their connection, their causes and effects. He would begin with the childish superstitions of the savages, and continuing through the so-called learned systems of the ancients and of the Middle Ages, would bring his history up to the theories of contemporary scientists. He would demonstrate the psychological causes of the fact that man, at a certain stage of intellectual development, must necessarily fall into certain errors, and by the aid ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... the fish-lakes of Biserta in Tunis, these salt-pits were worked by the ancients, and have been inexhaustible and unchangeable through two thousand years. Whatever may be the geological changes in other regions of the globe, those of North Africa are not very rapid, beyond filling up a few of the artificial harbours, ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... ancients loved this noble fish, And, coming from the kitchen fire All piping hot upon a dish, What raptures did he not inspire! "Fish should swim twice," they used to say— Once in their native vapid brine, And then a better way— You ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... conceive of as returning to dead earth, inasmuch as it is now soulless? Is there any unnatural violence which can be done to our thoughts by which we can bring the ideas of a soul and of water, or of a stone into combination, and keep them there for long together? The ancients, indeed, said they believed their rivers to be gods, and carved likenesses of them under the forms of men; but even supposing this to have been their real mind, can it by any conceivable means become our own? Granted that a stone ...
— God the Known and God the Unknown • Samuel Butler
... people who inhabited the country at the time of the arrival of the conquerors were not the builders of the ancient monuments. Many of these were then in ruins and looked upon by the inhabitants, as they are today, with respect and awe. True, many of the habits and customs of the ancients, to a certain extent, existed yet among them; but disfigured, distorted by time, and the new modes of thinking and living introduced by the invaders; while, strange to say, the language remained unaltered. Even today, in many places in Yucatan the descendants of the Spanish conquerors have forgotten ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... perhaps are more willing to honour past than present excellence; and the mind contemplates genius through the shades of age, as the eye surveys the sun through artificial opacity. The great contention of criticism is to find the faults of the moderns, and the beauties of the ancients. While an authour is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... the cause of the suffering, I never could understand. This kind of diversion betrays a want of humane consideration in the contriver. It is infinitely more cruel and unamiable than Spanish bull-baitings, or the gladiatorial shows of the ancients, inasmuch as a shock to the finest feelings of human nature is harder to bear, and longer in duration, than the momentary pang induced by witnessing a merely ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... they fill with their noses as at Otaheite; but these have four holes or stops, whereas those of Otaheite have only two. The other was composed of ten or eleven small reeds of unequal lengths, bound together side by side, as the Doric pipe of the ancients is said to have been; and the open ends of the reeds into which they blow with their mouths, are of equal height, or in a line. They have also a drum, which, without any impropriety, may be compared to an ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... reason why she felt no obligation to him was that she was one with him. She was prepared to sacrifice him exactly as she was, or ought to be, willing to sacrifice herself; whereas her mother—it seemed as if her mother's power surrounded her in every direction, as solid as the ancients believed the ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... in such abundant festoons from the fir-trees has a most singular effect, almost weird at times. These ancients of the forest, with their long grey beards and hoary tresses, look very solemn indeed in ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... this demand, and the otherwise beautiful tragedy of Cato (for even the unities are preserved in it) is spoiled by two stupid love plots, that not only disfigure it, but throw a complete weariness over the whole. With the ancients it was very different, and amongst all those splendid Greek compositions which are regarded as models for the drama, we find none of them, with the exception of Hippolitus, in which there is any of this trifling ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 561, August 11, 1832 • Various
