Cultures have long heard wisdom in non-human voices: Apollo, god of music, medicine and knowledge, came to Delphi in the form of a dolphin. But dolphins, which fill the oceans with blipping and chirping, and whales, which mew and caw in ultramarine jazz - a true rhapsody in blue - are hunted to the edge of silence.
- Jay Griffiths
source: "Fifty years on, the silence of Rachel Carson's spring consumes us" by Jay Griffiths, www.theguardian.com. September 25, 2012.
topic: Ocean, Blue, Whales, Delphi
Apollo at Delphi, through the oracular utterance of his priestess, pronounced Socrates the wisest of men. Of him it is related that he said with sagacity and great learning that the human breast should have been furnished with open windows, so that men might not keep their feelings concealed, but have them open to the view. Oh that nature, following his idea, had constructed them thus unfolded and obvious to the view.
- Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
source: "The Ten Books On Architecture". Book by Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, Book III, Preface, Sec. 1, c. 15 BC.
topic: Men, Views, Should Have, Delphi, Priestesses
And for Incoherent Speech, it was amongst the Gentiles taken for one sort of Prophecy, because the Prophets of their Oracles, intoxicated with a spirit, or vapor from the cave of the Pythian Oracle at Delphi, were for a time really mad, and spake like mad-men; of whoose loose words a sense might be made to fit any event, in such sort, as all bodies are said to be made of Materia prima .
- Thomas Hobbes
source: Thomas Hobbes (1953). “Leviathan”, Peter Smith Pub Inc
topic: Taken, Men, Mad, Vapor, Delphi
Antique art has come down to us in a fragmentary condition, and we have virtuously adapted our taste to this necessity. Almost all our favorite specimens of Greek sculpture, from the sixth century onward, were originally parts of compositions, and if we were faced with the complete group in which the Charioteer of Delphi was once a subsidiary figure, we might well experience a moment of revulsion. We have come to think of the fragment as more vivid, more concentrated, and more authentic.
- Kenneth Clark
source: Kenneth Clark (1956). “The nude: a study in ideal form”, M J F Books
topic: Art, Thinking, Greek, Delphi, Revulsion