"Ancients" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... either the Odyssey or any other ancient work, he must never look at the dead without seeing the living in them, nor at the living without thinking of the dead. We are too fond of seeing the ancients as one thing and ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... rains, these piles swept away the timbers of the weir, driven by the irresistible power of the water, and then in its course the flood, carrying the balks before it like battering rams, cracked and split the bridges of solid stone which the ancients had built. These and the iron bridges likewise were overthrown, and presently quite disappeared, for the very foundations were covered with the sand and gravel ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... actively engaged in the House of Commons and in the courts of law, he still found leisure for letters and philosophy. The noble treatise on the Advancement of Learning, which at a later period was expanded into the De Augmentis, appeared in 1605. The Wisdom of the Ancients, a work which, if it had proceeded from any other writer, would have been considered as a masterpiece of wit and learning, but which adds little to the fame of Bacon, was printed in 1609. In the meantime the Novum Organum was slowly proceeding. Several distinguished men of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... twining basilisk of sovereignty, while from its sides depend the wide Egyptian lappels, or wings, that fall upon her shoulders. The Sibilla Libica has crossed her knees,—an action universally held amongst the ancients as indicative of reticence or secrecy, and of power to bind. A secret-keeping looking dame she is, in the full-bloom proportions of ripe womanhood, wherein choosing to place his figure the sculptor has deftly gone between ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... its quarries of marble, and its treasure-houses of gold, the imperial founder must himself have learned, that although he could employ all these rich materials in obedience to his own wish, it was the mind of man itself, those intellectual faculties refined by the ancients to the highest degree, which had produced the specimens of talent at which men paused and wondered, whether as subjects of art or of moral labour. The power of the Emperor might indeed strip other cities of their statues and their shrines, in order to ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... all his magnificence; the pleasant land is to this day desolate under the power of the Turk; but the LORD has loved Israel for ever, and soon a King shall reign in Mount Zion "before His ancients gloriously." But meanwhile this KING, all unseen to human sense, is reigning, and to those who come to Him in no sordid spirit, but gladly consecrating the wealth of their heart's affection and the most ...
— A Ribband of Blue - And Other Bible Studies • J. Hudson Taylor
... appears in North Armenia, again appears in connection with the Nile; while again the name "Nile" has wandered back to the confines of Persia, and one of the Euphrates branches is still called "Shatt-en-nil." The ancients, indeed, had very curious ideas about the Nile. Its real sources being so long undiscovered—no Speke or Grant having appeared—imagination ran wild on the subject. Not only so, but it is remarkable that the name Cush should have acquired both a Persian Gulf and an Egyptian employment: ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... science. He has endeavoured to ascertain of what countries the vegetables now cultivated are natives, the earliest accounts of their cultivation, and how far they have improved by attention, or degenerated by neglect; also the various uses made of them by the ancients, as well as the moderns, ...
— The Lady's Own Cookery Book, and New Dinner-Table Directory; • Charlotte Campbell Bury
... modern discoveries are in the field which was opened to us by the lens in its manifold applications, it is in the chemist's laboratory that we find that branch of science, long cultivated, but rapidly advanced only within the last two centuries, which has done the most for the needs of man. The ancients guessed that the substances which make up the visible world were more complicated in their organization than they appear to our vision. They even suggested the great truth that matter of all kinds is made up of inconceivably small indivisible ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... wrapped in gaily colored cottons, busying themselves about frail, leaf-thatched dwellings perched high on bamboo stilts above the river-banks. And, arching over all, a sky as flawlessly blue as the dome of the Turquoise Mosque in Samarland. Such is the land that the ancients called the Golden Chersonese but which is labeled in the geographies of today as Lower Siam ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... existence of Jupiter and his Pantheon, where various deities presided over various virtues and vices, and regulated the temporal fortune and future happiness of such as practised them. The more learned and wise of the ancients rejected such the vulgar interpretation, and wisely, although affecting a deference to the public faith, denied before their disciples in private, the gross fallacies of Tartarus and Olympus, the vain doctrines concerning the gods themselves, and the extravagant expectations ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... one hundred and fifty pages from the printed copy submitted to his censorship. He had formerly approved of the work, and had quietly passed over some of these obnoxious passages: it is certain that Gros de Boze, in a dissertation on the Janus of the ancients in this work, actually erased a high commendation of himself,[149] which Lenglet had, with unusual courtesy, bestowed on Gros de Boze; for as a critic he is most penurious of panegyric, and there is always a caustic flavour even ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... former she is the picture of Mary queen of Scotland. In short, the one Sophonisba is as different from the other as the Brutus of Voltaire is from the Marius, jun., of Otway, or as the Minerva is from the Venus of the ancients. ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... sir, that the wise ancients did not praise the ship parting with flying colors from the port, but only that brave sailor which came back with torn sheets and battered sides, stript of her banners, but having ridden out the storm? And so, gentlemen, I feel in regard to this aged England, with ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... difference actors were treated among the ancients. At Athens, they were held in such esteem, as to be sometimes appointed to discharge embassies and other negotiations; whereas, at Rome, if a citizen became an actor, he thereby forfeited his freedom. Among the moderns, actors are best treated in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume X, No. 280, Saturday, October 27, 1827. • Various
... the surveying of lands well. As he was by many accounted a severe student, a devourer of authors, a melancholy and humourous person, so by others who knew him well, a person of great honesty, plain dealing and charity. I have heard some of the ancients of Christchurch often say that his company was very merry, facete and juvenile; and no man in his time did surpass him for his ready and dexterous interlarding his common discourses among them with verses from the poets, or sentences from classical authors; ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... the fictions that beguiled our boyhood? Let our motto still be "Forward;" we have pleasures of which our grandsires never dreamed, and inventions that they were inexcusable in ignoring. We are so great that we can afford to be generous. Let them sleep well, those honest but benighted ancients, who went down to their graves unconscious of "Aunt Sally," and ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... of Gros-Rene ridicules the pedantic arguments of some of the philosophers of the time of Moliere. It also attributes to the ancients some sayings of authors of the day; for example, the comparison, from a Greek author, "that a woman's head is like a quicksand," is from a contemporary; the saying from Aristotle, comparing woman to the sea, is from Malherbe. Words very familiar look more homely when employed ...
