A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.
Divorce is probably of nearly the same date as marriage. I believe, however, that marriage is some weeks the more ancient.
Each day as I travel through downtown Tucson, I am amazed at how quickly the most ancient of human behaviors have changed. For as long as there have been Homo sapiens – roughly 200,000 years – people have filled their lives principally with two activities: talking directly with other people, and doing physical things.
Football is controlled violence, but it is violence, which people have loved to watch since the gladiatorial contests in ancient Rome.
Trials by the adversarial contest must in time go the way of the ancient trial by battle and blood.
In every ancient culture, there are rituals to mortify the body as a way of understanding that the energy of the soul is indestructible.
I am also well aware that literature only has a minimal influence on political disputes or economic crises in the world, but its significance to human beings is ancient.
‘Frankenstein’ feels like an ancient tale, the kind of traditional story that appears in many other forms.
After finishing the gymnasium in Muenchen with 9 years of Latin and 6 years of ancient Greek, history and philosophy, I decided to become a physicist. The great theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, an university colleague of my late father, advised me to begin with an apprenticeship in precision mechanics.
The role of the architect as artist is an ancient one, but it was de-emphasized with the rise of modernism, which rejected the drawing-based Beaux-Arts tradition in favor of a more technocratic approach.
A modern arboretum brings us that ancient forest and, with it, a changed apprehension of time, a renewed appreciation of the elegance of natural form and a renewed sense of wonder at the variety of the world we inhabit.
As we were developing ‘Umbral’, and I was delving into the mythology and legends, I had a sudden realisation. ‘Wasteland’ is about people who fervently believe new myths and legends, but they turn out to be false; whereas ‘Umbral’ is about people who reject ancient myths and legends, but they turn out to be true!
At first the ancient images of the Goddess did not interest me.
Syria is the proud heir of an ancient civilization that has a unique spectrum of minorities that encompasses Muslims and Christians of various denominations. There are at least ten such ethnic and religious groups.
I would say that the West is very young, it’s very corrupt. We’re not very wise. And I think we’re hopeful that there is a place that is ancient and wise and open and filled with light.
Oil is ancient wealth in the ground.
Confidentiality is an ancient and well-warranted social value.
Does the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes? Certainly the modern novel does, but the ancient legends did not do the same. Oedipus’ psychology was deduced by Aeschylus or Freud, but the character is simply there, fixed in a pure and terribly disquieting state.
I have long been interested in landscape history, and when younger and more robust I used to do much tramping of the English landscape in search of ancient field systems, drove roads, indications of prehistoric settlement.
In marriage there are no manners to keep up, and beneath the wildest accusations no real criticism. Each is familiar with that ancient child in the other who may erupt again. We are not ridiculous to ourselves. We are ageless. That is the luxury of the wedding ring.
Seasonal changes, as it were, take place in history, when there is practically an almost universal death, a falling of the foliage of the tree of life. Such were the intervals between the ancient and mediaeval time, the mediaeval and the modern.
I’ve met and sketched most of the great athletes from the past five decades and their movement, grace and energy have kept me captivated over the years. That’s what the ancient Greeks first saw and that’s what caught my interest.
There’s something ancient and inevitable about this desire to do whatever you can to protect your child.
Cinderella is older than she lets on. She’s ancient. She’s had work done. The Disney film was based on Charles Perreault’s French story ‘Cendrillon,’ published in 1697.
I love The Edge’s guitar style; it is unique. There is an ancient world resonating in his guitar sound.
We are so fortunate, as Australians, to have among us the oldest continuing cultures in human history. Cultures that link our nation with deepest antiquity. We have Aboriginal rock art in the Kimberley that is as ancient as the great Palaeolithic cave paintings at Altamira and Lascaux in Europe.
I must admit that i am fascinated by the glories of ancient India. But when will the purveyors of Indian culture realise that not everything about our past was glorious?
Ancient recipients of instant news probably couldn’t do very much about it, for instance. Xerxes would still need three months to get his army together, and he might not get home for years.
The Ancient Games are relatively obscure to most Olympians, but to understand just what the Games are about, it is really necessary to investigate the roots and the meaning that has transformed culture and society for so many years.
Ancient monuments 300 to 1000-plus years old are never ‘renovated,’ only ‘restored,’ a distinction that escapes the babus.
All the ancient classic fairy tales have always been scary and dark.
The history of art is not just the history of artists; it is also the history of the people who viewed art. And that wider perspective can help us see some of the reasons why the art of the ancient world should still matter to us.
The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing – a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction.
When I was growing up I spent a lot of time reading about ancient China and was really fascinated.
If you really want to be a good archaeologist, you have to understand ancient DNA; you have to understand chemical analysis to figure out the composition of ancient pots. You have to be able to study human remains. You need to be able to do computer processing and, in some cases, computer programming.
I try to write in plain brown blocks of American speech but occasionally set in an ancient word or a strange word just to startle the reader a little bit and to break up the monotony of the plain American cadence.
Every document, apparently ancient, coming from the proper repository or custody, and bearing on its face no evident marks of forger, the law presumes to be genuine, and devolves on the opposing party the burden of proving it to be otherwise.
I was taught about slavery, but it was the ancient Egyptians. That’s the closest I got to African history.
Easter is an ancient festival of rebirth, but it’s also an excellent excuse for eating eggs. I really like eggs, of both the chocolate and chicken variety. But the chocolate ones, you must admit, can sustain only a fleeting interest. A sweet, sugary hit – and then it’s gone.
It’s like there’s a pulsating, hidden world, governed by ancient laws and principles, underlying everything around us – from the movements of electrical charges to the motions of the planets – and most people are completely unaware of it. To me, that’s a shame.
Man, born of woman, has found it a hard thing to forgive her for giving him birth. The patriarchal protest against the ancient matriarch has borne strange fruit through the years.
A new breeze is blowing, and a world refreshed by freedom seems reborn; for in man’s heart, if not in fact, the day of the dictator is over. The totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree.
The ancient Roman code belongs to a class of which almost every civilised nation in the world can show a sample, and which, so far as the Roman and Hellenic worlds were concerned, were largely diffused over them at epochs not widely distant from one another.
No one ever sits you down at age eight and says, ‘Aminatta, this is what’s happened so far.’ You have to work it out for yourself, and by the time you do, it’s ancient history to many of the players. We’re trying to make sense of the past, so we start to excavate our memories.
Venus, ancient goddess of love and beauty, is an apparently irrelevant, invented deity of the long dead. But Venus merits scrutiny. Chart her life story across 5,000 years and you chart the evolution of our conflicted relationship with sex and with the female body.
God, our genes, our environment, or some stupid programmer keying in code at an ancient terminal – there’s no way free will can ever exist if we as individuals are the result of some external cause.
Another important historical factor is the fact that this already very simple religion was further simplified and purified by the early philosophers of ancient China. Our first great philosopher was a founder of naturalism; and our second great philosopher was an agnostic.
In the twenty-first century, the robot will take the place which slave labor occupied in ancient civilization.
Indeed, many ancient Greek writers do treat Amazons as a tribe of men and women. They credit the tribe with innovations such as ironworking and domestication of horses. Some early vase paintings show men fighting alongside Amazons.
