John Henrik Clarke Quotes

The Egyptian contribution to architecture was more concerned with remembering the dead than the living.

Long before they had an Adam and Eve there was an Africa and African people, with concepts that predated Abraham. All of the pyramids of Africa, not only those in Egypt, but those in Sudan, and the two in northern Ethiopia … were built thousands of years before there was an Adam and Eve mentioned anywhere on the planet

Only great noblemen and valiant warriors are given license to build a home with a second story; for disobeying this law the penalty is death.

As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

What about King Tut’s tomb?” I protested. “That boy king?” Zia rolled her eyes. “Boring. You should see some of the good tombs.

There's such a craving to make Egypt white or Asian, people don't just even listen to you. When you explain why would anyone build anything as enduring as the Pyramids in Africa before they would build anything of that nature at home?

When Moses was alive, these pyramids were a thousand years old. Here began the history of architecture. Here people learned to measure time by a calendar, to plot the stars by astronomy and chart the earth by geometry. And here they developed that most awesome of all ideas - the idea of eternity.

The stones here speak to me, and I know their mute language. Also, they seem deeply to feel what I think. So a broken column of the old Roman times, an old tower of Lombardy, a weather- beaten Gothic piece of a pillar understands me well. But I am a ruin myself, wandering among ruins.

At the beginning, I thought the best Islamic work was in Spain - the mosque in Cordoba, the Alhambra in Granada. But as I learned more, my ideas shifted. I traveled to Egypt, and to the Middle East many times.I found the most wonderful examples of Islamic work in Cairo, it turns out. I'd visited mosques there before, but I didn't see them with the same eye as I did this time. They truly said something to me about Islamic architecture.

Joseph built the pyramids in order to store grain. Now, all the archeologists think that they were made for the pharaoh's graves. But, you know, it would have to be something awfully big, when you stop and think about it - and I don't think it would just disappear over the course of time - to store that much grain.

Safe-breaking and vault-breaking are at least as old as the pyramids and burial chambers of Egypt. Poking holes in vaults and safes for profit appears to be as durable as greed.

Egypt is the gift of the Nile.

The world is but a perennial movement. All things in it are in constant motion-the earth, the rocks of the Caucasus, the pyramids of Egypt-both with the common motion and with their own.

The crucial differences which distinguish human societies and human beings are not biological. They are cultural.

We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).

Building a temple didn't mean you believed in gods, it just meant you believed in architecture.

It feels like God visits everywhere else, but lives in Africa.

The pyramids are one of those things that live up to the hype. They're elemental in ways that are hard to describe.

Egypt is full of dreams, mysteries, memories.

Olive Schreiner is less a woman than a geographical fact. Just as one thinks of Egypt as a foreground for the Pyramids, so South Africa seems the setting of that warm, attractive, aggressive personality. Her work is far inferior to her.

For a lifetime I had bathed with becoming regularity, and thought the world would come to an end unless I changed my socks every day. But in Africa I sometimes went without a bath for two months, and I went two weeks at a time without even changing my socks. Oddly enough, it didn't seem to make much difference.

Mexico has lost an icon whose work has transcended generations and borders.

You shall not dwell in tombs made by the dead for the living.

Music [is] a science peculiarly productive of a pleasure that no state of life, publick or private, secular or sacred; no difference of age or season; no temper of mind or condition of health exempt from present anguish; nor, lastly, distinction of quality, renders either improper, untimely, or unentertaining.

Among the innumerable monuments of architecture constructed by the Romans, how many have escaped the notice of history, how few have resisted the ravages of time and barbarism! And yet even the majestic ruins that are still scattered over Italy and the provinces, would be sufficient to prove that those countries were once the seat of a polite and powerful empire.