... said she. And after a while she came from the cubiculum, in which she had been preparing to sleep, as it seemed, for she was in a single close tunic, called by the ancients capitium, covering the breast completely, and her hair was unbound. Vinicius, whose heart beat with more quickness at sight of her, began to upbraid her for not thinking of sleep yet; but she answered joyously,—"I was just preparing ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Montaigne's notice of his dispensing with "borrowed beauties." He was, in fact, a famous borrower. He himself warns his readers to be careful how they criticise him; they may be flouting unawares Seneca, Plutarch, or some other, equally redoubtable, of the reverend ancients. Montaigne is perhaps as signal an example as any in literature, of the man of genius exercising his prescriptive right to help himself to his own wherever he may happen to find it. But Montaigne has in turn been freely borrowed from. Bacon ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... disaster spread rapidly in Egypt, and for a moment filled the army with despair. Bonaparte received the tidings with imperturbable composure. "Well," he said, "we must die in this country, or get out of it as great as the ancients." He wrote to Kleber: "This will oblige us to do greater things than we intended. We must hold ourselves in readiness." The great soul of Kleber was worthy of this language: "Yes," replied Kleber, "we must do great things. I am preparing my faculties." The courage of these men supported ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... Yes, I'm told Some ancients like my rusty lay, As Grandpa Noah loved the old Red-sandstone march of Jubal's day I used to carol like the birds, But time my wits has quite unfixed, Et quoad verba,—for my words,— Ciel! ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... threaten to prevail that good citizens should endeavour to stifle them, even at the peril of their lives." The style, and the very errors in spelling, made this note—the brevity of which suggested the laconic style of the ancients—appear all the more heroic. Not one of the gentlemen of the Provisional Commission put in an appearance. The last two who had hitherto remained faithful, and Granoux himself, even, prudently stopped at home. Thus Rougon ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... metempsychosis is founded on the consciousness of gradation between beasts and men. The belief in a soul-endowed animal world was present among the ancients, and the laws of intelligence and instinct were misconstrued, or were regarded as a puzzle, which no ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... represents in the world, with a tenacity of its own the idea of a personal and absolute God; if Greece and Rome represent the idea of society, Gaul represents, just as particularly, the idea of immortality. Nothing characterized it better, as all the ancients admit. That mysterious folk was looked upon as the privileged possessor of the secrets of death, and its unwavering instinctive faith in the persistence of life never ceased to be a cause of astonishment, and sometimes of fear, ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... that was promised be even for him? Would his deep repentance, the agony of spirit he had endured, be payment enough? Eternal death—the everlasting hell of the Jehovah of the ancients! Not that, merciful God, but ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... which we suppose to be modern rather than ancient, and which therefore have a peculiar interest for us. The Second Alcibiades shows that the difficulties about prayer which have perplexed Christian theologians were not unknown among the followers of Plato. The Eryxias was doubted by the ancients themselves: yet it may claim the distinction of being, among all Greek or Roman writings, the one which anticipates in the most striking manner the modern science of political economy and gives an abstract form to some ...
— Eryxias • An Imitator of Plato
... brings one nearer the goal. How many who care only for applause content themselves to-day, unfortunately, with Nature at second hand! Without returning to her eternally fresh, inexhaustible spring, they draw from the conveniently accessible wells which the great ancients dug ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... imagine his being 'an absolute pedant,' but such was, actually, his own account of himself:—'When I talked my best, I quoted Horace; when I aimed at being facetious, I quoted Martial; and when I had a mind to be a fine gentleman, I talked Ovid. I was convinced that none but the ancients had common sense; that the classics contained everything that was either necessary, useful, or ornamental to men; and I was not even without thoughts of wearing the toga virilis of the Romans, instead of the vulgar and illiberal ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... make rules for itself, and that imitation is suicidal. "Genius," he says, "can set us right in composition, without the rules of the learned; as conscience sets us right in life, without the laws of the land." He lays it down as a maxim that "the less we copy the renowned ancients, we shall resemble them the more." The two golden rules in composition as in ethics are: know thyself and reverence thyself. Such were the "conjectures on original composition," expounded to him by Herder which led Goethe to regard ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... education" still lived on and had not yet lost its pathetic sound. These two worthy men saw clearly, by the system of instruction in vogue, that the time was not yet ripe for a higher culture, a culture founded upon that of the ancients: the neglected state of linguistic instruction; the forcing of students into learned historical paths, instead of giving them a practical training; the connection of certain practices, encouraged in the public schools, with the objectionable ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... 