A Quote by Benjamin Franklin
The ancients tell us what is best; but we must learn of the moderns what is fittest.
Related Quotes
From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become; from what the ancients did, what poetry must be.
The difference between ancients and moderns is that the ancients asked what have we experienced, and moderns asked what can we experience.
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!
If the ancients left us ideas, to our credit be it spoken that we moderns are building houses for them -- structures which neither Plato nor Archimedes had dreamed possible.
The finest and most beautiful ideas on morals and manners have been swept away before our times, and nothing is left for us but to glean after the ancients and the ablest amongst the moderns.
Some are so very studious of learning what was done by the ancients that they know not how to live with the moderns.
In the ancients, one sees the accomplished letter of entire poetry: in the moderns, one has the presentiment of the spirit in becoming.
The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of the moderns, has shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients.
We [the Moderns] are like dwarves perched on the shoulders of giants [the Ancients], and thus we are able to see more and farther than the latter.
Someone has said that to plagiarise from the ancients is to play the pirate beyond the Equator, but that to steal from the moderns is to pick pockets at street corners.
Speak of the moderns without contempt and of the ancients without idolatry; judge them all by their merits, but not by their age
It were indeed to be wish'd that our art had been less ingenious, in contriving means destructive to mankind; we mean those instruments of war, which were unknown to the ancients, and have made such havoc among the moderns. But as men have always been bent on seeking each other's destruction by continual wars; and as force, when brought against us, can only be repelled by force; the chief support of war, must, after money, be now sought in chemistry.
The ancients, by their system of colonization, made themselves friends all over the known world; the moderns have sought to make subjects, and therefore have made enemies.
If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism; if from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition.
To the haranguers of the populace among the ancients, succeed among the moderns your writers of political pamphlets and news-papers, and your coffee-house talkers.
The survival of the fittest is the ageless law of nature, but the fittest are rarely the strong. The fittest are those endowed with the qualifications for adaptation, the ability to accept the inevitable and conform to the unavoidable, to harmonize with existing or changing conditions.
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