Rome Quotes

New Rome will be destroyedBy the attacks of new vandals.God always remains silent.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.

~ Marcus Aurelius

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property – either as a child, a wife, or a concubine – must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the faith: all know how to die but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.

~ Winston S. Churchill

The melancholy of the antique world seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, all of whom more or less imply that beyond the dark void lies immortality. But for the ancients that ‘black hole’ is infinity itself; their dreams loom and vanish against a background of immutable ebony. No crying out, no convulsions—nothing but the fixity of the pensive gaze.With the gods gone, and Christ not yet come, there was a unique moment, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone. Nowhere else do I find that particular grandeur.

~ Flaubert Gustave

Look at their arts, their power of turning stone into lifelike figures, and above all, the way in which they can transfer their thoughts to white leaves, so that others, many many years hence, can read them and know all that was passing, and what men thought and did in the long bygone. Truly it is marvelous.

~ G.a. Henty

The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of Greece and Rome—not by favour of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world were alike despicable.

~ Thomas Henry Huxley

Everyone is running from something. But if we’re lucky, really lucky, fate intervenes and presents an opportunity to conquer our fears. Only then, if triumphant, can a destiny bestowed become a destiny fulfilled.

~ Rome Sims

The entire stock of relationships which suited in war—militiae—was regarded as inadmissible and improper in peace—domi. We have the measure of how right the Romans were in this respect in the experience of the intellectual and moral impoverishment brought about by total mobilisation.

~ Bertrand De Jouvenel

We came to save the sacred writings. - Essenes to Eleazar, on collecting the Dead Sea Scrolls from the burning Temple. Jerusalem, 70 CE.

~ Joseph Shellim

Lord Tierney was furious. But when he saw how his sister had suffered, his anger shifted instead toward Rome. “If it weren’t for this new menace on the horizon,” he thundered, “I’d declare war on those haughty deceivers this instant!”Marcus stepped forward. “Kyrie, I don’t think—“Then don’t!

~ Jennifer Mckeithen

I know not why any one but a schoolboy in his declamation should whine over the Commonwealth of Rome, which grew great only by the misery of the rest of mankind. The Romans, like others, as soon as they grew rich, grew corrupt; and in their corruption sold the lives and freedoms of themselves, and of one another.

~ Samuel Johnson

The danger we face does not come from religion. It comes from a growing intellectual bankruptcy that is one of the symptoms of a dying culture. In ancient Rome, as the republic disintegrated and the Caesars were deified, as the Roman Senate became little more than an echo chamber of the emperor, the population’s attention was diverted by a series of frontier wars and violent and elaborate spectacles in the arena. The excitement of entertainment consumed ancient Rome’s emotional and intellectual life. It poisoned civic and political discourse. Social critics no longer had a form in which to speak. They were answered with ridicule and rage. It was not prerogative of the citizen to think.

~ Chris Hedges

Goddammit! How does the world keep spinning with women on the planet?Ian St. John in THE POMPEII SCROLL

~ Jacqueline Latourrette

Rome was mud and smoky skies; the rank smell of the Tiber and the exotically spiced cooking fires of a hundred different nationalities. Rome was white marble and gilding and heady perfumes; the blare of trumpets and the shrieking of market-women and the eternal, sub-aural hum of more people, speaking more languages than Gaius had ever imagined existed, crammed together on seven hills whose contours had long ago disappeared beneath this encrustation if humanity. Rome was the pulsing heart of the world.

~ Marion Zimmer Bradley

Rome and New York were impressive, but they knew they were. They had the beauty of a vain woman who had squeezed herself into her favourite dress after hours of careful self worship. There was a raw, feral beauty about this landscape that was totally unselfconscious but no less real...There was no pomp or vainty here; this was an innocent, natural beauty, the best kind, like a woman first thing in the morning, lit up by the sun streaming through a window, who doesn't quite believe it when you tell her how beautiful she is.

~ Leonardo Donofrio

Oh Lion in a peculiar guise,Sharp Roman road to Paradise,Come eat me up, I'll pay thy tollWith all my flesh, and keep my soul.

~ Stevie Smith

There are many churches in my name and in the name of my apostles. The greatest and holiest is named after Peter, it is a place of great splendor in Rome. Nowhere can be found more gold.

~ Norman Mailer

You have not studied the histories of ancient times, and perhaps know not the life that breathes in them; a soul of beauty and wisdom which had penetrated my heart of hearts.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Achievement was worth of praise and honor, but excessive achievement was pernicious and a threat to the state. However great a citizen might become, however great he might wish to become, the truest greatness of all still belonged to the Roman Republic itself

~ Tom Holland

Achievement was worthy of praise and honor, but excessive achievement was pernicious and a threat to the state. However great a citizen might become, however great he might wish to become, the truest greatness of all still belonged to the Roman Republic itself

~ Tom Holland

...we can endure neither our vices nor the remedies needed to cure them.

