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.
He has not yet become an elder statesman, though his foreign policy credentials are considerable, but he is certainly our ancient mariner, forever tugging at our sleeve to let him tell his tale of what really happened.
Singing connected with movements and action is a much more ancient, and, at the same time, more complex phenomenon than is a simple song.
We're going through a kind of ancient, barbaric war dance now - it's almost an ultimate in absurdity.
My main mistake was to have made an ancient people advance by forced marches toward independence, health, culture, affluence, comfort.
I was sick and tired of reading other people's epigraphs. They all seemed to be in ancient Greek, middle French or, when they were translated, they never seemed to relate to the book at hand. Basically, they seemed to be there just to baffle you and to impress you with how smart the writer is.
While other kids were out playing and doing healthy things, I read an ancient judo book with a neck hold that was fatal to so many people, they finally dropped it from judo.
A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
I think storytelling in general is how we really deeply know things. It's ancient.
My mother's father taught English literature. When I was about ten or eleven, I could recite Macaulay's 'Lays of Ancient Rome.' While other kids were playing pedestrian war games, I'd be Horatius keeping the bridge.
We find Japan a little more difficult to understand because it has proven its 20th century prowess though the ancient traditions still persist.
Society therefore is as ancient as the world.
The nearest approach I have ever seen to the symmetry of ancient sculpture was among the Arab tribes of Ethiopia. Our Saxon race can supply the athlete, but not the Apollo.
No account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece.
Confidentiality is an ancient and well-warranted social value.
From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become; from what the ancients did, what poetry must be.
When immortality becomes for us no longer a matter of academic discussion, but the most vital of all questions; we shall find our comfort where so many before us have found it, in the ancient words.
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.
The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.
In a few decades of reconstruction, even the mathematical natural sciences, the ancient archetypes of theoretical perfection, have changed habit completely!
But, ancient Greece and ancient Rome - people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then, OK? People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons.
The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
Almost all the early Christian Fathers were opposed to the death penalty, even though it was of course standard practice across the ancient world.
It is good to learn from the ancients. I'm a bit of an ancient myself. They had a lot of time to think about architecture and landscape.
In my office in Jerusalem, there's an ancient seal. It's a signet ring of a Jewish official from the time of the Bible. The seal was found right next to the Western Wall, and it dates back 2,700 years, to the time of King Hezekiah. Now, there's a name of the Jewish official inscribed on the ring in Hebrew. His name was Netanyahu.
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 Victorian language of flowers began with the publication of 'Le Language des Fleurs,' written by Charlotte de Latour and printed in Paris in 1819. To create the book - which was a list of flowers and their meanings - de Latour gathered references to flower symbolism throughout poetry, ancient mythology, and even medicine.
The engine of ancient society was religion but the engine of contemporary society, as I see it, is advertising.
The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.
The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember.
Any period is fascinating: the more ancient, the better.
Anything based on ancient texts is difficult for a modern reader to get their head around.
Sometimes bad luck hits you like in an ancient Greek tragedy, and it's not your own making. When you have a plane crash, it's not your fault.
To ancient Chinese fancy, the Milky Way was a luminous river, - the River of Heaven, - the Silver Stream.
The ancient feud between cat and dog is not forgotten in the north, for the Lynx is the deadly foe of the Fox and habitually kills it when there is soft snow and scarcity of easier prey.
The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture, their amphitheaters, for wild beasts to fight in.
