Greek Quotes - Page 34

Since the Greeks, Western man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible, that there is a reason for everythingand that the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational Western mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself.

William Barrett

Men, Hands, Mind

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The Greeks have snatched up their spears.
They have pointed the helms of their ships
Toward the bulwarks of Troy.

Hilda Doolittle

War, Anger, Ships

Hilda Doolittle, Louis L. Martz (1986). “Collected Poems 1912-1944”, p.77, New Directions Publishing

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Christianity is the religion of melancholy and hypochondria. Islam, on the other hand, promotes apathy, and Judaism instills its adherents with a certain choleric vehemence, the heathen Greeks may well be called happy optimists.

Franz Grillparzer

Hands, Islam, Apathy

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Mankind became hysterical in the Middle Ages because it poorly repressed the sexual impressions of its Greek boyhood.

Karl Kraus

Age, Boyhood, Hysterical

Karl Kraus (1976). “Half-truths & one-and-a-half truths: selected aphorisms”

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You shouldn't be a big shot about your fate. I'm an enemy of Destiny, I'm not a Greek, I'm a Berliner.

Alfred Doblin

Fate, Destiny, Enemy

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The idea of childhood as a social invention, in retrospect, is hardly credible. In the Bible, in writings of the Greeks and Romans, and in the works of the first great educator of the modern era, Comenius, children were recognized as being both different from adults and different from one another with respect to their stages of development. To be sure, the scientific study of children and the increased length of life in modern times have enhanced our understanding of age differences, but they have always been acknowledged.

David Elkind

Children, Writing, Ideas

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In all the good Greek of Plato
I lack my roastbeef and potato.

A better man was Aristotle,
Pulling steady on the bottle.

John Crowe Ransom

Plato, Philosophical, Men

John Crowe Ransom (1978). “Selected Poems”

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The Greeks were smarter than us, and they had different words for different kinds of love. There's storge, which is family love. That's not us. There's eros, which is sexual love. There's philia, which is brotherly love. And then there's the highest form. Agape.” He pronounced it “aga-pay.” “That's transcendental love, like when you place the other person above yourself.

Bill Konigsberg

Family Love, Different, Pay

Bill Konigsberg (2013). “Openly Straight”, p.205, Scholastic Inc.

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I'm drawn to a lot of tragedies, and I love a Greek tragedy.But I would think - I start thinking realistically about it, and performing eight days a week, that would take a toll. I take things to heart. I don't know if I could survive, like, "Medea."

Eva Mendes

Heart, Thinking, Eight

Source: www.pbs.org

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Greek shipowners like to boast, 'I bought ships at the bottom of the market, and now they're worth ten times as much.' It goes back to the days of Onassis and Niarchos competing with each other over who had the biggest fleet, the biggest yacht and the most famous girlfriend.

Stelios Haji-Ioannou

Girlfriend, Ships, Wealth

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The principal thing is the question of how our culture views age: that old is ugly Just think of Rodin, how he dealt with people of all ages. I have the feeling that I'm alive, I have a body I can make it extremely interesting. That keeps me alive and vital. It's a kind of process of energizing myself by my belief that the classical tradition of art that we've inherited from the Greeks is a load of bullshit.

John Coplans

Art, Thinking, Views

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In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, "memoirs to serve for a history," which is but materials to serve for a mythology.

Henry David Thoreau

Hands, History, Raw Materials

Henry David Thoreau (1975). “Early Essays and Miscellanies”, p.60, Princeton University Press

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A beautiful person among the Greeks, was thought to betray by this sign some secret favor of the immortal gods; and we can pardonpride, when a woman possesses such a figure that wherever she stands, or moves, or leaves a shadow on the wall, or sits for a portrait to the artist, she confers a favor on the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beauty, Beautiful, Wall

Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “The Selected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.202, Graphic Arts Books

