These antiquity quotes will inspire you. Antiquity, the ancient past, especially the period before the Middle Ages.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging antiquity quotes, antiquity sayings, and antiquity proverbs.
Best Antiquity Quotes
- “Conservatism… offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future.” ~ Benjamin Disraeli
- “Antiquity! I like its ruins better than its reconstructions.” ~ Joseph Joubert
- “It is an unscrupulous intellect that does not pay to antiquity its due reverence.” ~ Desiderius Erasmus
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“Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on Simplicity.” ~ Plato
- “Study the past if you would define the future. I am not one who was born in the possession of knowledge; I am one who is fond of antiquity, and earnest in seeking it there. Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.” ~ Confucius
- “The art of reasoning becomes of first importance. In this line antiquity has left us the finest models for imitation; I should consider the speeches of Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus, as pre-eminent specimens of logic, taste, and that sententious brevity which, using not a word to spare, leaves not a moment for inattention to the hearer. Amplification is the vice of modern oratory.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “The wise men of antiquity, when they wished to make the whole world peaceful and happy, first put their own States into proper order. Before putting their States into proper order, they regulated their own families. Before regulating their families, they regulated themselves. Before regulating themselves, they tried to be sincere in their thoughts. Before being sincere in their thoughts, they tried to see things exactly as they really were.” ~ Confucius
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“I have no particular interest in antiquities or antiques, but I like things to meet a certain aesthetic.” ~ Stephen Bayley
- “The art of reasoning becomes of first importance. In this line antiquity has left us the finest models for imitation; I should consider the speeches of Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus, as pre-eminent specimens of logic, taste, and that sententious brevity which, using not a word to spare, leaves not a moment for inattention to the hearer. Amplification is the vice of modern oratory.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “Live in rooms full of light. Avoid heavy food. Be moderate in the drinking of wine. Take massage, baths, exercise, and gymnastics. Fight insomnia with gentle rocking or the sound of running water. Change surroundings and take long journeys. Strictly avoid frightening ideas. Indulge in cheerful conversation and amusements. Listen to music.” ~ Aulus Cornelius Celsus
- “Doctrine once sown strikes deep its root, and respect for antiquity influences all men.” ~ William Harvey
- “There is no patent recipe for getting good citizenship. You get it by applying the old, old rules of decent conduct, the rules in accordance with which decent men have had to shape their lives from the beginning .. fundamental precepts, put forth in the Bible and embodied consciously or unconsciously in the code of morals of every great and successful nation from antiquity to modern times.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
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“A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that being nothing art everything? When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity – then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the past is everything, being nothing!” ~ Charles Lamb
- “The great age of the earth will appear greater to man when he understands the origin of living organisms and the reasons for the gradual development and improvement of their organization. This antiquity will appear even greater when he realizes the length of time and the particular conditions which were necessary to bring all the living species into existence. This is particularly true since man is the latest result and present climax of this development, the ultimate limit of which, if it is ever reached, cannot be known.” ~ Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
- “It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity and the great ease which it has lent to computations put our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity.” ~ Pierre-Simon Laplace
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“In antiquity the sage kings recognized that men’s nature is bad and that their tendencies were not being corrected and their lawlessness controlled.” ~ Xunzi
- “Arles is certainly one of the most interesting towns I have ever seen, whether viewed as a place remarkable for the objects of antiquity it contains, or for the primitive manners of its inhabitants and its picturesque appearance.” ~ Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington
- “Pompeii is an extraordinary place to be because it was preserved exactly as it was. There are many other sites. If you visit any other antiquity-type sites throughout the world, they’re very damaged with what’s gone on over the centuries since they were abandoned. But this one was just, like, sealed, so you’re looking at rock surfaces and the carving of letters and names in the stones looks like it was done yesterday.” ~ David Gilmour
- “We gladly put antiquity above our age but not posterity. Only a father doesn’t begrudge his son’s talent.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- “Everyone who wants to know what will happen ought to examine what has happened: everything in this world in any epoch has their replicas in antiquity.” ~ Niccolo Machiavelli