— The Love-Tiff • Moliere
... thrown away by Pallas, which Marsyas picked up and then challenged Apollo to a musical contest. For his presumption the god had him flayed alive. (16) That is, the Little Bear, by which the Phoenicians steered, while the Greeks steered by the Great Bear. (See Sir G. Lewis's "Astronomy of the Ancients", p. 447.) In Book VI., line 193, the pilot declares that he steers by the pole star itself, which is much nearer to the Little than to the Great Bear, and is (I believe) reckoned as one of the stars forming the ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... and the carcasses of twelve hundred ponies killed in that terrible slaughter by the intrepid Custer and his troopers. The signals on the hills leaped into the crisp air like the tongues of dragons in the myths of the ancients; in fact, the whole aspect of the place, as we sat around the blazing logs of our camp-fire, ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... harangue the soldiers, and read to them the decree by which he had been made commander-in-chief of all the troops at Paris, and of the whole of the Seventeenth Military Division. I saw him come out much agitated first from the Council of the Ancients, and afterwards from the Assembly of the Five Hundred. I saw Lucien Bonaparte brought out of the hall, where the latter assembly was sitting, by some grenadiers, sent in to protect him from the violence of his colleagues. Pale and furious, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... art have taken extreme views. They have praised ad nauseam, as Walpole did when he wrote: "Mrs. Darner's busts from life are not inferior to the antique. Her shock dog, large as life and only not alive, rivals the marble one of Bernini in the Royal Collection. As the ancients have left us but five animals of equal merit with their human figures—viz., the Barberini Goat, the Tuscan Boar, the Mattei Eagle, the Eagle at Strawberry Hill, and Mr. Jennings' Dog—the talent of Mrs. Damer must appear in the ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... and christened the American velvet plant? Yet it, too, seems to have come over with the Pilgrims, and is most abundant in the older parts of the country. It abounds throughout Europe and Asia, and had its economic uses with the ancients. The Greeks made lamp-wicks of its dried leaves, and the Romans dipped its dried stalk in tallow for funeral torches. It affects dry uplands in this country, and, as it takes two years to mature, it is not a troublesome weed in cultivated crops. The first year it sits low upon the ground in ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... in time of peace, is a contest confined to modern nations; or, at least, but little known to the ancients. Indeed, it is only amongst commercial nations that it can exist. There can be no competition in agriculture; and, indeed, it is only in war, or in commerce, that nations ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... on every leaf. Who can now read and interpret them? Who can gather again the withered and scattered leaves of this rose, and vivify them with fresh perfume? The flames, in which the Greeks enveloped the bodies of the departed for the purpose of destruction; the flames, into which the ancients cast everything once dearest to the living, are now the securest repository for these relics. With trembling fear the surviving friend reads the leaves no eye has ever seen, save those now so firmly closed, and if, after a glance, ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... disdain to the sumptuous displays of commerce, government administrations, and the military. Too young to understand social distinctions and the necessities underlying the apparent assumption which they create, Paul was bored to death among these ancients, unaware that the connections of his youth would eventually secure to him that aristocratic pre-eminence which Frenchmen ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... moved until he stood before the semicircle of ancients. Then the youngest, the only one of the eight with some trace of feathery crest on his high gray head, said "Captain Vorongil, you ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... dedicate the entire winter to music, and French poems, and gay, cheerful conversation with his friends. A part of this happy time was consecrated to the earnest study of the ancients. For the first time he turned his attention to German literature, and felt an interest in the efforts of ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... the southern wall of which we were seated, though it was not a wall but a lava cliff between forty and fifty feet high which served as a wall. The amphitheatre itself, however, almost exactly resembled those of the ancients which I had seen in pictures and Ragnall had visited in Italy, Greece, and Southern France. It was oval in shape and not very large, perhaps the flat space at the bottom may have covered something over an acre, but all round this oval ran tiers of seats cut in the lava ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... commended by the ancients for the fidelity of their attachments, and they are still scrupulously exact to their words, and respectful to their kindred; they have been universally celebrated for their quickness of apprehension and penetration, and the vivacity of their wit. Their language is certainly one of the ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction - Vol. X, No. 289., Saturday, December 22, 1827 • Various
... Almost all the ancients had the bad taste to speak ill of women; among the rest even that delightful old Father 'of the golden mouth,' St Chrysostom.(94) So that, evidently, Dr Johnson's fierce dictum cannot apply universally—'Only scoundrels speak ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... the theory of a long plectrum used for pizzicato purposes, as I consider, with Engel, that such an implement would have been unmanageably clumsy even for the primitive music of the ancients. Whenever I see a rod, as in the accompanying drawing of the Assyrian Trigonon, I maintain that its purpose ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... opposition to the prevalent ungoverned and irresponsible Renaissance spirit. Jonson believed that there was a professional way of doing things which might be reached by a study of the best examples, and he found these examples for the most part among the ancients. To confine our attention to the drama, Jonson objected to the amateurishness and haphazard nature of many contemporary plays, and set himself to do something different; and the first and most striking thing that he evolved ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... or dogs that hunted by sight alone, were not known to the ancients previous to the time of the younger Xenophon, who then describes them as novelties just introduced ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... of perfumed gloom; we plume where the eagles soar; The North-wind swoops from the brooding Pole, and our ancients crash and roar; But where one falls from the crumbling walls shoots ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... with great care by the ancients. They formed part of the education of a gentleman. They give that physical beauty and grace which only spring from a fine muscular development. Among the Greeks and Romans, men frequented the gymnasium and the circus. Philosophers, judges, and soldiers took part in these exercises with the ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... the field of battle is difficult. Appian (ii. 75) expressly places it between (New) Pharsalus (now Fersala) and the Enipeus. Of the two streams, which alone are of any importance in the question, and are undoubtedly the Apidanus and Enipeus of the ancients—the