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Under the dominion of an idea, which possesses the minds of multitudes, as civil freedom, or the religious sentiment, the power ofpersons are no longer subjects of calculation. A nation of men unanimously bent on freedom, or conquest, can easily confound the arithmetic of statists, and achieve extravagant actions, out of all proportion to their means; as, the Greeks, the Saracens, the Swiss, the Americans, and the French have done.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Religious, Mean, Men

Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Mikics (2012). “The Annotated Emerson”, p.253, Harvard University Press

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In the Greek cities, it was reckoned profane, that any person should pretend a property in a work of art, which belonged to all who could behold it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Art, Cities, Should

The Conduct of Life "Wealth" (1860)

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The squabbles of philandering Zeus and shrewish Hera are the Greeks' comment on married life.

Mason Cooley

Marriage, Married, Zeus

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For me Esoteric Hitlerism is being possessed by the archetypes of the collective unconscious which the Greeks used to call gods.

Miguel Serrano

Collective Unconscious, Esoteric, Used

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And when the book of Daniel was showed to him (Alexander the Great) wherein Daniel declared that one of the Greeks should destroy the empire of the Persians, he supposed that himself was the person intended.

Josephus

Book, Empires, Should

Flavius Josephus (1830). “The Works of Flavius Josephus...: With Three Dissertations, Concerning Jesus Christ, John the Baptist, James the Just, God's Command to Abraham, Etc. and Explanatory Notes and Observations”, p.235

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The gothic is singular in this; one seems easily at home in the renaissance; one is not too strange in the Byzantine; as for the Roman, it is ourselves; and we could walk blindfolded through every chink and cranny of the Greek mind; all these styles seem modern when we come close to them; but the gothic gets away.

Henry Adams

Home, Style, Mind

Henry Adams (2017). “Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres”, p.116, BookRix

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The Greeks put us to shame not only by their simplicity, which is foreign to our age; they are at the same time our rivals, nay, frequently our models, in those very points of superiority from which we seek comfort when regretting the unnatural character of our manners. We see that remarkable people uniting at once fullness of form and fullness of substance, both philosophising and creating, both tender and energetic, uniting a youthful fancy to the virility of reason in a glorious humanity.

Friedrich Schiller

Regret, Character, Creating

Friedrich Schiller (2017). “Aesthetical Essays of Friedrich Schiller”, p.45, Litres

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I am not of the opinion generally entertained in this country [England], that man lives by Greek and Latin alone; that is, by knowing a great many words of two dead languages, which nobody living knows perfectly, and which are of no use in the common intercourse of life. Useful knowledge, in my opinion, consists of modern languages, history, and geography; some Latin may be thrown into the bargain, in compliance with custom, and for closet amusement.

Lord Chesterfield

Education, Country, Latin

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Beauty is no local deity, like the Greek and Roman gods, but omnipresent.

C. A. Bartol

Beauty, Deities, Roman Gods

C. A. Bartol (1855). “Pictures of Europe, Framed in Ideas”, p.36

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In families well ordered, there is always one firm, sweet temper, which controls without seeming to dictate. The Greeks represented Persuasion as crowned.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Sweet, Persuasion, Temper

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At first critics classified authors as Ancients, that is to say, Greek and Latin authors, and Moderns, that is to say, every post-Classical Author. Then they classified them by eras, the Augustans, the Victorians, etc., and now they classify them by decades, the writers of the '30's, '40's, etc. Very soon, it seems, they will be labeling authors, like automobiles, by the year.

W. H. Auden

Latin, Years, Eras

"The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays" by W. H. Auden, ("Reading"), (p. 12), 1962.

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[On the New Testament:] I ... must enter my protest against the false translation of some passages by the men who did that work, and against the perverted interpretation by the men who undertook to write commentaries thereon. I am inclined to think, when we [women] are admitted to the honor of studying Greek and Hebrew, we shall produce some various readings of the Bible a little different from those we now have.

Sarah Moore Grimke

Bible, Reading, Writing

Sarah Moore Grimké, Mary S. Parker (1838). “Letters on the equality of the sexes, and the condition of woman: Addressed to Mary S. Parker”, p.16

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