To me, there is spirit in a reed. It’s a living thing, a weed, really, and it does contain spirit of a sort. It’s really an ancient vibration.
Ancient eschatological texts are actually maps of the inner territories of the psyche that seem to transcend race and culture and originate in the collective unconscious.
I have a long view of history – my orientation is archaeological because I’m always thinking in terms of ancient Greece and Rome, ancient Persia and Egypt.
There are so many previously unknown sites and structures all over the world. And I think most importantly what satellites help to show us is we’ve actually only found a fraction of a percent of ancient settlements and sites all over the world.
How shall we remember Mahatma Gandhi, that eternal pilgrim of freedom? Born of the very spirit of India, steeped in the tradition, the song, the legend of our ancient land – and yet he was revolutionary. Unique among revolutionaries, he marched for freedom, clad in the robe of truth, with non-violence for his staff.
The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
The Germanic invasions destroyed neither the Mediterranean unity of the ancient world, nor what may be regarded as the truly essential features of the Roman culture as it still existed in the 5th century, at a time when there was no longer an Emperor in the West.
Even as fog continues to lie in the valleys, so does ancient sin cling to the low places, the depressions in the world consciousness.
In English we must use adjectives to distinguish the different kinds of love for which the ancients had distinct names.
Once, my writing-avoidance behavior involved me mixing up a cleaning concoction and getting some ancient stains out of the carpet. My wife liked that one.
What makes Burning Man special is the location: a 9-mile circle of gypsum, an ancient dried ocean bed. The ground is like a flat crust with no plants or insects, a perfect outdoor gallery for monumental interactive sculpture and architecture.
In ‘Seven Ancient Wonders,’ Jack West and his team break someone out of Guantanamo Bay. I’m not going to preach to people and say, ‘Guantanamo Bay, bad’, but I will have my hero go and break somebody out of it, and maybe people will think about it that way.
It is possible to take the story of Noah figuratively, although virtually every Near East ancient civilization has its own version of the flood story (including the amoral epic of Gilgamesh).
The technological revolution is itself a direct descendant of the Ancient Greeks’ historia, and the web is populated by young people who want to dive into the past.
Hapy, the ancient god of the Nile, depicted at Dendera with Cleopatra, is typically shown with breasts – symbolism that demonstrated how the life-giving gifts of Egypt’s river artery come only when the power of both female and male was combined.
Nature’s God really descends from an ancient Greek tradition that was passed along to the early modern philosophers. And these were quite radical thinkers who were really challenging the ways of thinking of their time and the established religion.
The title ‘Now He Sings, Now He Sobs’ comes from ‘I Ching,’ an ancient Chinese book that I was into in the ’60s when I was studying different philosophies and religions.
The origins of Indian classical music, not unlike their western counterparts, lie in the Vedas, the ancient Hindu scriptures of 2,000 years ago.
I think horror or science fiction is another way of telling a modern myth – it’s like Ancient Greece; it’s like kids couldn’t wait for the next ‘Orpheus’ story, the next ‘Jason and the Argonauts.’
I want to link together ancient forms of storytelling and the future.
The long march of Western civilization from pantheons of gods for every taste to one God for all has been thrown into reverse by celebrity worship to give us a plethora of ancient deities to follow.
I became an environmentalist at 16 when I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest Action Network. At 27 I helped save the last unprotected ancient redwoods in California. In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to invest $90 billion into them.
My own life in India, since I came to it in 1893 to make it my home, has been devoted to one purpose, to give back to India her ancient freedom.
The knowledge of the ancient languages is mainly a luxury.
Fire taps something ancient and vital in each of us, something both snarling and reverential.
That’s what I want to do, ultimately: figure out a way to get the world engaged with discovery and protecting these ancient sites.
It is an ancient need to be told stories. But the story needs a great storyteller. Thanks for all of it, Jo.
Tahiti has been spoiled for many years, but Bali is one of the few cultures with origins in one of the great ancient cultures which is still alive.
Human beings have kicked around the concept of what individual happiness means for centuries, from the Bible to the ancient Greeks to the 1859 bestseller ‘Self-Help.’
I was always fascinated, even as a child, by antiques and ancient times. I always felt I should have been born in the 17th or 18th century. They really had a big stone castle with authentic furniture.
I am studying ancient civilizations, trying to find what happened to them, finding out why they went into a decline, why they died.
The number of stressors has multiplied exponentially: traffic, money, success, work/life balance, the economy, the environment, parenting, family conflict, relationships, disease. As the nature of human life has become far more complicated, our ancient stress response hasn’t been able to keep up.
The ancients recommended us to sacrifice to the Graces, but Milton sacrificed to the Devil.
These days too many of us seem inclined to cover our ears, close our eyes, and blindly follow the most narrow, conservative tenets of religion; or else seek comfort in the ancient traditions of New Age ritual.
I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect.
I have a huge interest in ancient Egyptian times and the mummies and the kings and all that.
A lot of ancient poetry sees in nature a reflection of human emotions, and in a post-industrialized era, once people have become more aware of the necessity of a more harmonious relation between man and nature, we need to build cities which can connect with human spiritual needs instead of being merely functional.
The mineral world is a much more supple and mobile world than could be imagined by the science of the ancients. Vaguely analogous to the metamorphoses of living creatures, there occurs in the most solid rocks, as we now know, perpetual transformation of a mineral species.
Deadwood lies at the northern tip of the Black Hills, where the land is ancient and rubbed smooth by time. The Black Hills are more rugged at their southern extremity, where bare granite forms pinnacles and spires.
I’m not a new-agey person, but narrative is ancient and wise and generous.
Physical immortality is seductive. The ancient Hindus sought it; the Greek physician Galen from the 2nd Century A.D. and the Arabic philosopher/physician Avicenna from the 11th Century A.D. believed in it.
Many of my projects are inspired by Indian mythology. We have read that in the ancient times, people could expand their body parts, extend arms – all of that reads like a dream. But all this can be done using technology based on simple solutions.
London imbued me with an appreciation of the beauty and value of history in general. As it has evolved and grown, the city has created iconic modern buildings that look perfect as they sit alongside ancient ones.
Even if these stories are 3,000 years old, there’s still so much about the characters, about the dilemmas, about their understanding of the universe that still resonates. The whole idea of order and chaos, which is really central to the ancient Egyptian understanding of the world, is still very much with us.
The ancient media of speech and song and theater were radically reshaped by writing, though they were never entirely supplanted, a comfort perhaps to those of us who still thrill to the smell of a library.
We have a lot of historical and religious baggage in our culture. It’s ancient; we are clannish as a species. We like things to fit into boxes, and it’s unfortunate because humans are unique and should be celebrated and embraced as such.
Since ancient times, people from throughout Asia have brought to Japan their talents, knowledge and energy, helping to lay the basis for Japan’s existence as a country.
The Kurds are an ancient, democratic, peace-loving people that have never attacked any country.
My dad is amazing. He has, like, ancient Chinese skills.
Those of us with this ancient compulsion to tell stories sometimes start with a single kernel of something.
The political tradition of ancient thought, filtered in Italy by Machiavelli, says one thing clearly: every prince needs allies, and the bigger the responsibility, the more allies he needs.
Journalism still, in a democracy, is the essential force to get the public educated and mobilized to take action on behalf of our ancient ideals.
