We have our arts, the ancients had theirs. . . We cannot raise obelisks a hundred feet high in a single piece, but our meridians are more exact.
We are really so prejudiced by our educations, that, as the ancients deified their heroes, we deify their madmen.
The knowledge of the ancients reached the highest point-the time before anything existed. This is the highest point. It is exhaustive. There is no adding to it.
I have witnessed things the ancients would have called miracles, but they are not miracles. They are the products of someone's dream, and they happen as the result of hard work.
We are ancients of the earth, And in the morning of the times.
Seek not the paths of the ancients; Seek that which the ancients sought.
Medical research in the twentieth century mostly takes place in the lab; in the Renaissance, though, researchers went first and foremost to the library to see what the ancients had said.
The difference between ancients and moderns is that the ancients asked what have we experienced, and moderns asked what can we experience.
The ancients, sir, are the ancients, and we are the people of today.
Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet; especially not against their poetry.
The ancients stole all our ideas from us.
Those we call the ancients were really new in everything.
Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin.
Just as the ancients danced to call upon the spirits in nature, we too can dance to find the spirits within ourselves that have been long buried and forgotten.
And perhaps, posterity will thank me for having shown that the ancients did not know everything.
Those ancients who in poetry presented the golden age, who sang its happy state, perhaps, in their Parnassus, dreamt this place. Here, mankind's root was innocent; and here were every fruit and never-ending spring; these streams--the nectar of which poets sing.
The ancients were destitute of many of the conveniences of life which have been invented or improved by the progress of industry; and the plenty of glass and linen has diffused more real comforts among the modern nations of Europe than the senators of Rome could derive from all the refinements of pompous or sensual luxury.