Sofadhitiko and the Fersaliti—the former has its sources in the mountains of Thaumaci (Dhomoko) and the Dolopian heights, the latter in mount Othrys, and the Fersaliti alone flows past Pharsalus; now as the Enipeus according to Strabo (ix. p. 432) springs from mount Othrys and flows ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... register. He would pray to be delivered from that possession of everything of which you speak. I will not remind you of Socrates, Chrysippus, Zeno, and other great men, all the greater, however, because envy prevents no one from praising the ancients. But a short time ago I mentioned Demetrius, who seems to have been placed by nature in our times that he might prove that we could neither corrupt him nor be corrected by him; a man of consummate wisdom, though he himself disclaimed it, constant to the ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... that with the cestus, the boxing-glove of the ancients, a formidable implement, intended not to soften the blows dealt by the boxers, but to make them more painful, for it was composed of strips of hardened oxhide. To the competitors in this sport—if such it could be called—AEneas offered two prizes,—the ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... sir. I hear you are a great scholar, Latin and all that, quite pat. Damme, sir, those ancients understood things. They knew how to honour the gods, for they made soldiers of 'em and set 'em fighting in the clouds. There's divinity for you! You've got ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... or scruple, assert to have been the Clement whom Saint Paul mentions, Phil. iv. 3; "with Clement also, and other my fellow-labourers, whose names are in the book of life." This epistle is spoken of by the ancients as an epistle acknowledged by all; and, as Irenaeus well represents its value, "written by Clement, who had seen the blessed apostles, and conversed with them; who had the preaching of the apostles still sounding in his ears, and their traditions before his eyes." ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... I denominate ancientism. Yesterday was better than to-day. The ancients were wiser that we. This belief in a better day and a better people in the elder time is almost universal among mankind. A belief so widely spread, so profoundly entertained, must have for its origin some important facts in the constitution ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell
... fixed purpose for life. They should set their mark, as to what they wish to become; and then make it the great labor of their lives to attain it. And let that mark be a high one. You cannot make it too elevated. The maxim of the ancients was, that although he who aims at the sun will not hit it, yet his arrows will fly much higher than though his mark was on the earth. A young man who should strive to be a second Washington or Jefferson, might not attain to their renown. ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... the Campagna of Rome, a great flight appeared on the 3rd of April, and the day after heavy rain set in, which greatly interfered with my sport. The vulture, upon the same principle, follows armies; and I have no doubt that the augury of the ancients was a good deal founded upon the observation of the instincts of birds. There are many superstitions of the vulgar owing to the same source. For anglers, in spring, it is always unlucky to see single magpies,—but ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 323, July 19, 1828 • Various
... more constant than at Will's. That celebrated house, situated between Covent Garden and Bow Street, was sacred to polite letters. There the talk was about poetical justice and the unities of place and time. There was a faction for Perrault and the moderns, a faction for Boileau and the ancients. One group debated whether Paradise Lost ought not to have been in rhyme. To another an envious poetaster demonstrated that Venice Preserved ought to have been hooted from the stage. Under no roof was a greater variety of figures to be seen. There were Earls in stars and garters, clergymen ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... observed the manner in which the various parts were connected and secured together. The heavy shocks which vessels are exposed to from the waves makes it necessary to secure great strength in the construction of them; and, though the ships of the ancients were very small and imperfect compared with the men-of-war of the present day, still it is surprising that the Romans could succeed at all in such a sudden and hasty ...
— Hannibal - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... scarcely any of that kind of education which is usually performed in school-classes, and he was never able to read either Latin or Greek. Such slight knowledge as he ever got of the famous writers among the ancients was in translations. Of English literature, though its influence and that of our institutions were then becoming paramount in France, and though he had a particular esteem for the English character, he knew only the writings of Locke and Pope, and the Paradise Lost.[4] Vauvenargues must be ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... remarked, that it is no mystery why the decision should have gone pretty uniformly in favour of the ancients; for here is the dilemma:—A man, attempting this problem, is or is not a classical scholar. If he is, then he has already received a bias in his judgment; he is a bribed man, bribed by his vanity; and is liable ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... substance of a red color, out of which the winged king is at first formed." This ancient observer must undoubtedly have seen the quince-like jelly, a portion of which is always found at the base of the royal cells, after the queens have emerged. The ancients generally called the queen a king, although Aristotle says that some in his time called her the mother. Swammerdam was the first to prove by dissection that the queen is a perfect female, and the only one in the hive, and that ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... beliefs of this race: "If Judea represents in the world, with a tenacity of its own the idea of a personal and absolute God; if Greece and Rome represent the idea of society, Gaul represents, just as particularly, the idea of immortality. Nothing characterized it better, as all the ancients admit. That mysterious folk was looked upon as the privileged possessor of the secrets of death, and its unwavering instinctive faith in the persistence of life never ceased to be a cause of astonishment, and sometimes of fear, in the eyes of the heathen." ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... malleability of the metal—we may try in vain at a guinea, or louis d'or. The operation of separating silver ore from gold by the powers of aqua fortis, precipitating the first-named metal by suspension of a copper plate in the liquid, and called quartation; was I believe wholly unknown to the ancients, who got much earlier at the art of weighing gold in water, testified by the old story of ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... ancient poets; not unmindful that the blessed Paul himself, in those writings which are the food of our spirit, takes occasion to cite from more than one poet who knew not Christ. If you would urge the impurity and idolatry which deface so many pages of the ancients, let me answer you in full with a brief passage of the holy Augustine. "For," says he, "as the Egyptians had not only idols to be detested by Israelites, but also precious ornaments of gold and silver, to be carried off by them in flight, ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... "The ancients had a maxim—'Revenge is sweet.' In rural, as well as in other life, there are things said and done which are more or less ungenerous. These, if at any time they came my way, I repelled as best I might. But I did not stop ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... benighted ancients called a magician," interrupted Dr. Cairn quietly. "He is what was known in the Middle Ages as a wizard. What that means, exactly, few modern thinkers know; but I know, and one day others will know. Meanwhile his shadow lies upon a ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... the countryman and friend of Hume, who confirmed my good opinion of him, and from whom I learned a literary anecdote, which did him great honor in the opinion of his lordship and had the same effect in mine. Wallace, who had written against Hume upon the subject of the population of the ancients, was absent whilst his work was in the press. Hume took upon himself to examine the proofs, and to do the needful to the edition. This manner of acting was according to my way of thinking. I had sold at six sous (three pence) a piece, the copies of a song written against myself. I was, ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... is impossible to build a bridge over a river like the Rhone and the Isere. This river is very rapid, but not very clear. Its banks are rocky, hilly, and occasionally open into the most beautiful scenery which it is possible for poet or painter to conceive. The Isere was well known to the ancients. ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... mankind ever since have not produced any but what are to be found there.' MONBODDO. 'Yet no character is described.' JOHNSON. 'No; they all develope themselves. Agamemnon is always a gentleman-like character; he has always [Greek: Basilikon ti]. That the ancients held so, is plain from this; that Euripides, in his Hecuba, makes him the person to interpose[247].' MONBODDO. 'The history of manners is the most valuable. I never set a high value on any other history.' JOHNSON. 'Nor I; and therefore ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... the houses, in respect to plan and general arrangement, is very different from that of the dwellings built in our towns at the present day. The chief reasons for the difference arise from the absence of windows and chimneys in the houses of the ancients, and of course the leaving out of windows and chimneys in a house makes it necessary to ...
— Rollo in Naples • Jacob Abbott
... sacrificed at the dictates of fashion, custom, and law, not of faith. So our cities are adorned with splendid churches, and fashion and the tastes of the congregation decide as to the form of service. The sects differ widely with each other, and all differ with the Bible. The ancients gave no more respect to what was regarded as the will of their imaginary deities than do modern Christians to the precepts of the Bible. People went to the ceremonies, got through with them, and then did what they pleased; ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... have been compared, indeed, to that set forth in the Ptolemaic theory of the ancients. Like a cleverly carved Chinese object of ivory in the banker s collection, it was a system of spheres, touching, concentric, yet separate. In an outer space swung Mr. Parr; then came the scarcely less rarefied atmosphere of the Constables ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... arrival of the conquerors were not the builders of the ancient monuments. Many of these were then in ruins and looked upon by the inhabitants, as they are today, with respect and awe. True, many of the habits and customs of the ancients, to a certain extent, existed yet among them; but disfigured, distorted by time, and the new modes of thinking and living introduced by the invaders; while, strange to say, the language remained unaltered. Even today, in many places in Yucatan the descendants of the Spanish conquerors have forgotten ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... laughed in self-mockery. "I positively did. I labored every day toward becoming one. I lived among books, esteemed that I was doing something of genuine importance as I gravely tinkered with alliteration and metaphor and antithesis and judicious paraphrases of the ancients. I put up with life solely because it afforded material for versification; and, in reality, believed the destruction of Troy was providentially ordained lest Homer lack subject matter for an epic. And ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... meeting the wants of travellers once adapted to such a practice, it would easily become universal. It is, however, very possible that mere horror of the heats of day-time may have been the original ground for it. The ancients appear to have shrunk from no hardship so trying and insufferable as that of heat. And in relation to that subject, it is interesting to observe the way in which the ordinary use of language has accommodated itself to that feeling. ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... organization. I can enjoy a work, but it is difficult for me to form a judgment on it independently of the man himself; and I readily say, as is the tree so is the fruit. Literary study thus leads me quite naturally to moral study." This, of course, he can apply but partially to the ancients; but with the moderns the first thing to do in order to know the work is to know the man who did it, to get at his primary organization, his interior beginnings and proclivities; and to learn this, one of the best means is, to make yourself acquainted with his race, his family, ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... to be admired four pillars of verde antico, a species of green marble, obtained by the ancients, from the environs of Thessalonica. They were taken from the church of Montmorency, where they decorated the tomb of Anne, the constable of that name. The first three apartments are floored with inlaid oak; but this is paved ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... The Historic Muse. The ancients held that there were nine Muses or Goddesses who presided over the arts and sciences; and of these, one was the ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... The ancients had a very great admiration for the poetry of Homer. We are told that every educated Greek could repeat from memory any passage in the Iliad or Odyssey. Alexander the Great was so fond of Homer's poems that he always had them under his ...
— The Story of Troy • Michael Clarke
... Jakuns, or "tree people." There his followers married Jakun women, and their descendants spread over Sungei Ujong, Rumbow, and other parts, the Rayet Laut, or "sea-people," the supposed Ichthyophagi of the ancients, and the Rayet Utan, or "forest-people," betaking themselves to the woods and the ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... amongst the Indians to give all the goods of the dead to their relatives and friends, to mourn their death; but the husband of Catherine, in his quality of first captain, assembled the Council of the Ancients, and told them that they must no longer keep to their former customs, which profited nothing to the dead; that, as for him, his thought was to dress up the body of the deceased in her best garments, as she might rise some day,—and ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... were exceedingly comfortable to me; no quarrelling, no contention, no high nor hot words, but all passed with meekness and reverence, and due respect one for another. The young men waited for the words of the ancients, and the virgins carried a reverent respect to the matrons; and there was an universal concord and unity, so that I wondered greatly. One day as I was opening my mind to an ancient, I told him I admired much, and wondered greatly at the universal concord that I had taken notice of, beyond ...