- “Have you not a moist eye, a dry hand, a yellow cheek, a white beard, a decreasing leg, an increasing belly? Is not your voice broken, your wind short, your chin double, your wit single, and every part about you blasted with antiquity?” ~ William Shakespeare
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“The economic concept of value does not occur in antiquity .” ~ Karl Marx
- “It is an ancient belief, going back to classical antiquity, that specialization of any kind is illiberal in a freeman. A man willing to bury himself in the details of some small endeavor has been considered lost to these larger considerations which must occupy the mind of the ruler.” ~ Richard M. Weaver , Classical antiquity quotes
- “The game of chess is the most fascinating and intellectual pastime which the wisdom of antiquity has bequeathed to us.” ~ Howard Staunton
- “Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more modern. It is written as if the specator should be thinking of the backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the author expected that the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
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“Yes, ever since antiquity, the day after Friday has been Saturday.” ~ Mizuki Nomura
- “Astrology is knocking at the gates of our universities: A Tübingen professor has switched over to astrology and a course on astrology was given at Cardiff University last year. Astrology is not mere superstition but contains some psychological facts (like theosophy) which are of considerable importance. Astrology has actually nothing to do with the stars but is the 5000-year-old psychology of antiquity and the Middle Ages.” ~ Carl Jung
- “Each famous author of antiquity whom I recover places a new offence and another cause of dishonor to the charge of earlier generations, who, not satisfied with their own disgraceful barrenness, permitted the fruit of other minds, and the writings that their ancestors had produced by toil and application, to perish through insufferable neglect. Although they had nothing of their own to hand down to those who were to come after, they robbed posterity of its ancestral heritage.” ~ Petrarch
- “To put it in a nutshell, the Central and South American high cultures of antiquity were entirely worthy of comparison with what the Old World had achieved by the time of the Han, the Gupta, and the Hellenistic age. The fact is that the Amerindian high cultures were a human modality of their own, and those Spaniards who came among them first would have had the sensation, if they had ever heard of such literature, of treading in a world of imaginative science fiction. But it was real, and the Amerindian achievements deserve all our sympathy and praise.” ~ Joseph Needham
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“Damn the age. I’ll write for antiquity.” ~ Charles Lamb
- “What, then, shall a Catholic Christian do … if some novel contagion attempt to infect no longer a small part of the Church alone but the whole Church alike? He shall then see to it that he cleave unto antiquity, which is now utterly incapable of being seduced by any craft or novelty.” ~ Vincent of Lerins
- “It is with antiquity as with ancestry, nations are proud of the one, and individuals of the other; but if they are nothing in themselves, that which is their pride ought to be their humiliation.” ~ Charles Caleb Colton
- “What subsists to-day by violence continues to-morrow by acquiescence and is perpetuated by tradition; till at last the hoary abuse shakes the gray hairs of antiquity at us, and gives it-self out as the wisdom of ages.” ~ Edward Everett
- “It would seem that if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them. I do not question that, in an age of instruction and equality like our own, sovereigns might more easily succeed in collecting all political power into their own hands and might interfere more habitually and decidedly with the circle of private interests than any sovereign of antiquity could ever do.” ~ Alexis de Tocqueville
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“I beg you, reject antiquity, tradition, faith, and authority! Let us begin anew by doubting everything we assume has been proven!” ~ Giordano Bruno
- “If there were even one spark of evidence from antiquity that Jesus even may have gotten married, then as a historian, I would have to weigh this evidence against the total absence of such information in either Scripture or the early church traditions. But there is no such spark-not a scintilla of evidence-anywhere in historical sources. Even where one might expect to find such claims in the bizarre, second-century, apocryphal gospels…there is no reference that Jesus ever got married.” ~ Paul L. Maier
- “Book burning is a charming old custom, hallowed by antiquity. It has been practiced for centuries by fascists, communists, atheists, school children, rival authors, and tired librarians. Like everything of importance since the invention of the cloak and the shroud, its origins are cloaked in mystery and shrouded in secrecy. Some scholars believe that the first instance of book burning occurred in the Middle Ages, when a monk was trying to illuminate a manuscript. All agree that book burning was almost non-existent during the period when books were made of stone.” ~ Richard Armour
- “Streets teemed with hell’s wretched souls. New dead with their gadgets and old dead from antiquity. Demons roamed the avenues and alleyways, tormenting hapless damned at random with branding irons, flaming pitchforks, and razor-wire whips. -From the story Remember, Remember, Hell in November, in the anthology, Lawyers in Hell.” ~ Larry Atchley Jr.