1st dialogue embraces the question Nature, and its processes, invention and imitation,—imitation chiefly. Kosmon begins by showing, in illustration of the truth of Christian's concluding sentences, how imperfectly all the Ancients, excepting the Hebrews, loved, understood, or felt Nature, &c. This is not an ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... as a hammer to knock things into heads; if rebuked for this, plaintively remonstrating, "But I thought you told me it was useful to teach with!" (So Gideon taught the men of Succoth.) And therefore, we need not be astonished: coming dawn to Strabo, to find him asserting that "the ancients held poetry to be a kind of elementary philosophy, introducing us from childhood to life and pleasureably instructing us in character, behaviour and action." The Greeks, he tells us, chose poetry for their children's first lessons. Surely ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the rich fish sauce of the ancients, equivalent to a saumure, perhaps, in modern French cookery. In the Middle Ages the word is used both for ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... he told me, "this prodigious, inexhaustible wet nurse of a sea not only feeds me, she dresses me as well. That fabric covering you was woven from the masses of filaments that anchor certain seashells; as the ancients were wont to do, it was dyed with purple ink from the murex snail and shaded with violet tints that I extract from a marine slug, the Mediterranean sea hare. The perfumes you'll find on the washstand ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... persons as are experienced, older than we are, and prudent, than to their demonstrations, for their experience gives them an insight into principles." Thus it is written (Prov. 3:5): "Lean not on thy own prudence," and (Ecclus. 6:35): "Stand in the multitude of the ancients" (i.e. the old men), "that are wise, and join thyself from thy heart to their wisdom." Now it is a mark of docility to be ready to be taught: and consequently docility is fittingly reckoned a part ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... light, in favorable circumstances. Some of them are as large as the asteroids. One, of 600,000 tons weight, passed within twenty-five miles of the earth, at the rate of twenty miles a second. A fragment of it reached the earth.[294] "That aerolites were called stars by the ancients is indisputable. Indeed, Anaxagoras considered the stars to be only stony masses, torn from the earth by the violence of rotation. Democritus tells us, that invisible dark masses of stone move with the visible stars, and remain on that account unknown, but sometimes fall upon ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... bearing on one topic connected with the art,—namely, that if he had read as much as other men, he should have remained still as ignorant as other men. This must not be interpreted too literally. Hobbes was really a great reader of the ancients, and must have studied with care some of the philosophers immediately preceding himself. Still, it indicates an important point for discussion in the art of study, in which great men have gone to opposite extremes—I mean in reference to the amount of attention to be given ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... young people of the opposite sex, who are much thrown together, and so become in a way essential to each other's happiness, to end by falling in love. It is said that "love is blind," and the ancients so painted their mythological god, Cupid. It is very certain that the fascination is not dependent on the will; it is a divine, natural impulse, which has for its purpose the continuance ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... learning, or often from the prejudices of a school education, where they hear of nothing else, are always talking of the ancients, as something more than men, and of the moderns, as something less. They are never without a classic or two in their pockets; they stick to the old good sense; they read none of the modern trash; and will show you, plainly, that no improvement has been made, in any one art or science, ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... but pursued his own train of thought. "How futile your science is! You find a bacillus here, a ptomain there. What use is that to me? None! Teach me how to keep young forever, then I shall have some respect for your staring into your beloved microscope. The ancients alone were right in that, as in everything else. To die young. In undiminished vigour. The gods can bestow no greater happiness. What is there to seek in life when ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... reigns, in fact, often, so far as the pomp and pleasure of reigning are concerned, over quite a little kingdom, and is looked up to by the millions beneath his grade with a reverence as great, at least, as that with which the ancients looked up to their gods. He is deprived of nothing which pertains to power but the mere toil, and care, and responsibility of ruling, so that he has all the sweetness and fragrance of sovereignty without its thorns. ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott |
