Best 551 quotes in «greek quotes» category

People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat.

Perché quella piccola voce ostinata nella nostra testa ci tormenta così?» disse , guardandoci. «Forse perché ci ricorda che siamo vivi, che siamo mortali, che abbiamo anime autonome - che, dopotutto, siamo troppo pavidi per cedere, ma che pure ci procurano un grave malessere? È una cosa terribile imparare da bambini che si è un essere separato dal resto del mondo, che niente e nessuno soffre i nostri medesimi solori di scottature alla lingua o di sbucciature alle ginocchia: che ognuno è solo con i propri acciacchi e le proprie pene, Ancor più terribile, invecchiando, scoprire che nessuna persona - non importa quanto vicina - potrà mai capirci davvero. I nostri io sono ciò che ci rende più infelici, ed è per questo che bramiamo perderli, non credere?

Plan harm for another and harm yourself most, The evil we hatch always comes home to roost.

Sleep is sweet, whomever it seizes, though he has cares.

Sappho isn't really meant to be read. It's meant to be sung and there were dances for the songs, also. Sappho was a performance artist, and now she exists as a textual project. She was saved by her critics, and by people who wrote of her in letters to each other. As the morning sun lathers the pool through the long windows and stripes the opposite walls in gold, I look at the fragment translations. She's paper, too. A paper poet for a paper boy. People claim to be translating her but they don't, really, they use her to write poems from as they fill in the gaps in the fragments. A duet. She may have meant for these to be solos but they're duets now, though the second singer blends in with the first. The first singer in this case is offstage, like in the old days of stars who couldn't sing, a real singer hidden behind a curtain, which is the velvet drape of history.

She wore an A-line bridal gown with a V-shaped neckline while Apollo playing Bach's Air on the G string.

The difficulty of learning the dead languages does not arise from any superior abstruseness in the languages themselves, but in their being dead, and the pronunciation entirely lost. It would be the same thing with any other language when it becomes dead. The best Greek linguist that now exists does not understand Greek so well as a Grecian plowman did, or a Grecian milkmaid; and the same for the Latin, compared with a plowman or a milkmaid of the Romans; and with respect to pronunciation and idiom, not so well as the cows that she milked. It would therefore be advantageous to the state of learning to abolish the study of the dead languages, and to make learning consist, as it originally did, in scientific knowledge.

Stunned by how little he'd gotten over her and she'd gotten over him, he walked away understanding, as outside his reading in classical Greek drama he'd never had to understood before, how easily life can be one thing rather than another and how accidentally a destiny is made...

The air of the islands, she believed, was different than the air of other regions of the world. It engulfed her now, carrying with it flavors of sun-drenched soil and foam-flecked sea, aromas of virgin woods and naked rocks, its tang of citrus trees and its fizz of foreign wine-misted lips. It carried in its pockets the sounds of children's laughter, the clatter of drunken brawls, the mandolin music thrumming sensually from decades-old cassette tapes in the colorful souvenir shops where old ladies and young women waved at passersby. It came from near and far, rebounding off the blue-white flag strapped to ferry masts rearing above the sparkling waters, glinting in the brown-eyed winks and twirled mustaches of the locals.

Sometime later, I stood watching the cold rain fall, when suddenly I felt Daemon's arms around me and his lips on my neck. He loved my pregnant body and his hands roamed over it under the warm terrycloth of my bathrobe. I was lost in the moment, content to stay here forever...lost in the cold rain and welcoming warmth of Dublin, and lost in the arms of my husband. Since we arrived early this morning we were in our room, making love and sleeping, lost in a fairy tale moment, savoring every caress.

the dank night is sweeping down from the sky and the setting stars incline our heads to sleep.

The fox knows many tricks, the hedgehog only one. One good one.

The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbor for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty.

There’s one big thing I know, to pay back injury done to me with terrible injuries.

The Greek meaning of the word "blessed" is "supreme happiness." [see Matthew 5:3-5]

The original text of the Bible was perhaps written in Hebrew and Aramaic and later translated into Greek.

The future science of government should be called 'la cybernétique' (1843) {Coining the French word to mean 'the art of governing,' from the Greek (Kybernetes = navigator or steersman), subsequently adopted as cybernetics by Norbert Wiener for the field of control and communication theory.}

The Greeks think they justly honor players, because they worship the gods who demand plays; the Romans, on the other hand, do not suffer an actor to disgrace by his name his own plebeian tribe, far less the senatorial order. And the whole of this discussion may be summed up in the following syllogism. The Greeks give us the major premise: If such gods are to be worshiped, then certainly such men may be honored. The Romans add the minor: But such men must by no means be honoured. The Christians draw the conclusion: Therefore such gods must by no means be worshiped.

There are few things more mysterious than endings. I mean, for example, when did the Greek gods end, exactly? Was there a day when Zeus waved magisterially down from Olympus and Aphrodite and her lover Ares, and her crippled husband Hephaestus ) I always felt sorry for him), and all the rest got rolled up like a worn-out carpet?

The true Epicurean cultivates the capacity to take pleasure in simple things, while those around him chase pleasure in more things.

The same touchy sense of personal honor that is at the root of Achilles' wrath still governs relations between man and man in modern Greece; Greek society still fosters in the individual a fierce sense of his privileges, no matter how small, of his rights, no matter how confined, of his personal worth, no matter how low. And to defend it, he will stop, like Achilles, at nothing.

The signs of the old flame, I know them well. I pray that the earth gape deep enough to take me down or the almighty Father blast me with one bolt to the shades, the pale, glimmering shades in hell, the pit of night, before I dishonor you, my conscience, break your laws.

The whole of life but labours in the dark. For just as children tremble and fear all In the viewless dark, so even we at times Dread in the light so many things that be No whit more fearsome than what children feign, Shuddering, will be upon them in the dark. This terror then, this darkness of the mind, Not sunrise with its flaring spokes of light, Nor glittering arrows of morning can disperse, But only nature's aspect and her law.

The wine god sighed. 'Oh Hades if I know. But remember, boy, that a kind act can sometimes be as powerful as a sword. As a mortal, I was never a great fighter or athlete or poet. I only made wine. The people in my village laughed at me. They said I would never amount to anything. Look at me now. Sometimes small things can become very large indeed.' He left me alone to think about that. And as I watched Clarisse and Chris singing a stupid campfire song together, holding hands in the darkness, where they thought nobody could see them, I had to smile.

The word ecology is derived from the Greek oikos, the word for home.

Trust my folly then, since it is best for a man truly wise to be thought a fool.

To attempt to build up theories of art, or to form a new style, would be an act of supreme folly. It would be at once to reject the experiences and accumulated knowledge of thousands of years. On the contrary, we should regard as our inheritance all the successful labours of the past, not blindly following them, but employ simply as guides to find the true path.

What benefit have the Hindus derived from their contact with Christian nations? The idea generally prevalent in this country about the morality and truthfulness of the Hindus evidently has been very low. Such seeds of enmity and hatred have been sown by the missionaries that it would be an almost Herculean task to establish better relations between India and America... If we examine Greek, Chinese, Persian, or Arabian writings on the Hindus, before foreigners invaded India, we find an impartial description of their national character. Megasthenes, the famous Greek ambassador, praises them for their love of truth and justice, for the absence of slavery, and for the chastity of their women. Arrian, in the second century, Hiouen-thsang, the famous Buddhist pilgrim in the seventh century, Marco Polo in the thirteenth century, have written in highest terms of praise of Hindu morality. The literature and philosophy of Ancient India have excited the admiration of all scholars, except Christian missionaries.

Unlike their brethren in the Holy Land, Diaspora Jews spoke Greek, not Aramaic: Greek was the language of their thought process, the language of their worship.

Very good, Jason Grace," Notus said. "You are a son of Jupiter, yet you have chosen your own path- as all the greatest demigods have done before you. You cannot control your parentage, but you can choose your legacy.

What could you possibly write at Gates of Hades?” Cadmus asked. “Keep your spirits up.” Lycon sheathed the dagger he’d used to chisel the trunk. Cadmus shook his head. “Idiot.

What the Greek called Kosmos was the image of a world that is not continuous but complete. Inevitably, then, the Greek man himself was not a series but a term. What his philosophers occasionally told him on the subject they had heard, not experienced, and what a few brilliant minds in the Asiatic-Greek cities (such as Hipparchus and Aristarchus) discovered was rejected alike by the Stoic and by the Aristotelian, and outside a small professional circle not even noticed.

. . . when a woman has a husband And you've got none, Why should she take advice from you? Even if you can quote Balzac and Shakespeare And all them other highfalutin' Greeks.

What strange and unexpected event has not occurred in our time? The life we have lived is no ordinary human one, but we were born to be an object of wonder to posterity.” (Aeschines about  the conquest of Persia  and the later Macedonian Victory)

You ask perhaps if one should take the maid herself? Such a plan brings the greatest risk with it. In one case, fresh from bed, she’ll get busy, in another be tardy, in one case you’re a prize for her mistress, in the other herself. There’s chance in it: even if it favours the idea, my advice nevertheless is to abstain. I don’t pick my way over sharp peaks and precipices, no youth will be caught out being lead by me. Still, while she’s giving and taking messages, if her body pleases you as much as her zeal, make the lady your first priority, her companion the next: Love should never be begun with a servant.

When I kiss Agathon my soul is on my lips, where it comes, poor thing, hoping to cross over.

When someone blamed Hecataeus the sophist because that, being invited to the public table, he had not spoken one word all supper-time, Archidamidas answered in his vindication 'He who knows how to speak, knows also when'.

Whisper it softly, but many Greeks, including clergy, welcomed the Ottomans. On the whole Muslim rulers have been much more tolerant of infidels than their Christian counterparts have. As long as their subjects paid taxes and provided recruits to the harems and armies of the Sultan, they could have whatever religion they liked. Only when they joined religion with revolt did scimitars and stakes come out. Orthodox Christianity was under far greater threat from the Roman variety imposed by Venetians and Franks and Catalans. Jews too were safer from pogrom under the crescent than the cross. This is not a line of thought that goes down well in Greek company.

Why must we overlook what we are most likely able to do?

You’re probably wondering: why were Medusa’s kids a golden warrior and a winged horse? And how had they been stuck in Medusa’s body all those years?Heck, I dunno. I’m just telling you how it was. You want stuff to make sense, you’re in the wrong universe

You know, Mac,”Cadmus said still looking out the window. “We may have to work on the way we tell our story …apparently it’s not amusing enough.” “I’ll try to include a joke between ‘he bled to death’and ‘the city burned’.”Machaon responded tersely.

You’re the girl that I have been wanting. You’re the girl that I could see myself with forever. And most importantly, you’re the girl that I’ve fallen in love with.

A fist is more than the sum of its fingers.

] ]you will remember ]for we in our youth did these things yes many and beautiful things ] ] ]

According to Greek mythology, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves.

A forward critic often dupes us With sham quotations peri hupsos, And if we have not read Longinus, Will magisterially outshine us. Then, lest with Greek he over-run ye, Procure the book for love or money, Translated from Boileau's translation, And quote quotation on quotation.

A guy in Greek armor drew his sword and charged, but slipped in a puddle of pina colada.

After independence was gained, one of the first Acts passed by the Greek government was for the protection and preservation of national monuments.

Alexander was not the first Greek to be honoured as a god for political favour.

A heroic nature is very Greek.