— A Short History of a Long Travel from Babylon to Bethel • Stephen Crisp
... style of architecture, sometimes called the ecclesiastical style, because it is most frequently used in cathedrals, churches, abbeys, and other religious edifices. Its principle seems to have originated in the imitation of groves and bowers, under which the ancients performed their sacred rites; its clustered pillars and pointed arches very well representing the trunks of trees and their ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... not to think, Mademoiselle," I interrupted calmly, for, having taken the first plunge, I was now master of myself. "The ironical little god, whom the ancients painted with bandaged eyes, has led M. de Mancini by the nose in this matter, and things have gone awry for the plotters. There, Mademoiselle, you have the reason for a clandestine union. Did Monsieur your father guess how Andrea's affections have"—I caught the word "miscarried" betimes, and substituted—"gone ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... you, however, that I die in the faith of my century, believing in matter uncreated, all-powerful, and eternal—the Nature of the ancients. There have been in all ages philosophers who have had conceptions of the truth. But ripe to-day, it has become the common property of all who are strong enough to stand it—for, in sooth, this latest religion of humanity is food fit ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... Arabella, apart; "do you want anything such as this, Mrs. Cartlett? It is not compounded out of my regular pharmacopoeia, but I am sometimes asked for such a thing." He produced a small phial of clear liquid. "A love-philtre, such as was used by the ancients with great effect. I found it out by study of their writings, and have never known it ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... be real Indians; and the Aethiopians, sometimes known by that name, were never used by the ancients as guards or followers: they were the trifling, though costly objects of female and royal luxury, (Terent. Eunuch. act. i. scene ii Sueton. in August. c. 83, with a good note of Casaubon, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... must learn to love them as one learns to love sunsets, mountains, and the ocean, by seeing them. So let him who would know the joys and rewards of the booklover associate with well-made books. Let him begin with the ancients of printing, the great Germans, Italians, Dutchmen. He can still buy their books if he is well-to-do, or see them in libraries and museums if he belongs to the majority. Working down to the moderns, he will find himself discriminating and rejecting, ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... shining of the eyes is but a sickly glazing, and they which do every day get better and likewise thinner and weaker shall find that way leadeth to the church-yard gate. This is the malady which the ancients did call tubes, or the wasting disease, and some do name the consumption. A disease whereof most that fall ailing do perish. This Margaret is not long for earth—but she knoweth it not, and ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Queen Alequippa by the English, to whom she was devoted. Both Queen and subjects had fled; but among the deserted wigwams were six more Englishmen, whom Celoron warned off like the others, and who, like them, pretended to obey. At a neighboring town they found only two withered ancients, male and female, whose united ages, in the judgment of the chaplain, were full two centuries. They passed the site of the future Pittsburg; and some seventeen miles below approached Chininguee, called Logstown by the English, one of the ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... endearments of conjugal and parental affection, and who had a plenitude of leisure for solitary application. To these men we are indebted for the preservation of the literature of Rome, and the multiplied copies of the works of the ancients. Nor were they contented only with the praise of never-ending industry. They forged many works, that afterwards passed for classical, and which have demanded all the perspicacity of comparative criticism to refute. And in these pursuits ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... justice to them and their lovely wearers? Some time ago, (as I am informed,) a lady made her appearance on the beach as a Nereid. Did you Ne'er read of the Nereids, Mr. PUNCHINELLO? If you have, you are aware that they were the Sea Nymphs of the Ancients, in other words the Old Maids of the Sea, who never got married, and frequently played Scaly tricks on Mariners. The Nereid referred to was arrayed in pea green and spangles, with green tresses, which is very well known to be the correct costume of a mermaid of antiquity, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various
... sufficient to amount to a paraphrase, as Dr. Blomfield asserted. Besides, as Lucian lays the scene at Caucasus, he would rather seem to have had the "Prometheus solutus" in mind. (See Schutz, Argum.) But the ancients commonly made Caucasus the seat of the punishment of Prometheus, and, as AEschylus is not over particular in his geography, it is possible that he may be not altogether consistent with himself. Lucian makes no mention of Strength and Force, but brings ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus
... to be told against 'em, and what do you think one was? Why, that they're punished with a bad odor in their bodies; and that, says the author, date 1715 (I've just been pricing and marking the book this very morning)—that is true, for the ancients spoke of it. But then, he says, the other things are fables, such as that the odor goes away all at once when they're baptized, and that every one of the ten tribes, mind you, all the ten being concerned ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... beings, the guardians and representatives of the dead.{49} Burchardus of Worms in the early eleventh century says definitely that in his time tables were laid with food and drink and three knives for "those three Sisters whom the ancients in their folly called Parcae."{50} The Parcae were apparently identified with the three "weird" Sisters known in England and in other Teutonic regions, and seem to have some connection with the fairies. As we shall see later on, it is still in some places the custom to lay out tables for ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... have often heard of it. Is it the true Elixir vitae of the ancients, or a new and ...
