Quotes about Antiquity

The Old Man of Stoer is 60 metres high and found in Sutherland, Scotland UK

Mad is the man who is forever gritting his teeth against that granite block, complete and changeless, of the past. Saint Exupery 

If we look backwards to antiquity, it should be as those that are winning a race. Charles Caleb Colton 

To excel the past we must not allow ourselves to lose contact with it; on the contrary, we must feel it under our feet because we raised ourselves upon it. Jose Ortega Y Gasset 

History is the witness of the times, the light of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, the messenger of antiquity. Cicero 

Books that have become classics; books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal, always remind me of retired colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay. Thomas Bailey Aldrich 

Nothing is improbable until it moves into the past tense George Ade 

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time. Francis Bacon

The passing minute is every man’s equal possession, but what has once gone by is not ours. Marcus Aurelius

A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past. Eric Hoffer

The Will-be and the Has-been touch us more nearly than the Is. So we are more tender towards children and old people than to those who are in the prime of life. Samuel Butler

Antiquity cannot privilege an error, nor do novelties prejudice a truth. Thomas Fuller

Why doesn’t the past decently bury itself, instead of sitting waiting to be admired by the present? D. H. Lawrence

Antiquity is full of the praises of another antiquity still more remote. Voltaire  

Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass? Maurice Maeterlinck  

I would not fear nor wish my fate, but boldly say each night; tomorrow let my sun his beams display, or in clouds hide them; I have lived today. Abraham Cowley 

What’s said is said and goes upon its way. Like it or not, repent as you may. Chaucer 

Respect the past in the full measure of its deserts, but do not make the mistake of confusing it with the present nor seek in it the ideals of the future. Jose Ingenieros 

The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won't let us. Eugene O’Neill 

Antiquity was perhaps created to provide professors with their bread and butter. Edmund and Jules De Concourt 

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it. George Santayana 

Here at least the spirit of the ancient builders was at one with the spirit of the modern beholder. Standing before this abraded pile, the eye regarded its present usage, the mind dwelt upon its past history, with a satisfied sense of functional continuity throughout. … For once medievalism and modernism had a common standpoint. Thomas Hardy

To what a degree the same past can leave different marks; and especially admit of different interpretations. Andre Gide

The mill cannot grind with water that’s past. George Herbert 

We are not free to use today, or to promise tomorrow, because we are already mortgaged to yesterday. Emerson

The future is an opaque mirror. Anyone who tries to look into it sees nothing but the dim outlines of an old and worried face. Jim Bishop 

Happy the man, and happy he alone, he can call today his own; he who, secure within, can say, tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today. John Dryden 

Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. Unknown

One can return to their place of birth, but one cannot go back to your youth. John Burroughs

Remember that the sole life which a man can lose is that which he is living at the moment. Marcus Aurelius 

What we look for does not come to pass; god finds a way for what none foresaw. Euripides  

With the past, as past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future as future. I live now, and will verify all past history in my own moments. Emerson 

All things are taken from us, and become portions and parcels of the dreadful past. Alfred Lord Tennyson 

People are what they are because they have come out of what was. Therefore they should bow down before what was, and take it and say it’s good; or should they? Carl Sandburg 

Remember that the future is neither ours nor wholly not ours, so that we may neither count on it as sure to come, nor abandon hope of it as certain not to be. Epicurus 

What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance? Djuna Barnes 

We live between two dense clouds; the forgetting of what was and the uncertainty of what will be. Anatole France 

Man is a history making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind him. W. H. Auden 

Had the Greeks held novelty in such disdain as we, what work of ancient date would now exist?  Horace 

Nostalgia: Praising what is lost, makes the remembrance dear. Shakespeare  

All our yesterdays are summarized in our now, and all our tomorrows are ours to shape. Hal Borland 

Every situation and every moment is of infinite worth, for it is the representative of a whole eternity. Goethe  

How the past perishes is how the future becomes. Alfred Lord Whitehead 

I believe the future is only the past again, entered through another gate. Sir Arthur Wing Pinero 

Obligations, hatreds, injuries; what did I expect my memories to be? I was forgetting remorse. Now I have a complete past. Jean Anouilh

The past not merely is not fugitive, it remains present. Marcel Proust

The present, like a note in music, is nothing but as it appertains to what is past and what is to come. Walter Savage Landor 

It is not the weight of the future or the past that is pressing upon you, but ever that of the present alone. Even this burden, too, can be lessened if you confine it strictly to its own limits. Marcus Aurelius 

The mind which renounces, once and for ever, a futile hope, has its compensation in ever-growing calm. George Gissing 

Necessity is the theme and the inventress, the eternal curb and law of nature. Leonardo DA Vinci 

Quotes about Books and Literature

While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living. Cyril Connolly 

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered. W. H. Auden

The unusual is only found in a very small percentage, except in literary creations, and that is exactly what makes literature. Julio Cortazar 

The adult relation to books is one of absorbing rather than being absorbed. Anthony Burgess,

Most of today’s books have an air of having been written in one day from books read the night before. Chamfort

The existence of good bad literature; the fact that no one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one’s intellect simply refuses to take seriously is a reminder that art is not the same thing as celebration. George Orwell

