A Quote by Girolamo Savonarola

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!

Girolamo Savonarola

Quote Topics

Antiquity Being Best Chains Excel God Minds Now Only Refuse Save Some Speak Speaks Them Think Those Thought Thoughts Too Us Will

Quote Author

Girolamo Savonarola
Italian - Priest
September 21, 1452 - May 23, 1498

One only passes from the darkness of ignorance to the enlightenment of science if one re-reads with ever-increasing love the works of the ancients. Let the dogs bark, let the pigs grunt! I will nonetheless be a disciple of the ancients. All my care will be for them and the dawn will see me studying them.

Peter of Blois

My pawing over the ancients and semi-ancients has been one struggle to find out what has been done, once and for all, better than it can ever be done again, and to find out what remains for us to do, and plenty does remain, for if we still feel the same emotions as those who launched a thousand ships, it is quite certain that we came on these feelings differently, through different nuances, by different intellectual gradations. Each age has its own abounding gifts yet only some ages transmute them into matters of duration.

Ezra Pound

The ancients, sir, are the ancients, and we are the people of today.

Moliere

Let us prepare for that blessed day when He will come again. Let us be as wise as those ancients who watched for His coming.

Dieter F. Uchtdorf

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Seek not the paths of the ancients; Seek that which the ancients sought.

Matsuo Basho

The ancients tell us what is best; but we must learn of the moderns what is fittest.

Benjamin Franklin

The difference between ancients and moderns is that the ancients asked what have we experienced, and moderns asked what can we experience.

Alfred North Whitehead

The best minds will tell you that when a man has begotten a child he is morally bound to tenderly care for it, protect it from hurt, shield it from disease, clothe it, feed it, bear with its waywardness, lay no hand upon it save in kindness and for its own good, and never in any case inflict upon it a wanton cruelty. God's treatment of his earthly children, every day and every night, is the exact opposite of all that, yet those best minds warmly justify these crimes, condone them, excuse them, and indignantly refuse to regard them as crimes at all, when he commits them.

Mark Twain

It is my conviction that pure mathematical construction enables us to discover the concepts and the laws connecting them, which gives us the key to the understanding of nature ... In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed.

Albert Einstein

The ancients stole all our ideas from us.

Mark Twain

Seek the truth in all fields, and in that search you will need at least three virtues: courage, zest and modesty. The ancients put that thought in the form of a prayer. They said, “From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth, from the laziness that is content with half truth, from the arrogance that thinks it has all truth – O God of truth, deliver us.

Hugh B. Brown

The ancients recommended us to sacrifice to the Graces, but Milton sacrificed to the Devil.

Voltaire

In the ancient world individuals have sold themselves as slaves, in order to eat. So in society. Here is a witch-doctor who can save us from the sorcerers - a war-lord who can save us from the barbarians - a Church that can save us from Hell. Give them what they ask, give ourselves to them bound and blindfold, if only they will! Perhaps the terrible bargain will be made again. We cannot blame men for making it. We can hardly wish them not to. Yet we can hardly bear that they should.