— Montezuma's Castle and Other Weird Tales • Charles B. Cory
... were Sidney and Spenser, sought diligently to compose in the quantitative metres of the classics; Puttenham, the author of one of the first English treatises on the Art of Poetry (1589), declared that by "leisurable travail" one might "easily and commodiously lead all those feet of the ancients into our vulgar language"; but while they may have satisfied themselves (Spenser certainly did not) these experimenters produced nothing of genuine significance. The result was candidly anticipated by Ascham, who said in the Schoolmaster (1570) ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... personify mountains as masculine, the old fable of Phadrus about the "mountain in labour, that brought forth a mouse,"—as Horace has it, Montes laborabant et parturitur ridiculus mus,—shows that another concept was not unknown to the ancients. The Armenians call Mount Ararat "Mother of the World" (500. 39), and the Spaniards speak of a chief range of mountains as Sierra Madre. In mining we meet with the "mother-lode," veta, madre, but, curiously enough, the main shaft is called in ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... "The ancients who had the nourishment of the world wished for nothing, and the world had enough:—they did nothing, and all things were transformed:—their stillness was abysmal, and the ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... as I before observed (vide Chapter I.), of the highest antiquity, as systems which are now in vogue must have been known—if even in a modified form—to the ancients. We may roughly divide the operation of tanning into two distinct classes: One which deals with skins without the preservation of the fur, and which turns the skin so operated upon into the material ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... Blessed be the nation that invented it, and the woman that made it, and the young man who brings it to fainting folk. Have a suck, my girl, while I relate to our young host the history and virtues of this his sovereign compound. This corroborative, young sir, was unknown to the ancients: we find it neither in their treatises of medicine, nor in those popular narratives, which reveal many of their remedies, both in chirurgery and medicine proper. Hector, in the Ilias, if my memory ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... just as she always had been. Besides, what was the need of painting naked women? Couldn't he do other things? She urged him to paint children in smocks and sandals, curly haired and chubby, like the child Jesus; old peasant women with wrinkled, copper-colored faces, bald-headed ancients with long beards; character studies, but no young women, understand? No naked beauties! Renovales said "yes" to everything, drawing close to him that beloved form still trembling with its past rage. They clung to each other with a sort of anxiety, desirous of forgetting what had happened, ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... I 'm told Some ancients like my rusty lay, As Grandpa Noah loved the old Red-sandstone march of Jubal's day. I used to carol like the birds, But time my wits has quite unfixed, Et quoad verba,—for my words,— Ciel! ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... vicar. "From the explorations at Nineveh and at Pompeii, we have already learnt that the ancients well knew of what we in our pride long ascribed to modern inquiry ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Indians walked together to the village. At the door of one of the largest wigwams, one of the ancients stood to receive them. According to their custom, on such occasions, he was entirely unclothed. This probably was the savage mode of indicating that there were no concealed weapons about the person. This man, with his hands raised toward the sun, which ...
— The Adventures of the Chevalier De La Salle and His Companions, in Their Explorations of the Prairies, Forests, Lakes, and Rivers, of the New World, and Their Interviews with the Savage Tribes, Two Hu • John S. C. Abbott
... the East India Company gained a better knowledge of one of the neighbouring kingdoms, and collected precious documents relating to the resources and productions of a country traversed by an immense river, the Indus of the ancients, which rises in the Himalayas, and might readily serve to transport the products of an immense territory. The end gained was perhaps rather political than geographical; but science profited, once more, by ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... his work on The Celtic Druids, shows how, among the ancients, superstitions connected with numbers, as the days of the year or the figures 365, have played a prominent part. "Amongst the ancients" (says he) "there was no end of the superstitious and trifling play ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... fear this calamity, and have no present cause of fear, because we have not sunk to the weakness and wickedness of the Romans, and because we have no powerful external enemies. But if amid our magnificent triumphs of science and art, we should accept the Epicureanism of the ancients and fall into their ways of life, then there would be the same decline which marked them,—I mean in virtue and public morality,—and there would be the same penalty; not perhaps destruction from ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... Speeches of Cicero, which he read, till the shades of evening, glooming down on the cypresses in the Cloister garden, spread their batlike wings over the pages of his book. For you must know Messer Guido Cavalcanti was a searcher after truth in the writings of the Ancients, and was for treading the arduous ways that lead mankind to immortality. Devoured by the noble longing of discovery, he would set out in canzones the doctrines of the old-world Sages concerning Love which is the path ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... so the ancients of these lands;— The Indian, when from life released, Again is seated with his friends, And shares again the ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... I hope this little volume will be the means of making popular some of the best thoughts of one of the most interesting and thoughtful of the ancients, who often seems indeed ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... me instead, papa? You see, I think Wasner does a great deal better than your Franz with his team of ancients. ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... more important article of food with the ancients than it is with us. As they appear to have been unacquainted with sugar, honey, no doubt, stood them instead. It is too rank and pungent for the modern taste; it soon cloys upon the palate. It demands the appetite of youth, and the strong, robust digestion ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... expositors were almost wanting to the Latins: Origen, Basil, Gregory, Nazianzene, John of Damascus, Dionysius, Chrysostom, and others, both in Hebrew and Greek.