The quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns (French: querelle des Anciens et des Modernes) was a literary and artistic debate that heated up in the early 1690s and shook the Académie française.
Read more about Quarrel Of The Ancients And The Moderns: Debate in France, Assessment, Analogous British Debate
Famous quotes containing the words quarrel, ancients and/or moderns:
“You must labour to acquire that great and uncommon talent of hating with good breeding, and loving with prudence; to make no quarrel irreconcilable by silly and unnecessary indications of anger; and no friendship dangerous, in care it breaks, by a wanton, indiscreet, and unreserved confidence.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“This was the merriest old man that we had ever seen, and one of the best preserved. His style of conversation was coarse and plain enough to have suited Rabelais. He would have made a good Panurge. Or rather he was a sober Silenus, and we were the boys Chromis and Mnasilus, who listened to his story.... There was a strange mingling of past and present in his conversation, for he had lived under King George, and might have remembered when Napoleon and the moderns generally were born.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)