Greek Quotes - Page 33

• What little recognition the idea of obligation to the public obtains in modern morality, is derived from Greek and Roman sources, not from Christian; as, even in the morality of private life, whatever exists of magnanimity, high-mindeness, personal dignity, even the sense of honour, is derived from the purely human, not the religious part of our education, and never could have grown out of a standard of ethics in which the only worth, professedly recognized, is that of obedience.

  John Stuart Mill

  Christian, Religious, Ideas

  "On Liberty". Philosophical work by John Stuart Mill, 1859.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• We believe that the Greeks have been punished through [the Crusades] by the just judgement of God: these Greeks who have striven to rend the Seamless Robe of Jesus Christ ... Those who would not join Noah in his ark perished justly in the deluge; and these have justly suffered famine and hunger who would not receive as their shepherd the blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles.

  Pope Innocent III

  Jesus, Believe, Blessed

  35 Copy quote

• One of the interesting things about the ancient Greeks is that they really didn't have our conception of individual rights. They didn't have our conception of all lives matters. And it was really was true for them, that certain lives matter a lot more than others. It didn't dawn on them that all lives, although different, can be lives of equal mattering. And that is actually something a huge ethical lesson.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Rights, Interesting, Dawn

  "What Do We Have To Teach Plato?". "Here And Now" with Jeremy Hobson, news.stlpublicradio.org. April 22, 2014.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• There's love and there's romantic love. The Greeks had different words for different kinds of love. And we just got "love." I don't know what you would call the other kinds - maybe brotherly love, Christian love, the love of Saint Francis, love of everyone and everything. Then there's romantic love, which, by and large, is a pain in the ass, a kind of trauma.

  John Maus

  Christian, Pain, Romantic Love

  Interview with Jenn Pelly, pitchfork.com. August 10, 2012.

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• I can understand the Greek idea that there are these these principles of lightening or of war or of wisdom and to embody them, to personify them into a Athena or Aries or whichever god you want makes enormous sense.

  Stephen Fry

  War, Ideas, Principles

  "Big Think Interview With Stephen Fry". bigthink.com. December 8, 2009.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The Greeks understood perfectly that if there were divine beings they are capricious, unkind, malicious mostly, temperamental, envious and mostly deeply unpleasant because that you can say well yes, all right, if there is going to be god or gods then you have to admit that they're very at the very least capricious. They're certainly not consistent. They're certainly not all loving.

  Stephen Fry

  Envious, Divine, Capricious

  "The Importance of Unbelief". Big Think Interview, bigthink.com. December 8, 2009.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Could truth perhaps be a woman who has reasons for not permitting her reasons to be seen? Could her name perhaps be--to speak Greek--Baubo?... Oh, those Greeks! They understood how to live: to do that it is necessary to stop bravely at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore the appearance, to believe in forms, in tones, in words, in the whole Olympus of appearance! Those Greeks were superficial--out of profundity!

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Truth, Believe, Names

  4 Copy quote

• The Greeks, with their truly healthy culture, have once and for all justified philosophy simply by having engaged in it, and having engaged in it more fully than any other people.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Philosophy, Philosophical, People

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (2012). “Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks”, p.28, Regnery Publishing

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Greek is the embodiment of the fluent speech that runs or soars, the speech of a people which could not help giving winged feet toits god of art. Latin is the embodiment of the weighty and concentrated speech which is hammered and pressed and polished into the shape of its perfection, as the ethically minded Romans believed that the soul also should be wrought.

  Havelock Ellis

  Running, Art, Latin

  Havelock Ellis (1915). “Impressions and comments”

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• What a contrast between the stern and desolate poetry of Ossian, and that of Chaucer, and even of Shakespeare and Milton, much more of Dryden, and Pope, and Gray! Our summer of English poetry, like the Greek and Latin before it, seems well advanced towards its fall, and laden with the fruit and foliage of the season, with bright autumnal tints, but soon the winter will scatter its myriad clustering and shading leaves, and leave only a few desolate and fibrous boughs to sustain the snow and rime, and creak in the blasts of age.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Summer, Latin, Fall

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.261, Xist Publishing

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The world, which the Greeks called Beauty, has been made such by being gradually divested of every ornament which was not fitted to endure.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Beauty, Ornaments, World

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.517, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few are attracted strongly to Nature. In their reaction to Naturemen appear to me for the most part, notwithstanding their arts, lower than the animals. It is not often a beautiful relation, as in the case of the animals. How little appreciation of the beauty of the landscape there is among us! We have to be told that the Greeks called the world Kosmos, Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why they did so, and we esteem it at best only a curious philological fact.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Beauty, Beautiful, Appreciation

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.410, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is a monstrous thing to force a child to learn Latin or Greek or mathematics on the ground that they are an indispensable gymnastic for the mental powers. It would be monstrous even if it were true.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Children, Latin, Learning

  George Bernard Shaw (2015). “George Bernard Shaw: The Collected Plays (Illustrated): 60 plays including Caesar and Cleopatra, Pygmalion, Saint Joan, The Apple Cart, Cymbeline, Androcles And The Lion, The Man Of Destiny, The Inca Of Perusalem and Macbeth Skit”, p.2005, e-artnow

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• The Indian gods are imposing, the Greek gods are not. Indeed they are not brave, not self-controlled, they have no manners, they are not gentlemen and ladies.

