quotations about antiquity
You praise the fortune and manners of the men of old, and yet, if on a sudden some god were for taking you back to those days, you would refuse every time.
HORACE
Satires
The fleets of Ninevah and Tyre
Are down with Davy Jones, Esquire,
And all the oligarchies, kings,
And potentates that ruled these things
Are gone! But cheer up; don't be sad;
Think what a lovely time they had!
ARTHUR GUITERMAN
Elegy
The blessings of knowledge and civilisation are not now, as they were in the days of antiquity, confined to a single nation.
YA DING
The Earth Sings
As in the little, so in the great world, reason will tell you that old age or antiquity is to be accounted by the farther distance from the beginning and the nearer approach to the end--the times wherein we now live being in propriety of speech the most ancient since the world's creation.
GEORGE HAKEWILL
An Apologie or Declaration of the Power and Providence of God in the Government of the World
Nor rough, nor barren, are the winding ways
Of hoar antiquity, but strewn with flowers.
THOMAS WARREN
Written on a Blank Leaf of Dugdale's Monasticon
Veneration of antiquity is congenial to the human mind.
EDMUND BURKE
Tracts on the Popery Laws
Those things which we reverence for antiquity what were they at their first birth? Were they false?--time cannot make them true. Were they true?--time cannot make them more true. The circumstances therefore of time in respect of truth and error is merely impertinent.
JOHN HALES
Of Inquiry and Private Judgment in Religion
With sharpen'd sight pale antiquaries pore,
Th' inscription value, but the rust adore.
This the blue varnish, that the green endears,
The sacred rust of twice ten hundred years!
ALEXANDER POPE
Epistle to Mr. Addison
Antiquity is beautiful, it is true, but, at the same time it is old. Now the face of a woman, however advanced her age, will never lose its proportions, its regularities, and hence the fundamental beauties of its youthful form; but wrinkles destroy the soft, fresh, magnetic roundness of the face, that with its power of attraction, even to ignorant eyes, characterizes it as beautiful.
ANDREA DE JORIO
Gesture in Naples and Gesture in Classical Antiquity
Antiquity, the nearer it was to its divine origin, perhaps perceived more clearly what things were true.
CICERO
attributed, Day's Collacon
Antiquity is not always a mark of verity.
JOHN RAY
English Proverbs
Waiting in utopia,
To liberate the living dead.
Palm trees and antiquity.
Kool-aid and strychnine.
DOG FASHION DISCO
"Antiquity's Small Rewards"
We extol ancient things, regardless of our own age.
TACITUS
Annals
The pyramids themselves, doting with age, have forgotten the names of their founders.
THOMAS FULLER
The Holy and Profane State
Primeval antiquity is enveloped in oblivion and silence.
RALPH LEMER
On Speaking in the Language of the Sons of Man
Within no very distant period the study of antiquities has passed in popular esteem, from contempt to comparative honour.
E. OLDFIELD
Archaeological Journal, March 1852
To look back to antiquity is one thing; to go back to it is another.
C.C. COLTON
Lacon
Antiquity was once new.
TACITUS
attributed, Day's Collacon
The door to the past is a strange door. It swings open and things pass through it, but they pass in one direction only. No man can return across that threshold, though he can look down still and see the green light waver in the water weeds.
LOREN C. EISELEY
The Immense Journey
The Irish and the English and the Scottish and the Welsh
A damp and misty history, they're keeping to themselves
I'll often talk antiquity and smoldering descent
Invisible division, behind a wall and not a fence
ROBERT PLANT
"Carving Up the World Again ... a wall and not a fence"