When one can read, can penetrate the enchanted realm of books, why write? Colette 

Most people won’t realize that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship it like anything else. Katherine Anne Porter 

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself. Truman Capote 

A writer lives, at best, in a state of astonishment. Beneath any feeling he has of the good or evil of the world lays a deeper one of wonder at it all. To transmit that feeling, he writes. William Sansom 

The bare objects of a book, or of a story, might also have a subtle relation to our own past. ... It is where lies part of the pleasure and urgency.  It is one of the ways an author speaks to a reader, and becomes integrated into the reader’s own imaginative life.  Even the most sophisticated readers read novels in the light of their own experience, and in such recognition, sympathy may begin.  Source: My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead

A book, like a landscape, is a state of consciousness varying with readers. Ernest Dimnet 

Literature was formerly an art and finance a trade; today it is the reverse. Joseph Roux

The most thrilling version of the Bible was printed in 1631 by Robert Barker and Martin Lucas, the King’s printers at London. It contained several mistakes, but one was inspired, for the word “not” was omitted from the Seventh Commandment and enjoined its readers, on the highest authority, to commit adultery. 

A classic is something that everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read. Mark Twain

The illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is Amorphous, literature is formal. Francoise Sagan 

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. T. S. Eliot

Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to write “very”; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. Mark Twain

I do not know where to find in any literature, whether ancient or modern, any adequate account of that nature with which I am acquainted. Mythology comes nearest to it of any. Henry David Thoreau

A book is not harmless merely because no one is consciously offended by it. T. S. Eliot

Perversity is the muse of modern literature. Susan Sontag

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry without a certain unsoundness of mind. Thomas Macaulay

An inveterate and incurable itch for writing besets many and grows old with their sick hearts. Juvenal 

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous. Robert Benchley

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents. Ezra Pound

Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of the various, the possibility, complexity, and difficulty. Lionel Trilling 

There is much trickery required to grow rich by a stupid book as there is folly in buying it. LA Bruyere 

A writer and nothing else; a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right. John K. Hutchens 

Reading makes a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. Francis Bacon

A great classic means a man whom one can praise without having read. G. K. Chesterton

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. Somerset Maugham

In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn’t be mixed. And if they are, the fiction parts should be printed in red ink, the fact parts in black ink. Catherine Drinker Bowen

In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from binding. Charles Lamb

The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman. Boris Pasternak 

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. Virginia Woolf

In a very real sense, the writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratifications, is a curious anticlimax. Alfred Kazin

Books give not wisdom where none before was, but where some is, their reading makes it more.  Sir John Harrington

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering. Robert Frost 

He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public. Emerson 

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction. A. Bevan

Have you any right to read, especially novels, until you have exhausted the best part of the day in some employment that is called practical? Charles Dudley Warner 

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal but which the reader recognizes as his own.  Salvatore Quasimodo 

He that I am reading seems always to have the most force. Montaigne 

The modernness of all good books seems to give me an existence as wide as man. Emerson

Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they are written. Thoreau 

Isn’t it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists? Kelvin Throop

My experience with public libraries is that the first volume of the book I inquire for is out, unless I happen to want the second, when that is out. Oliver Wendell Holmes 

The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes. Andre Gide 

Hard-covered books break up friendships. You loan a hard-covered book to a friend and when he doesn’t return it you get mad at him. It makes you mean and petty. But twenty-five-cent books are different. John Steinbeck 

When we read too fast or too slowly we understand nothing. Pascal

Poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere, and at all times, in hundreds and hundreds of men. Goethe 

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. Georges Simenon 

The poet begins where the man ends. The man’s lot is to live his human life; the poet’s to invent what is nonexistent. Jose Ortega Y Gasset 

How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words. Maurice Maeterlinck 

A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself. Marianne Moore

The business man who is a novelist is able to drop in on literature and feel no suicidal loss of esteem if the lady is not at home, and he can spend his life preparing without fuss for the awful interview. V. S. Pritchett 

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who are minded beyond reason the opinion of others. Virginia Woolf 

Words not only affect us temporarily; they change us, they socialize or unsocialize us. David Riesman 

Biography broadens the vision and allows us to live a thousand lives in one. Elbert Hubbard

The world, in its sheer exuberance of kindness, will try to bury the poet with warm and lovely human trivialities. It will even ask him to autograph books. Christopher Morley  

Few books have more than one thought; the generality indeed have not quite so many. Julius and Augustus Hare

Authors are sometimes like tomcats; they distrust all other toms, but they are kind to kittens. Malcolm Cowley 

The poet camouflages, in the expression of joy, his despair at not having found its reality.  Max Jacob 

He that does not expect a million readers should not write a line. Goethe

The first thing to have in a library is a shelf. From time to time this can be decorated with literature, but the shelf is the main thing. Finley Peter Dunne 

Those things, for which we find words, are things that we have already overcome. Nietzsche 

There are favorable hours for reading a book, as for writing it. Longfellow

As to the pure mind all things are pure, so to the poetic mind all things are poetical. Longfellow 

If you would be a reader, read; if a writer, write. Epictetus 

Journalism is literature in a hurry. Matthew Arnold

We poets in our youth begin in gladness; but thereof come in the end despondency and madness. William Wordsworth