[1] The scientific books of Aristotle, of Avicenna, of Seneca, and other ancients could only be had at great cost. Their principal works had not been translated into Latin. "The admirable books of Cicero De Republica are not to be found anywhere, as far as I can hear, although I have made anxious inquiry for them in different ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... very important respects the ancients were in advance of us, especially in the arts, and we can not boast of superiority in either letters or philosophy. "The gentlemen of modern materialistic schools do not compare favorably with Plato and Cicero in the elevation and reverence of their opinions." "Science has certainly made some ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... but also well trained, and sweet to hear as a chime perfectly in tune. It is true she sang "Meet me by moonlight," and "I've been roaming"; for mortals must share the fashions of their time, and none but the ancients can be always classical. But Rosamond could also sing "Black-eyed Susan" with effect, or Haydn's canzonets, or "Voi, che sapete," or "Batti, batti"—she only wanted to know what ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... drinks known to the ancients were wines and beers. That these were used for medicinal as well as beverage purposes is evident from sacred and secular history. About the tenth century of the Christian era, an Arabian alchemist discovered the art of distillation, by which the active principle ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... the moderns really do surpass the ancients; on this point I came to satisfy myself, and doubt not I shall have to carry back a melancholy report ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... drinking too much," said Colaisso suddenly, and with a certain brutality that startled his friend. "You are not sober. You must have taken a great deal last night. A libation to the dead, I suppose, in the manner of the ancients." ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... Tacitus, Dialogus c. 16, as an appreciation of historical perspective unusual in ancient writers: "The four hundred years which separate us from the ancients are almost a vanishing quantity if you compare them with the duration of the ages." See the whole passage, where the Magnus Annus of 12,954 years is ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... Giorgione, Titian, and Morto da Feltre were employed in the adornment of the facade. Vasari is very much exercised over Giorgione's share in these decorations. "One does not find one subject carefully arranged," he complains, "or which follows correctly the history or actions of ancients or moderns. As for me, I have never been able to understand the meaning of these compositions, or have met any one able to explain them to me. Here one sees a man with a lion's head, beside a woman. Close by one comes upon an angel or ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... one,—but simple, perspicuous, and conclusive. It was nevertheless received with ridicule, as the utterance of a crack-brained impostor. For some time, he did not make a single convert, and gained nothing but contumely and abuse. He had called in question the revered authority of the ancients; and it was even averred that his views were calculated to subvert the authority of the Scriptures and undermine the very foundations of morality and religion. His little practice fell away, and he was ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... glyconic measure, written when he was seventeen, are remarkably easy and elegant. Some of his other odes are deformed by the Pindaric folly then prevailing, and are written with such neglect of all metrical rules as is without example among the ancients; but his diction, though perhaps not always exactly pure, has such copiousness and splendour, as shews that he was but at a very ...
— The Psalms of David - Imitated in the Language of The New Testament - And Applied to The Christian State and Worship • Isaac Watts
... thought to find old Rome crystallized amid its glorious memories. He finds a nineteenth-century city, with gay shops and fashionable streets, living over the heroic scenes of the ancients and the actual woe and spiritual mysticism of the mediaeval age; and he is disappointed—nay, even sometimes enraged into a gnashing of the teeth at all ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... may be pushed to unpleasant consequences. Nor can Plato in the Gorgias be deemed purely self-regarding, considering that Socrates expressly mentions the duty of imparting the truth when discovered to others. Nor must we forget that the side of ethics which regards others is by the ancients merged in politics. Both in Plato and Aristotle, as well as in the Stoics, the social principle, though taking another form, is really far more prominent than in most ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... exercised any strong influence, as such, on any pagan nation or pagan artist. I have no time to enter into any details on this, of course, most intricate and difficult subject; but I will only ask you to observe, that wherever natural scenery is alluded to by the ancients, it is either agriculturally, with the kind of feeling that a good Scotch farmer has; sensually, in the enjoyment of sun or shade, cool winds or sweet scents; fearfully, in a mere vulgar dread of rocks and desolate places, as compared with the comfort of cities; or, finally, superstitiously, ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... which proved more honorary than lucrative, for he had to find a substitute, at his own expense, to perform the duties of the office. Colin inherited a considerable fortune in gold from his father, while in right of his mother he succeeded to the ruined Castle of Dingwall, one of the ancients seats of the old Earls of Ross, and its lands, as also the lands of Longcroft. He gave the site of the Castle, at the time valued at L300, to Henry Davidson of Tulloch as a contribution towards the erection of a manufactory which that gentleman proposed to erect for the employment of the surplus ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... faculties, is an ample compensation for the labour which that exercise requires. Accordingly, we find that the best writers of every age have generally, though not always, been the most voluminous. Not to mention a host of ancients, I might instance many of our own country as illustrious examples of this assertion, and no example more illustrious than that of the immortal Shakspeare. In our times the author of "Waverley," whose productions, in different branches of literature, would almost of themselves fill a library, continues ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 348, December 27, 1828 • Various
... thee for the good thou hast done with my son." "O wife of my brother," answered he, "this is no manner of kindness in me, [200] for that this is my son and it behoveth me stand in the stead of my brother his father; so be thou easy." Quoth she, "I pray God, by the glory of the ancients [201] and the moderns, that He let thee [live] and continue thee, O my brother-in-law, and prolong me thy life, so thou mayst be [as] a wing [202] to this orphan boy; and he shall still be under thine obedience and thy commandment and shall do nought but that which thou biddest him." "O wife ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne
... all the other actions of our life ought to be try'd and sifted. 'Tis the master-day, 'tis the day that is judge of all the rest, 'tis the day (says one of the ancients) that ought to judge of all my foregoing years. To death do I refer the essay of the fruit of all my studies. We shall then see whether my discourses came only from my mouth or from my heart. I have seen many by their death give a good or an ill repute to their whole life. Scipio, the father-in-law ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... times than they bear now, both absolutely and in comparison with other kinds of jewels. Romantic ideas prevailed regarding their origin and their nature; but it is well worthy of remark that the parable passes in silence all that was false or fanciful in the ideas of the ancients regarding the production and the medicinal virtue of pearls. There is not a word about their origin in a drop of dew, or the colour imparted to them by the brightness or darkness of the heavens at the moment of their conception: the only circumstance ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... yet of human wrong Left the unbalanced scale, great Nemesis! Here, where the ancients paid thee homage long - Thou, who didst call the Furies from the abyss, And round Orestes bade them howl and hiss For that unnatural retribution—just, Had it but been from hands less near—in this Thy former realm, I call thee from the dust! Dost thou not ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... Cormorants, and Ibises, {45} the young thrust their bills far down the throats of the parents to procure the regurgitated food. From this custom the ancients may have got the idea that Pelicans feed their young with their own life blood. The suggestion still persists, and on the seal of one of our large life insurance companies of America a Pelican and her young are represented accompanied with the motto: "I live ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... not complain of these ancients so much because their logic is, by their own showing, utterly baseless, worthless and fantastic altogether, as because of their pompous and imbecile proscription of all other roads of Truth, of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of having shared in the national robberies. A short time in the summer of 1797, after the dismissal of Cochon, he acted as a Minister of Police; and in 1798 the Jacobins elected him a member of the Council of Ancients, where he, with other deputies, sold himself to Bonaparte, and was, in return, rewarded with a place in the Senate. Under monarchy he was a republican, and under a Republic he extolled monarchical institutions. He wished to be singular, and to be rich. Among so many ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... air, or drains defiling the water. Now, builders have to face the many square miles of Chicago or Buenos Ayres, to provide lungs for their cities, to fight with polluted streams and smoke. Their problems are quite unlike those of the ancients. When Cobbett, about 1800, called London the Great Wen, he contrasted in two monosyllables the ancient ideal of a city ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield
... Lucian, and similar sources. But it will at once be perceived, and admitted even by candid men of science, that these spiritual phenomena of the classical period cannot plausibly, nor even possibly, be attributed to the agency of rats, when we recall the fact that the rat was an animal unknown to the ancients. As the learned M. Selys Longch observes in his Etudes de Micromammalogie (Paris, 1839, p. 59), 'the origin of the rat is obscure, the one thing certain is that the vermin was unknown to the ancients, and that it arrived in Europe, introduced, ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... a curious discovery, that in a province of this kingdom, not fifty miles from its capital, a sort of devotion is still paid to Priapus, the obscene divinity of the ancients (though under another denomination), I have thought it a circumstance worth recording; particularly as it offers a fresh proof of the similitude of the Popish and Pagan religion, so well observed by Dr. Middleton in his celebrated Letter from Rome; therefore ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... Revelation describes the Saints before the throne of God praying for their earthly brethren: "The four and twenty ancients fell down before the Lamb, having every one of them harps and golden vials full of odors, which are the ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... unaffected by currents of any kind. And here, as a matter of course, the greater part of the gulf-weed and other floating materials, which are carried round by the current, is eventually deposited. This is the "Sargasso Sea" of the ancients. Columbus crossed this "weedy sea" on his quest after a western passage to India. And the singular appearance of the ocean, thickly matted over with gulf-weed, caused great alarm among his companions, who thought they had reached the ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... dead Aenesidemus, who had lived two centuries before him, but with his own contemporaries. He also seeks to prove that Sextus could not have gained his knowledge of these sayings of Aenesidemus from any of Aenesidemus' own writings, as neither by the ancients, nor by later writers, was any book spoken of which could well have contained them. Neither Aristocles nor ...
— Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism • Mary Mills Patrick
... unknown to the ancients. The reciprocal duties of master and apprentice make a considerable article in every modern code. The Roman law is perfectly silent with regard to them. I know no Greek or Latin word (I might venture, I believe, to assert that there is none) ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... Hammachaloth, "Song of Ascents," prefixed to these fifteen Psalms, has given rise to much controversy. The different opinions as to the import of this title may be thus stated: 1. The ancients understood it to relate to the steps of the temple: of this supposition I shall speak hereafter. 2. Luther, whom Tholuck is inclined to follow, renders it a song in the higher choir: intimating that they ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 234, April 22, 1854 • Various
... supposed irrecoverable on the one hand, or indeterminate on the other, or of any excellence conceived to have been either summoned by an incantation, or struck out by an accident. And of late, among our leading masters, the loss has not been merely of the system of the ancients, but of all system whatsoever: the greater number paint as if the virtue of oil pigment were its opacity, or as if its power depended on its polish; of the rest, no two agree in use or choice of materials; ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... of his ground in so singular an argument. 'Very true.' Then, leaving the subject for further examination at some future time, let us proceed with our laws about education, for in this manner we may probably throw light upon our present difficulty. 'Let us do as you say.' The ancients used the term nomoi to signify harmonious strains, and perhaps they fancied that there was a connexion between the songs and laws of a country. And we say—Whosoever shall transgress the strains by law established is a transgressor of the laws, and shall ...
— Laws • Plato
... generally reside in the highest stories has been immemorially observed. The wisdom of the ancients was well acquainted with the intellectual advantages of an elevated situation; why else were the Muses stationed on Olympus, or Parnassus, by those who could with equal right have raised them bowers in the vale of Tempe, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... eyelashes are only not quite so long as her hair. She has a mouth which would strike you as large,—it is five and a half inches across,—but when she speaks, and you hear the combined wisdom of Solomon, and Plato, and Socrates, and Solon, and the rest of the ancients (not to mention the moderns), falling from her lips, your only wonder is that her mouth keeps within its present limits. Her nose—Miss Phebe, can it be? Is it possible you have left out her nose? Soeur Angelique, I am forced to the melancholy ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... pious men in the old times, and had stood the test of ages, must necessarily be true. Then, as the opposing evidence became irresistible, they were content to admit that these marvels were allegories under which the wisdom of the ancients had concealed many sacred and mysterious things. They tried to reconcile, what now in their misgivings they feared might be myths, with their advancing intellectual state. But their efforts were in vain, for there ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... sustenance, or for the building up of its structure, upon certain constituents of the coral. Does it not break and grind down to powder the ramparts of coral? Clumsy and ill-shaped as it appears to be in other respects, it has jaws of wonderful design, and known to the ancients as "Aristotle's lantern." They are composed of five strips of bony substance, with enamel-like tips overlying each other in the centre of the disc-shaped mouth. With this splendid instrument the creature grips and breaks off or gnaws off, or ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield |
