Quotessence
Home / Topics / Parthenon Quotes

Parthenon Quotes

Browse 24 quotes about Parthenon.

Parthenon Quotes

“Across the distance, the Acropolis museum cradled within its protective walls its legendary treasures, lulling them to a peaceful sleep under the eerie light from the heavens. Yet, through the large window, the five Caryatids stood alert on their strong platform. The ageless maidens with the long braided hair down their backs remained awake even at this hour gazing across to the Acropolis, full of nostalgia for their sacred home. Inside their marble chests, they nurtured as always, precious hope for the return of their long lost sister.”

AntiquityAthensMuseumParthenonAcropolisParthenon Marbles
Book:The Necklace of Goddess Athena
Create image

“I want to see the Parthenon by moonlight.' I had my way. They floodlight it now, to great advantage I am told, but it was not so then, and since it was late in the year there were few tourists. My companions were all intelligent men, including my own husband, and they had the sense to stay mute. I suppose, being a woman, I confuse beauty with sentiment, but, as I looked on the Parthenon for the first time in my life, I found myself crying. It had never happened to me before. Your sunset weepers I despise. It was not full moon, or anywhere near it. The half circle put me in mind of the labrys, the Cretan double axe, and the pillars were the most ghostly in consequence. What a shock for the modern aesthete, I thought when my crying was done, if he could see the ruddy glow of colour, the painted eyes, the garish lips, the orange-reds and blues that were there once, and Athene herself a giantess on her pedestal touched by the rising sun. Even in those distant times the exigencies of a state religion had brought their own traffic, the buying and selling of doves, of trinkets: to find himself, a man had to go to the woods, to the hills. "Come on," said Stephen. "It's beautiful and stark, if you like, but so is St. Pancras station at 4 A.M. It depends on your association of ideas." We crammed into Burns's small car, and went back to our hotel. ("The Chamois")”

GreeceAthensParthenon
Book:Echoes from the Macabre: Selected Stories
Create image

“Imagine you are a member of a tour visiting Greece. The group goes to the Parthenon. It is a bore. Few people even bother to look — it looked better in the brochure. So people take half a look, mostly take pictures, remark on serious erosion by acid rain. You are puzzled. Why should one of the glories and fonts of Western civilization, viewed under pleasant conditions — good weather, good hotel room, good food, good guide — be a bore? Now imagine under what set of circumstances a viewing of the Parthenon would not be a bore. For example, you are a NATO colonel defending Greece against a Soviet assault. You are in a bunker in downtown Athens, binoculars propped up on sandbags. It is dawn. A medium-range missile attack is under way. Half a million Greeks are dead. Two missiles bracket the Parthenon. The next will surely be a hit. Between columns of smoke, a ray of golden light catches the portico. Are you bored? Can you see the Parthenon? Explain.”

GreeceParthenon
Book:Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book
Create image

“In the later nineteenth century, the tops of skyscrapers often took the shape of domes, surmounted by jaunty gilded lanterns; later came ziggurats, mausoleums, Alexandrian lighthouses, miniature Parthenons. These charming follies contained neither royal corpses nor effigies of gods and goddesses; rather they contained large wooden tanks filled with water.”

WaterCenturyShapesFilledFollyGoddessCharmingRoyalCorpsesTanksNineteenth CenturyLighthouseMiniaturesSkyscraperDomesLanternsGildedGods And GoddessesMausoleumParthenon
Author:Brendan Gill
Create image

“Leisure, itself the creation of wealth, is incessantly engaged in transmuting wealth into beauty by secreting the surplus energy which flowers in great architecture, great painting and great literature. Only in the atmosphere thus engendered floats that impalpable dust of ideas which is the real culture. A colony of ants or bees will never create a Parthenon.”

