A Quote by Moliere

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

Moliere

Quote Topics

People Sir Today

Quote Author

Moliere
French - Playwright
January 15, 1622 - February 17, 1673

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

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

Matsuo Basho

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

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

By comparing what we know today with what the ancients appear to have known we can guess at the kinds of wine they drank.

Alec Waugh

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.