As a freshman in college, I was having a lot of trouble adjusting. I took a meditation class to handle anxiety. It really helped. Then as a grad student at Harvard, I was awarded a pre-doctoral traveling fellowship to India, where my focus was on the...
The Christian Bible is a symbolic book, not a literal one. The one Christians know as Jesus was actually a symbol for the sun. Ancient sun worshippers believed the sun died at the end of the winter solstice and then three days later it would be rebor...
The Torah is the foundational text for Jewish law, but the Haggadah is our book of living memory. We are not merely telling a story here. We are being called to a radical act of empathy. Here we are, embarking on an ancient, perennial attempt to give...
Private Joker: I wanted to see exotic Vietnam... the crown jewel of Southeast Asia. I wanted to meet interesting and stimulating people of an ancient culture... and kill them. I wanted to be the first kid on my block to get a confirmed kill!
Pita: Do you have a girlfriend, Creasy? Creasy: What? Pita: Do you have a girlfriend? Creasy: No. What kind of question is that, anyway? You're supposed to be studying history, okay? Pita: It is history... Creasy history. Creasy: No, that's ancient h...
Marcus Licinius Crassus: Are you not aware of Rome's most ancient law? That no General may enter the city at the head of his armed legions? Marcus Publius Glabrus: Sulla did. Marcus Licinius Crassus: Sulla? To the infamy of his name! To the utter dam...
John Connor: [they're travelling in an ancient truck with the T-1000 hot on their heels] Step on it! The Terminator: [the truck is only going about 65] This is the vehicle's top speed. John Connor: I could get out and run faster than this!
Don Bradman will bat no more against England, and two contrary feelings dispute within us: relief, that our bowlers will no longer be oppressed by this phenomenon; regret, that a miracle has been removed from among us. So must ancient Italy have felt...
If nature has composed the human body so that in its proportions the seperate individual elements answer to the total form, then the Ancients seem to have had reason to decide that bringing their creations to full completion likewise required a corre...
There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a ...
Although it was only a single instrument, each note had the peculiar echoed quality of a thousand harmonics voiced together. There was a whisper behind the strongest note and a shout beneath the softest, and they sang of far off places in long forgot...
She was crouched in the corner of the room, eating something off the floor. It was the old woman dressed in endless black. When she looked up this time there was no question she was there for me. She had the face of my mother but much older, her anci...
Ricky Roma: How are you? George Aaronow: Fine. You mean the board? You mean, you mean on the board? Ricky Roma: Yes, okay. The board. George Aaronow: I'm fucked on the board. I can't... I can't... I can't... my mind must be in other places cause I ca...
My parents are like younger, urchinlike brothers and sisters whose faces are dirty and who blurt out humiliating things that can neither be anticipated nor controlled. I sigh and make the best of it. I feel I’m older than they are, much older. I fe...
In alien lands I keep the body Of ancient native rites and things: I gladly free a little birdie At celebration of the spring. I'm now free for consolation, And thankful to almighty Lord: At least, to one of his creations I've given freedom in this w...
When melodies and chord changes are masterfully combined, a grand movement takes over our entire body, awakening heart, nerves, and emotions with a primitive force. One can see it in the ancient dance of the enchantress: her hypnotic jingling of cost...
Those ancients who in poetry presented the golden age, who sang its happy state, perhaps, in their Parnassus, dreamt this place. Here, mankind's root was innocent; and here were every fruit and never-ending spring; these streams--the nectar of which ...
In ancient Greece more than one royal house was guilty of crime which became the stuff of tragedy: now Rome was to follow the same path - but not in vain; for that very guilt was to hasten the coming of liberty and the hatred of kings, and to ensure ...
We are like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants; thanks to them, we see farther than they. Busying ourselves with the treatises written by the ancients, we take their choice thoughts, buried by age and human neglect, and we raise them, as it w...
Occasionally, there are battles in the sky. One likes to imagine the angels are always triumphant. One does not like to think of the ancient and terrible scales balancing the infernal and divine as wobbling back and forth. Tilting freely, to and fro....
The very names we use to describe ancient ideas or vanished forms of social organization would be quite meaningless if we had not known living men.