IdeasRealCultureLiteratureEnergyWealthCreationPaintingFlowerArchitectureDustAtmosphereEngagedLeisureBeesFloatsAntsColonySurplusIncessantlyGreat LiteratureParthenon
Author:Edith Wharton
Create image

“There are many things worth telling that are not quite narrative. And eternity itself possesses no beginning, middle or end. Fossils, arrowheads, castle ruins, empty crosses: from the Parthenon to the Bo Tree to a grown man's or woman's old stuffed bear, what moves us about many objects is not what remains but what has vanished. There comes a time, thanks to rivers, when a few beautiful old teeth are all that remain of the two-hundred-foot spires of life we call trees. There comes a river, whose current is time, that does a similar sculpting in the mind.”

MenMindDoeTwoEndsBeautifulMovingTreeFeetMiddleObjectsBearsHundredRiversCrossesEmptyEternityRemainsCurrentsTeethRuinsThanksNarrativeFossilsCastlesThere Comes A TimeGrown ManSculptingAll That RemainsSpiresParthenon
Author:David James Duncan
Create image

“The academic teaching on beauty is false. We have been misled, but so completely misled that we can no longer find so much as a shadow of a truth again. The beauties of the Parthenon, the Venuses, the Nymphs, the Narcisusses, are so may lies. Art is not the application of a canon of beauty, but what the instinct and the brain can conceive independently of that canon.”

MayHas BeensArtLyingBrainTeachingArt IsShadowInstinctApplicationAcademicVenusMisledCanonNymphsParthenon
Author:Pablo Picasso
Create image

“Mind you, Mount Rushmore isn't exactly the Parthenon or the Sistine Chapel either. After the naïve daftness of the Crazy Horse monument, I find the pompous idiocy of those four presidents somehow more risible still. Wishing to show respect or feel a vicarious thrill of admiration and pride, I can only giggle. For which I am very sorry. Any loyal American reading this who feels outraged and insulted is free to explode with derisive snorts of laughter at any British equivalent.”

FeelsMindStillsI CanShowsReadingWishPresidentFourCrazyPrideLaughterHorseSorryBritishAdmirationLoyalThrillMonumentInsultedGiggleOutragedPompousIdiocyChapelVicariousShow RespectSistine ChapelParthenonMount RushmoreCrazy Horse
Author:Stephen Fry
Create image

“Man's history has been graven on the rock of Egypt, stamped on the brick of Assyria, enshrined in the marble of the Parthenon-it rises before us a majestic presence in the piled up arches of the Coliseum-it lurks an unsuspected treasure amid the oblivious dust of archives and monasteries-it is embodied in all the looms of religions, of races, of families.”

MenHas BeensScienceRaceHistoryRocksTreasureDustEgyptBricksMarbleFamily HistoryMajesticArchesObliviousArchivesMonasteriesParthenonColiseum
Book:Essays on Art and Archaeology
Create image

“Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.”

PeopleMenBookMomentsRememberNightFallGirlThreeFoundNaturalStreetsSweetMetsSummerLonelyThirdsTreasureMemorableParksSunriseKittenDoorwaysWayneSummer NightsCentral ParkParthenonMemorable MomentsStagecoaches
Book:The Moviegoer
Create image

“Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean I'd love to be skinny like that but not with all those flies and death and stuff.”

WorldMeanI CanHelpingKidsFunnyStuffPoorMoneyWatchesStupidCryIgnoranceTvsDumbSkinnyStarvingStupid PeopleStupidestReally StupidStupid CelebrityI Was StupidReally DumbStupid FunnyStupidest CelebrityDumbest CelebrityDumb CelebrityParthenonSilly StupidCelebrity GossipSkinny People
Author:Mariah Carey
Create image

“The falling apart of a man's life should make more noise. It should startle passesrby with its Sturm and Drang. It ought to sound like the Parthenon crashing down. Not this ordinary, everyday kind of quiet...He closed his eyes...And still it was quiet, this falling apart of his life, as silent as the last beat of an old man's heart. A quiet, echoing thud, and then...nothing.”

MenShouldHeartKindStillsEyeLastsFallSoundOughtQuietBeatsOrdinarySilentEverydayNoiseHis EyesOld ManFalling ApartCrashing DownParthenon
Author:Kristin Hannah
Create image