Quotations.ch

Use to study word meaning&usage through literary text; receive literary suggestions in real time when writing; use our functionalities...

[Quotations.ch @QuotationsC]

https://t.co/1hpb5zw2Pq

[weird medieval guys @WeirdMedieval]

i think a lot about that guy in the early 1900s who went to bosnia to the last illiterate communities in europe and found out they were still reciting homer epic-length poems to each other from memory.

but when they became literate they lost the ability to remember the poems

[Boze Herrington, Library Owl 😴🧙‍♀️ @SketchesbyBoze]

By far the funniest moment in Homer’s Odyssey is when Circe says, “Shall we have sex?” and Odysseus says, “You just turned all my men into pigs. You have the GALL to think I would sleep with you? Of course I will. Absolutely. But don’t do any weird spells”

[sam buntz @SamBuntz]

Vladimir Nabokov on the existence of God:

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

i think AI is about to set off the biggest wave of historical discoveries ever

and it's already started...

> AI read the full text of a scroll buried by Mount Vesuvius 2,000 years ago, revealing a lost work of Stoic philosophy and a book by the philosopher Philodemus that nobody knew existed

> AI deciphered another scroll from the same library and found Plato's exact burial spot, unknown for 2,000 years. the text even describes his final night, with Plato critiquing a flute player's rhythm from his deathbed

> an AI handwriting model showed some Dead Sea Scrolls are 50 to 100 years older than scholars believed, putting the Book of Daniel within its author's lifetime. we could be looking at something close to an original

> AI recovered a 250-line hymn to Babylon, one of the most copied texts of the ancient world, by matching 30 fragments scattered across museums worldwide. it had been lost for 1,000 years

> AI found 303 new Nazca lines in Peru in six months, nearly doubling one of archaeology's most famous mysteries after a century of human searching had only turned up 430

> AI reconstructed the rules of a 2,000-year-old Roman board game from nothing but the carvings on a limestone slab, simulating thousands of games until it found the ruleset that fit

everyone is excited about what AI will solve in the future

i'm equally excited about what AI will solve from the past

[The War on Beauty @thewaronbeauty]

The past is becoming a foreign language

[Quotations.ch @QuotationsC]

@adaubam 3. combat the abstractness of language with great precision

[Selma Ancira @selma_ancira]

“Soy feo, torpe, desaseado y desprovisto de educación mundana. Soy irritable, aburrido para los otros, inmodesto, impaciente y tímido como un niño. Soy intemperante, indeciso, inconstante, estúpidamente vanidoso y arrebatado, como toda la gente sin carácter.”
Tolstói, julio 1854.

[LiteraryVienna @LiteraryVienna]

Doris Lessing

[Poetic Outlaws @OutlawsPoetic]

“Even biology knows that habitual, extreme safety and well-being are not advantageous for a living organism. Today, well-being in the life of Western society has begun to reveal its pernicious mask.”

—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

[Cat @catfacer]

Geoffrey Hill

[Manuel García Pérez @ManuelGarciaOri]

"El poder requiere cuerpos tristes. El poder necesita tristeza porque puede dominarla. La alegría, por lo tanto, es resistencia, porque no se rinde. La alegría como potencia de vida, nos lleva a lugares donde la tristeza nunca nos llevaría."

Gilles Deleuze

[Words & Wisdom @WordsnWisdom26]

“If justice truly existed, prisons would be filled with politicians, not the poor.”

— Niccolo Machiavelli

[Cat @catfacer]

“He tells me that this dark, forbidding river abounds in sterlet, white salmon, eel-pout, pike, but there is no one to catch the fish and no tackle to catch it with.”
-Chekhov

[LiteraryVienna @LiteraryVienna]

„The past is never dead. It's not even past.“

William Faulkner

[Poetic Outlaws @OutlawsPoetic]

"The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought."

~ H. L. Mencken

[Vesuvius Challenge @scrollprize]

This sounds crazy, BUT this week we READ A FULL SCROLL!!

https://t.co/6Jcn13yOQv

It’s PHerc. 1667, aka Scroll 4!

And that’s not all.

We also proved that we can directly see ink in a rescan of PHerc. Paris 4 — Scroll 1 — WITHOUT machine learning…

…and we UNROLLED ABOUT 140 COLUMNS FROM IT.

This was honestly POETIC.

We first saw a glimpse of the results over dinner in Naples, in a restaurant where Caravaggio was stabbed. Federica was so excited — more excited than we had ever seen her — that we abandoned dinner, went back to work, and unrolled the 140 columns until 3 a.m. on a hotel rooftop, with Vesuvius in the background.

The unroll is not perfect.

But guys…

140 columns, with text visible everywhere.

It’s HUGE.

This project has been full of ups and downs, but somehow, at some point, something ALWAYS happens.

We’re starting to think these scrolls have personalities…

…and they want to be read.

@natfriedman has announced a $1M Grand Prize to read another full scroll. Official details coming soon!

[Kathleen Tyson @Kathleen_Tyson_]

One of my proudest moments translating the earliest account of the Norman Conquest came from being the first historian to correctly number the Norman allied army at 6,000 by understanding ‘decem decies decies et milia quinque’.

The key was a 13th century maths manuscript which said ‘mille cubus sit ergo decem decies decies’.

Every 11th century school boy had learned the pun and understood the bard singing of ‘ten times ten times ten and 5000 more’.

Ergo 6,000 men.
https://t.co/uU2RFFEZJw

[Ancient Hypotheses @AncientEpoch]

🚨Major announcement from the Vesuvius Challenge!

Researchers have completely virtually unwrapped and read an entire Herculaneum scroll for the first time; without ever physically opening it!

The Herculaneum scrolls are a collection of over 1,800 carbonized ancient papyrus scrolls discovered in the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, Italy.

They were buried and preserved when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD

The text is a philosophical treatise on ethics, something we sorely could use a reminder of today.

One excerpt reads;

“…we will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature…”

Prescient.

[Alan Levinovitz @AlanLevinovitz]

Amazing essay “On Girls” by a 19th century schoolboy, picked out by Mark Twain as the funniest (genuine) boy’s composition he has ever seen.

“they always now their lessons bettern boys” … just incredible