~ Livy

It is no coincidence that, on all four sides, in all four corners, the borders of the Roman Empire stopped where wine could no longer be made.

~ Neel Burton

Death smiles at us all, all a man can do is smile back.

~ Marcus Aurelius

All the great groups that stood about the Cross represent in one way or another the great historical truth of the time; that the world could not save itself. Man could do no more. Rome and Jerusalem and Athens and everything else were going down like a sea turned into a slow cataract. Externally indeed the ancient world was still at its strongest; it is always at that moment that the inmost weakness begins. But in order to understand that weakness we must repeat what has been said more than once; that it was not the weakness of a thing originally weak. It was emphatically the strength of the world that was turned to weakness and the wisdom of the world that was turned to folly.In this story of Good Friday it is the best things in the world that are at their worst. That is what really shows us the world at its worst. It was, for instance, the priests of a true monotheism and the soldiers of an international civilisation. Rome, the legend, founded upon fallen Troy and triumphant over fallen Carthage, had stood for a heroism which was the nearest that any pagan ever came to chivalry. Rome had defended the household gods and the human decencies against the ogres of Africa and the hermaphrodite monstrosities of Greece. But in the lightning flash of this incident, we see great Rome, the imperial republic, going downward under her Lucretian doom. Scepticism has eaten away even the confident sanity of the conquerors of the world. He who is enthroned to say what is justice can only ask:‘What is truth?’ So in that drama which decided the whole fate of antiquity, one of the central figures is fixed in what seems the reverse of his true role. Rome was almost another name for responsibility. Yet he stands for ever as a sort of rocking statue of the irresponsible. Man could do no more. Even the practical had become the impracticable. Standing between the pillars of his own judgement-seat, a Roman had washed his hands of the world.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.

~ Jeffrey Eugenides

How like God's love yours has been to me- so wise, so generous, and so unsparing! exclaimed Pancratius. Promise me one thing more- that is, that you will stay near to me to the end, and carry my last legacy to my mother.

~ Nicholas Wiseman

No more light answers. Let our officersHave note what we purpose. I shall breakThe cause of our expedience to the QueenAnd get her leave to part. For not aloneThe death of Fulvia, with more urgent touches,Do strongly speak to us, but the letters tooOf many our contriving friends in RomePetition us at home. Sextus PompeiusHath given the dare to Caesar and commandsThe empire of the sea. Our slippery people,Whose love is never linked to the deserverTill his deserts are past, begin to throwPompey the Great and all his dignitiesUpon his son, who - high in name and power,Higher than both in blood and life - stands upFor the main soldier; whose quality, going on,The sides o' th' world may danger. Much is breedingWhich, like the courser's hair, hath yet but lifeAnd not a serpent's poison.

~ William Shakespeare

Great empires are not maintained by timidity.

~ Tacitus

In an empire as unruly as Rome, it is quite easy to get away with something as thespian as murder.

~ Katlyn Charlesworth

If the teachings of the early Christians changed Rome and the entire Roman Empire, we can’t point to any great change that the teachings coming from our pulpits today are producing upon our world in general

~ Sunday Adelaja

I don't know what you have thought of. Everyone thinks to the extent of his depravity... #HenriettaLedyanova. #ItalianPassion

~ Olgagoa

You are like the winged goddess from Greek mythology. As beautiful and soaring like an angel as her. #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion:

~ Olga Goa

You've got something that I don't have. Innocence. Ur eyes express it, & I can read everything in them. #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion

~ Olga Goa

You are like the winged goddess from Greek mythology. As beautiful and soaring like an angel as her. #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion

~ Olga Goa

Although I think the word pleasure is unknown to you. More precisely, its practical meaning. #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion

~ Olga Goa

I cannot perceive that you're still a girl. Ur kisses don't seem so innocent. They just drive me crazy! #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion

~ Olga Goa

I want to forget myself in you... #MilanoVeneziani. #ItalianPassion

~ Olgagoa

You are like a narcotic plant... #TimothySvetlov. #ItalianPassion

~ Olgagoa

Stop smiling as if we'd been acquainted with you for ages! #VeronicaLedyanova. #ItalianPassion

~ Olgagoa

Everything we know and believe about deity and divinity nowadays, is a direct origin of old civilizations. Everybody, Greeks, Saxons, Assyrians and Soumerians, all imitate the ancient ways of the first tribes of central Africa (Mason father to his son in The Omniconstant

~ Christos Rodoulla Tsiailis