ANTIQUITY

Related Subjects: Age, Ancestry, Decay, History, Past, Time

1. These times are the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and not those which we account ancient ordine retrogrado, by a computation backward from ourselves.—BACON, Advancement of Learning

2. Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwrecks of time.—BACON, Advancement of Learning

3. Remove not the ancient landmark.—Bible, Proverbs 22:28

4. The ancient and honourable.—Bible, Isaiah 9:15

5. I do by no means advise you to throw away your time ransacking, like a dull antiquarian, the minute and unimportant parts of remote and fabulous times. Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.—LORD CHESTERFIELD

6. Antiquity is the aristocracy of history.—DUMAS

7. How cunningly Nature hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and morning dew!—EMERSON

8. The Pyramids themselves, doting with age, have forgotten the names of their founders.—THOMAS FULLER, Holy and Profane State

9. The ancients built for tomorrow in another world, forgetting that all of us have a today in this. They spent riches and labour to save the souls of their hierarchy, but they kept their laborers so poor that they had no souls to save. They left astounding testimony to human genius and tenacity, but it never seems to have ruffled their consciousness that they fashioned the beautiful with slavery, misery, and blood.—GALSWORTHY, Castles In Spain

10. The volumes of antiquity, like medals, may very well serve to amuse the curious; but the works of the moderns, like the current coin of a kingdom, are much better for immediate use.—GOLDSMITH

11. Rich with the spoils of time.—THOMAS GRAY, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

12. An acute and experienced critic of antiques.—HORACE, Satires

13. 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

14. Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that, being nothing, are 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!—CHARLES LAMB, Essays of Elia

15. It is looked upon as insolence for a man to adhere to his own opinion against the current stream of antiquity.—LOCKE

16. Those we call the ancients were really new in everything.—PASCAL

17. The sacred rust of twice ten hundred years!—POPE, Epistle to Mr. Addison

18. Antiquity cannot privilege an error, nor novelty prejudice a truth.—Proverb

19. Antiquity is not always a mark of verity.—Proverb

20. Time consecrates; and what is gray with age becomes religion.—SCHILLER

21. All those things that are now held to be of the greatest antiquity were at one time new; what we today hold up by example will rank hereafter as precedent.—TACITUS

22. We are Ancients of the earth,
    And in the morning of the times.—TENNYSON, The Day Dream