  Gerard Manley Hopkins

  Self, Brave, Gentleman

  Gerard Manley Hopkins, Gerald Roberts (1980). “Selected prose”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The Greeks by their laws, and the Romans by the spirit of their people, took care to put into the hands of their rulers no such engine of oppression as a standing army. Their system was to make every man a soldier, and oblige him to repair to the standard of his country whenever that was reared. This made them invincible; and the same remedy will make us so.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Death, Country, Military

  Thomas Jefferson, Joyce Appleby, Terence Ball (1999). “Jefferson: Political Writings”, p.139, Cambridge University Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The Parisian is to the French what the Athenian was to the Greeks: no one sleeps better than he, no one is more openly frivolous and idle, no one appears more heedless. But this is misleading. He is given to every kind of listlessness, but when there is glory to be won he may be inspired with every kind of fury. Give him a pike and he will enact the tenth of August, a musket and you have Austerlitz. He was the springboard of Napoleon and the mainstay of Danton. At the cry of "la patrie" he enrols, and at the call of liberty he tears up the pavements. Beware of him!

  Victor Hugo

  Sleep, August, Paris

  Victor Hugo (1980). “Les misérables”, Viking Pr

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Whatever, in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is an anachronism is due to mediaevalism.

  Oscar Wilde

  Facts, Modern, Anachronism

  Oscar Wilde (1997). “Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis”, p.975, Wordsworth Editions

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• There's nothing a well-regulated child hates so much as regularity. I believe a really healthy boy would thoroughly enjoy Greek Grammar--if only he might stand on his head to learn it!

  Lewis Carroll

  Education, Children, Hate

  Lewis Carroll (2015). “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Other Tales”, p.309, Race Point Pub

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Ulysses is son to Laertes, but he is father to Telemachus, husband to Penelope, lover of Calypso, companion in arms of the Greek warriors around Troy, and King of Ithaca. He was subjected to many trials, but with wisdom and courage came through them all.... he is a complete man as well, a good man.

  James Joyce

  Kings, Husband, Father

  5 Copy quote

• Out of all those centuries the Greeks can count seven sages at the most, and if anyone looks at them more closely I swear he'll not find so much as a half-wise man or even a third of a wise man among them.

  Desiderius Erasmus

  Wise, Men, Looks

  Desiderius Erasmus (1986). “Literary and Educational Writings: Panegyricus and Philippum Austriaeducem. Moriae encomium. Dialogus Julius exclusus e coelis. Institutio principis christiani. Querela pacis”

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• I have turned my entire attention to Greek. The first thing I shall do, as soon as the money arrives, is to buy some Greek authors; after that, I shall buy clothes.

  Desiderius Erasmus

  Clothes, Attention, Firsts

  Desiderius Erasmus (1974). “The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 1 to 141, 1484-1500”, p.252, University of Toronto Press

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Man is a rational animal—so at least I have been told. … Aristotle, so far as I know, was the first man to proclaim explicitly that man is a rational animal. His reason for this view was … that some people can do sums. … It is in virtue of the intellect that man is a rational animal. The intellect is shown in various ways, but most emphatically by mastery of arithmetic. The Greek system of numerals was very bad, so that the multiplication table was quite difficult, and complicated calculations could only be made by very clever people.

  Bertrand Russell

  Clever, Animal, Men

  4 Copy quote

• We are only geometricians of matter; the Greeks were, first of all, geometricians in the apprenticeship to virtue.

  Simone Weil

  Matter, Firsts, Virtue

  Simone Weil (2005). “War and the Iliad”, New York Review of Books

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The difference between prose logic and poetic thought is simple. The logician uses words as a builder uses bricks, for the unemotional deadness of his academic prose; and is always coining newer, deader words with a natural preference for Greek formations. The poet avoids the entire vocabulary of logic unless for satiric purposes, and treats words as living creatures with a preference for those with long emotional histories dating from mediaeval times. Poetry at its purest is, indeed, a defiance of logic.

  Robert Graves

  Simple, Emotional, Differences

  Robert Graves, Patrick J. Quinn (2000). “Some speculations on literature, history, and religion”, Carcanet Press Ltd.

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost ideas with Hebraism is conduct and obedience.Nothing can do away with this ineffaceable difference. The Greek quarrel with the body and its desires is, that they hinder right thinking; the Hebrew quarrel with them is, that they hinder right acting.

  Matthew Arnold

  Thinking, Ideas, Differences

  10 Copy quote