Famous quotes containing the words ancient history, century, history, kingdom and/or ancient:
“Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more modern. It is written as if the specator should be thinking of the backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the author expected that the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“He who tip-toes cannot stand; he who strides cannot walk.”
—Lao-Tzu (6th century B.C.)
“The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“I’ll give my jewels for a set of beads,
My gorgeous palace for a hermitage,
...
And my large kingdom for a little grave,
A little, little grave, an obscure grave.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,
A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall,
An acre of stony ground,
Where the symbolic rose can break in flower,
Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)