Pompeii Quotes:

We are not good at recognizing distant threats even if their probability is 100%. Society ignoring [peak oil] is like the people of Pompeii ignoring the rumblings below Vesuvius.

- James R. Schlesinger

topic: Oil, People, Pompeii, Peak Oil

People will perish, but books are immortal. (Pompeii)

- Robert Harris

topic: Book, People, Pompeii

Look at the walls of Pompeii. That's what got the internet started.

- Robin Williams

topic: Wall, Pompeii, Looks

I haven't watched it [the film 'Pink Floyd at Pompeii'] in years. I find it excruciating.

- David Gilmour

source: "David Gilmour Talks Pompeii Return: 'It’s a Place of Ghosts'". Interview with Kory Grow, www.rollingstone.com. July 7, 2016.

topic: Years, Pompeii, Film

We mixed the sounds ourselves. If they were going to put the sound back onto our film [Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii.], we wanted to mix it ourselves.

- David Gilmour

source: "David Gilmour Talks Pompeii Return: 'It's a Place of Ghosts'". Interview with Kory Grow, www.rollingstone.com. July 7, 2016.

topic: Sound, Pompeii, Film

People perish. Books are immortal.

- Robert Harris

topic: Book, People, Pompeii

Pompeii is an extraordinary place to be because it was preserved exactly as it was. There are many other sites. If you visit any other antiquity-type sites throughout the world, they're very damaged with what's gone on over the centuries since they were abandoned. But this one was just, like, sealed, so you're looking at rock surfaces and the carving of letters and names in the stones looks like it was done yesterday.

- David Gilmour

source: "David Gilmour Talks Pompeii Return: 'It’s a Place of Ghosts'". Interview with Kory Grow, www.rollingstone.com. July 7, 2016.

topic: Names, Yesterday, Rocks, Antiquity, Pompeii

If there was a volcano under their feet, a Vesuvius that could erupt and bury this modern-day Pompeii at any moment, the best thing to do was dance on it.

- Deborah Davis

source: Deborah Davis (2004). “Strapless”, Penguin

topic: Life, Volcanoes, Feet, Modern Day, Pompeii

We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.

- Oswald Spengler

source: Oswald Spengler (2016). “Routledge Revivals: Man and Technics (1932): A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life”, p.56, Routledge

topic: Taken, Mean, Greatness, Thoroughbreds, Roman Soldiers

Which of us that is thirty years old has not had its Pompeii? Deep under ashes lies the life of youth--the careless sport, the pleasure and the passion, the darling joy.

- William Makepeace Thackeray

topic: Sports, Lying, Passion, Thirty Years Old, Pompeii

Put a compass to paper and trace a circle. Then tell me which other country has such a concentration of places like Amalfi, Naples, Ischia, Procida, Sorrento, Positano, Pompeii, and Capri,

- Diego Della Valle

source: "Captain Italia" by Alessandra Ilary, www.townandcountrymag.com. August 7, 2014.

topic: Country, Circles, Paper, Naples, Capri

Pompeii, especially, with its grand murals and its flourishing gardens haunted by the dark shadow of Vesuvius, has always suggested uncomfortable parallels with our contemporary world, especially here in Southern California, where the sunlit life also turns out to have dark shadows in which failure and death lurk at the edge of consciousness. Now in these times, we have even closer parallels with those ancient, beautiful, affluent people living the good life on the verge of annihilation.

- Eleanor Antin

topic: Beautiful, Good Life, Dark, Living The Good Life, Mural

That a thing made by hand, the work and thought of a single craftsman, can endure much longer than its maker, through centuries in fact, can survive natural catastrophe, neglect, and even mistreatment, has always filled me with wonder. Sometimes in museums, looking at a humble piece of pottery from ancient Persia or Pompeii, or a finely wrought page from a medieval illuminated manuscript toiled over by a nameless monk, or a primitive tool with a carved handle, I am moved to tears. The unknown life of the maker is evanescent in its brevity, but the work of his or her hands and heart remains.

- Susan Vreeland

topic: Heart, Humble, Museums, Pottery, Mistreatment

The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.

- Marcel Proust

source: Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.1194, Delphi Classics

topic: Nature, Nymphs, Tree, Pompeii

Our men must win or die. Pompey's men have... other options.

- Julius Caesar

topic: Winning, Men, History, Pompey, Pompeii

Each generation thinks it invented sex; each generation is totally mistaken. Anything along that line today was commonplace both in Pompeii and in Victorian England; the differences lie only in the degree of coverup - if any.

- Robert A. Heinlein

source: Introduction to "Cliff and the Calories" in "Expanded Universe" by Robert A. Heinlein, (p. 355), 1980.

topic: Sex, Lying, Thinking, Victorian, Pompeii

On the whole, the modern palette is the same as the one used by the artists of Pompeii... I mean it has not been enriched. The ancients used earths, ochres, and ivory-black - you can do anything with that palette.

- Pierre-Auguste Renoir

topic: Mean, Artist, Ivory, Pompeii

Pompeii has nothing to teach us, we know crack of volcanic fissure, slow flow of terrible lava, pressure on heart, lungs, the brain about to burst its brittle case (what the skull can endure!)

- Hilda Doolittle

source: Hilda Doolittle, Louis L. Martz (1986). “Collected Poems 1912-1944”, p.510, New Directions Publishing

topic: Heart, Skulls, Brain, Lava, Pompeii

Unless companies change these rules, any superficial re-organizations they perform will be no more effective than dusting the furniture in Pompeii.

- Michael Martin Hammer

topic: Change, Organization, Furniture, Pompeii

A bronze plaque read: GAIUS PLINIUS CAECILIUS SECUNDUS Dan made a face. "Get a load of the guy with the funny name." "I think that's Pliny the younger, the famous Roman writer," Amy supplied. She bent down to read the English portion of the tablet. "Right. In A.D. 79, Pliny chronicled the destruction of Pompeii by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. It's one of the earliest eyewitness accounts of a major disaster." Dan yawned. "Doesn't this remind you of the clue hunt? You know–you telling me a bunch of boring stuff, and me not listening?

- Gordon Korman

topic: Thinking, Names, Guy, Bronze, Eyewitnesses

My experiences of traveling abroad and going to Italy with my father, having to break down a gigantic electric chair to get on trains. You've got three minutes. You go to Pompeii and there are shockingly few accessible hotels in a city that was covered in volcanic ash.

- Zach Anner

topic: Father, Cities, Three, Electric Chair, Pompeii

What I like so much about Corot is that he can say everything with a bit of tree; and it was Corot himself that I found in the museum of Naples - in the simplicity of the work of Pompeii and the Egyptians. These priestesses in their silver-grey tunics are just like Corot's nymphs.

- Pierre-Auguste Renoir

topic: Museums, Nymphs, Tree, Naples, Priestesses

Adrian Maben came to us with the idea. And we just thought, "Well, why not?" I don't think any of us thought it would be as well received and last in people's minds for as long as it did. All credit to him. It's his idea [Pink Floyd at Pompeii] and it was great.

- David Gilmour

source: "David Gilmour Talks Pompeii Return: 'It's a Place of Ghosts'". Interview with Kory Grow, www.rollingstone.com. July 7, 2016.

topic: Thinking, Ideas, Long, Pompeii