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“The doctors of antiquity have affirmed that love is a passion that resembles a melancholy disease. The physician Rasis prescribed, therefore, in order to recover, coitus, fasting, drunkenness, and walking.” ~ Marsilio Ficino
- “But Shakespeare never drank coffee. Nor did Julius Caesar, or Socrates. Alexander the Great conquered half the world without even a café latte to perk him up. The pyramids were designed and constructed without a whiff of a sniff of caffeine. Coffee was introduced to Europe only in 1615. The achievements of antiquity are quite enough to cow the modern human, but when you realize that they did it all without caffeine it becomes almost unbearable.” ~ Mark Forsyth
- “If we look backwards to antiquity it should be as those that are winning a race.” ~ Charles Caleb Colton
- “Some have narrowed their minds, and so fettered them with the chains of antiquity that not only do they refuse to speak save as the ancients spake, but they refuse to think save as the ancients thought. God speaks to us, too, and the best thoughts are those now being vouchsafed to us. We will excel the ancients!” ~ Girolamo Savonarola
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“Antiquity was perhaps created to provide professors with their bread and butter.” ~ Jules de Goncourt
- “The nations of antiquity rolled away in the current of ages, Israel alone remained one indestructible edifice of gray antiquity… preserved by an internal and marvelous power.” ~ Isaac Mayer Wise
- “For we can affirm with a good conscience that we have, after reading the Holy Scripture, applied ourselves and yet daily apply ourselves to the extent that the grace of the Lord permits to inquiry into and investigation of the consensus of the true and purer antiquity.” ~ Martin Chemnitz
- “It is one proof of a good education and of true refinement of feeling, to respect antiquity.” ~ Sigourney Weaver
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“The larvae! The scent of young blood entices and draws them closer. There’s no need to venture into antiquity to evoke the shades of the dead.” ~ Jean Lorrain
- “Every generation enjoys the use of a vast hoard bequeathed to it by antiquity, and transmits that hoard, augmented by fresh acquisitions, to future ages.” ~ Thomas B. Macaulay
- “What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
- “Among the writers of antiquity there are none who instruct us more openly in the manners of their respective times in which they lived than those who have employed themselves in satire, under whatever dress it may appear.” ~ Joseph Addison
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“Warhol turned to photographs of stars, as the Renaissance turned to antiquities, to find images of gods.” ~ David Sylvester
- “Rome was so mighty that it could not fall. It had to vanish in a cloud, like so many of the mythical heros of antiquity, and to receive its apotheosis among the stars before men became fully aware that it had vanished from the earth!” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “Although Damascus is considered the oldest city in the world, the date of its foundation going beyond tradition, there are very few relics of antiquity in or near it.” ~ Bayard Taylor
- “All those things that are now field to be of the greatest antiquity were at one time new; what we to-day hold up by example will rank hereafter as precedent.” ~ Tacitus
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“Again men have been kept back as by a kind of enchantment from progress in science by reverence for antiquity, by the authority of men counted great in philosophy, and then by general consent.” ~ Francis Bacon
- “You will certainly grant me that neither antiquity nor whatever nation has devised a more repulsive and blasphemous absurdity than that of eating your God. This is the most disgusting dogma of Christian religion, the greatest insult to the Highest Being, the climax of madness and insanity.” ~ Frederick The Great
- “No mistake is more to be deplored than the conception that a system of morals and religion should derive any portion of its authority either from the circumstance of its novelty or its antiquity, that it should be judged excellent, not because it is reasonable or true, but because no person has ever thought of it before, or because it has been thought of from the beginning of time.” ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley
- “Why should Canada, wild and unsettled as it is, impress us as an older country than the States, unless because her institutions are old? All things appeared to contend there, as I have implied, with a certain rust of antiquity, such as forms on old armor and iron guns,–the rust of conventions and formalities. It is said that the metallic roofs of Montreal and Quebec keep sound and bright for forty years in some cases. But if the rust was not on the tinned roofs and spires, it was on the inhabitants and their institutions.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
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“A fortified town is like a man cased in the heavy armor of antiquity, with a horse-load of broadswords and small arms slung to him, endeavoring to go about his business.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
- “Our own country furnishes antiquities as ancient and durable, and as useful, as any; rocks at least as well covered with lichens,and a soil which, if it is virgin, is but virgin mould, the very dust of nature. What if we cannot read Rome or Greece, Etruria or Carthage, or Egypt or Babylon, on these; are our cliffs bare?” ~ Henry David Thoreau
- “Twenty thousand thieves landed at Hastings. These founders of the House of Lords were greedy and ferocious dragoons, sons of greedy and ferocious pirates… Such, however, is the illusion of antiquity and wealth, that decent and dignified man now existing, boast their descent from these filthy thieves, who showed a far juster conviction of their own merits, by assuming for their types the swine, goat, jackal, leopard, wolf, and snake, which they severally resembled.” ~ Lewis Carroll
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“For my own part, I adhere to the maxim of antiquity, that the throne is a glorious sepulcher.” ~ Theodora
- “The clatter of a changing world is not pleasant, and those who have enjoyed the comforts and protection of the old order may be shocked and unhappy when they behold the vigorous young builders of a new world sweeping away their time-honored antiquities.” ~ Helen Keller
- “The error of those who reason by precedents drawn from antiquity, respecting the rights of man, is that they do not go far enough into antiquity.” ~ Thomas Paine
