#ancient

A couple years ago, the novelist Russell Banks told me he was reading the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. I asked why. He said, 'Because I've always wanted to and am tired of having my reading assigned.' I thought it was a marvelous declaration of independence. ↗

— Richard Russo

#always #am #ancient #asked #assigned

I can still memory - taste the fresh buttermilk pancakes and hot buttermilk biscuits - both made with lard! - that were cooked on the top, or in the oven, of that ancient iron stove. ↗

— Vernon L. Smith

#biscuits #both #cooked #fresh #hot

The praise of ancient authors proceeds not from the reverence of the dead, but from the competition and mutual envy of the living. ↗

— Thomas Hobbes

#authors #competition #dead #envy #living

The form language used by the ancient Egyptians in their structures is minimal. ↗

— Harry Seidler

#egyptians #form #language #minimal #structures

Surely the greatest mercy granted us by Providence is our ignorance of the future. Imagine if we knew the outcome of our hopes and plans, or could see the manner in which we are doomed to die - how ruined our lives would be! Instead we live on dumbly from day to day as happily as animals. But all things must come to dust eventually. No human being, no system, no age is impervious to this law; everything beneath the stars will perish; the hardest rock will be worn away. Nothing endures but words. ↗

— Robert Harris

#cicero #tiro #age

For it is now to us itself ancient; and yet its maker was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote. ↗

— J.R.R. Tolkien

#beowulf #loss #poignant #regret #sorrow

The earliest sensation at the onset of illness, often preceding the recognition of identifiable symptoms, is apprehension. Something has gone wrong, and a glimpse of mortality shifts somewhere deep in the mind. It is the most ancient of our fears. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#apprehension #deep #earliest #fears #glimpse

The situations depicted in the Book of Changes are the primary data of life -- what happens to everybody, every day, and what is simple and easy to understand. ↗

— Hellmut Wilhelm

#chinese-philosopher #i-ching #the-occult #change

....the line of ill-intentional Egyptologist, equipped with a ferocious erudition , have commited their well known crime against science, by becoming guilty of a deliberate falsification of the history of humanity. Supported by the governing powers of all the Western countries , this ideology, based on a moral and intellectual swindle, easily won out over the true scientific current developed by a parallel group of Egyptologist of good will, whose intellectual uprightness and even courage cannot be stressed stronly enough. The new Egyptological ideology , born at the opportune monment, reinforced the theorectical bases of imperialist ideology. That is why it easily drowned out the voice of science, by throwing the veil of fasificacation over historical truth. This ideology was spread with the help of considerable publicity and taught the world over, because it alone had the material and financial means for its own propagation. Thus imperialism, like the prehistoric hunter, first killed the being spiritually and culturally, before trying to eliminate it physically. The negation of the history and intellectual accomplishments of Black Africans was cultural, mental murder,which preceded and paved the way for their genocide here and there in the world. ↗

— Cheikh Anta Diop

#courage

TEIRESIAS: You have your eyes but see not where you are in sin, nor where you live, nor whom you live with. Do you know who your parents are? Unknowing you are enemy to kith and kin in death, beneath the earth, and in this life. ↗

— Sophocles

#sophocles #tragedy #death