A Quote by Bettany Hughes

Venus's life story across 5,000 years reminds us not to trivialise the power of desire: the ancients were right to never underestimate its influence. — © Bettany Hughes
Venus's life story across 5,000 years reminds us not to trivialise the power of desire: the ancients were right to never underestimate its influence.
Venus, ancient goddess of love and beauty, is an apparently irrelevant, invented deity of the long dead. But Venus merits scrutiny. Chart her life story across 5,000 years and you chart the evolution of our conflicted relationship with sex and with the female body.
Never underestimate the power of dreams and the influence of the human spirit. We are all the same in this notion: The potential for greatness lives within each of us.
You must never underestimate the power of your righteous influence.
At what point, 2,000 years on from the life of Jesus, do we need a refresher course? Another 2,000 years? Imagine 100,000 years’ time – would the story of Moses’ burning bush amaze a generation laden with unimaginable scientific and technological wonders? Here lies religion’s biggest quandary. While science is squeezing the life out of God, how is religion going to muster a counterattack from here?
Never underestimate the power of anyone's story... anyone's life.
Never underestimate the power of a good story.
Never underestimate the power of jealousy and the power of envy to destroy. Never underestimate that.
Never underestimate the power of people who are determined to change life and work with all their might towards it. They are the ones who turn into leaders and revolutionize the world around us.
Let us never underestimate the power of a well-written letter.
Who knows the power that Saturn has over us, or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time.
Some have narrowed their minds, and so fettered them with the chains of antiquity that not only do they refuse to speak save as the ancients spake, but they refuse to think save as the ancients thought. God speaks to us, too, and the best thoughts are those now being vouchsafed to us. We will excel the ancients!
Beauty is transcendent. It is our most immediate experience of the eternal. Think of what it's like to behold a gorgeous sunset or the ocean at dawn. Remember the ending of a great story. We yearn to linger, to experience it all our days. Sometimes the beauty is so deep it pierces us with longing. For what? For life as it was meant to be. Beauty reminds us of an Eden we have never known, but somehow our hearts were created for.
Never underestimate the power of your actions. With one small gesture you can change a person's life. For better or worse. God puts us all in each other's lives to impact one another in some way.
Sometime in the last 50,000 years, before 12,000 years ago, a kind of paradise came into existence. A situation in which men and women, parents and children, people and animals, human institutions and the land all were in dynamic balance and not in any primitive sense at all. Language was fully developed, poetry may have been at its climax, dance, magic, poetics, altruism, philosophy. There's no reason to think that these things were not practiced as adroitly as we practice them today and it was under the boundary dissolving influence of psilocybin.
Look, we have existed for 4,000 years - 2,000 years in diaspora, in exile. Nobody in the Middle East speaks their original language but Israel. When we started 64 years ago, we were 650,000 people. So, you know, we are maybe swimming a little bit against the stream, but we continue to swim.
As a kid, I always liked reading stories where I had a power-projection fantasy. I wanted to be inside of a story where I had power and influence, was going to rise to power, was going to somehow influence my society.
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