Quotes by Greek Authors - Page 17

It is not in words that I should wish my life to be distinguished, but rather in things done.
Sophocles
Unanimous hatred is the greatest medicine for a human community.
Aeschylus
Learning to draw is really a matter of learning to see - to see correctly - and that means a good deal more than merely looking with the eye.
Kimon Nicolaides
To throw away an honest friend is as it were to throw your life away.
Sophocles
If you only keep adding little by little it will soon become a big heap.
Hesiod
Science is no longer fiction,but Reality may become one.
Natasha Tsakos
Be slow to fall into friendship, but when you are in, continue firm and constant.
Socrates
The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself.
Thales
When two men are together, one of them may see some opportunity which the other has not caught sight of; if a man is alone he is less full of resource, and his wit is weaker.
Homer
Man is free only within communion. If the Church wishes to be the place of freedom, she must continually place all the 'objects' she possesses, whatever they may be (Scripture, sacraments, ministries, etc.) within the communion-event to make them 'true' and to make her members free in regard to them as objects, as well as in them and through them as channels of communion. Christians must learn not to lean on objective 'truths' as securities for truth, but to live in an epicletic way, i.e. leaning on the communion-event in which the structure of the Church involves them. Truth liberates by placing beings in communion.
John D. Zizioulas
Persons in whom a crisis takes place pass the night preceding the paroxysm uncomfortably, but the succeeding night generally more comfortably.
Hippocrates
...I do not believe that the law of God permits a better man to be harmed by a worse. No doubt my accuser might put me to death or have me banished or deprived of civic rights; but even if he thinks, as he probably does (and others to, I dare say), that these are great calamities, I do not think so... For let me tell you, gentlemen, that to be afraid of death is only another form of thinking that one is wise when one is not; it is to think that one knows what one does not know. No one knows with regard to death whether it is not really the greatest blessing that can happen to a man; but people dread it as though they were certain that it is the greatest evil; and this ignorance, which thinks that it knows what it does not, must surely be ignorance most culpable. This, I take it, gentlemen, is the degree, and this is the nature of my advantage over the rest of mankind; and if I were to claim to be wiser than my neighbour in any respect, it would be in this: that not possessing any real knowledge of what comes after death, I am also conscious that I do not possess it. But I do know that to do wrong and to disobey my superior, whether God or man, is wicked and dishonourable; and so I shall never feel more fear or aversion for something which, for all I know, may really be a blessing, than for those evils which I know to be evils.
Socrates
And where there is ignorance, there is also want of learning and instruction in essentials.
Epictetus
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
Plato
Somebody who is Christ's must love Christ, and when he loves Christ he is delivered from the Devil, from hell and from death.
Elder Porphyrios
It is no easy thing for a principle to become a man's own unless each day he maintains it and works it out in his life.
Epictetus
Seventy years I regard as the limit of the life of man. In these seventy years are contained, without reckoning intercalary months, twenty-five thousand and two hundred days. Add an intercalary month to every other year, that the seasons may come round at the right time, and there will be, besides the seventy years, thirty-five such months, making an addition of one thousand and fifty days. The whole number of the days contained in the seventy years will thus be twenty-six thousand two hundred and fifty, whereof not one but will produce events unlike the rest. Hence man is wholly accident.
Herodotus
Don’t just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents.
Epictetus
It is gaol that finally reveals to me the beauty of Shakespeare, the spirit in his words, the jaw-dropping audacity of his language.
Christos Tsiolkas
Of all creatures that can feel and think,we women are the worst treated things alive
Euripides
Be true to thine own self
Socrates
Try thyself first and after call in God. For to the worker God himself lends aid.
Euripides
For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles.
Socrates
Let food be thy your medicine
Hippocrates
The voice of the people is the voice of God.
Hesiod
No wealth can ever make a bad man at peace with himself
Plato
Science is nothing but perception.
Plato
I am all that hath been, and is, and shall be; and my veil no mortal has hitherto raised.
Plutarch
The emotional states are liberated inside water, we calm down emotionally, we become more sensitive, we are able to "touch" deeper ourselves and other beings. Empathy is echoing back to us giving subtle vibrations from the realm of the senses. Find your water ~
Grigoris Deoudis
TRIAD supernal, both super-God and super-good, Guardian of the Theosophy of Christian men, direct us aright to the super-unknown and super-brilliant and highest summit of the mystic Oracles, where the simple and absolute a!nd changeless mysteries of theology lie hidden within the super-luminous gloom of the silence, revealing hidden things, which in its deepest darkness shines above the most super-brilliant, and in the altogether impalpable and invisible, fills to overflowing the eyeless minds with glories of surpassing beauty. This then be my prayer; but thou, O dear Timothy, by thy persistent commerce with the mystic visions, leave behind both sensible perceptions and intellectual efforts, and all objects of sense and intelligence, and all things not being and being, and be raised aloft unknowingly to the union, as far' as attainable, with Him Who is above every essence and knowledge. For by the resistless and absolute ecstasy in all purity, from thyself and all, thou wilt be carried on high, to the superessential ray of the Divine darkness, when thou hast cast away all, and become free from all.
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite
All philosophy in two words - sustain and abstain.
Epictetus
These things sensibly affected Theseus, who, thinking it but just not to disregard, but rather partake of, the sufferings of his fellow citizens, offered himself for one without any lot. All else were struck with admiration for the nobleness and with love for the goodness of the act.
Plutarch
Many things which cannot be overcome when they are together yield themselves up when taken little by little.
Plutarch
Evening you gather backall that dazzling dawn has put asunder:you gather a lamb, gather a kid,gather a child to its mother.
Sappho
The time when most of all you should withdraw into yourself is when you are forced to be in a crowd.
Epicurus
The potency of prayer hath subdued the strength of fire it hath bridled the rage of lions hushed anarchy to rest extinguished wars appeased the elements expelled demons burst the chains of death expanded the gates of heaven assuaged diseases repelled frauds rescued cities from destruction stayed the sun in its course and arrested the progress of the thunderbolt.
Saint John Chrysostom
In order to mount to heaven, you used the Inferno to give you momentum. "The further down you gain your momentum," you often used to tell me, "the higher you shall be able to reach. The militant Christian's greatest worth is not his virtue, but his struggle to transform into virtue the impudence, dishonor, unfaithfulness, and malice within him. One day Lucifer will be the most glorious archangel standing next to God; not Michael, Gabriel, or Raphael—but Lucifer, after he has finally transubstantiated his terrible darkness into light.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Without self knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave.
G.I. Gurdjieff
Education isn't what some people declare it to be, namely, putting knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting sight into blind eyes...The power to learn is present in everyone's soul and...the instrument with which each learns is like an eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light without turning the whole body... Then education is the craft concerned with doing this very thing, this turning around, and with how the soul can most easily and effectively be made to do it. it isn't the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education take for granted that sight is there but that it isn't turned the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries to redirect it appropriately.
Plato
Dreams are realities in oxygenated form
Natasha Tsakos
All philosophy lies in two words sustain and abstain.
Epictetus
If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion most people would be content to take their own and depart.
Socrates
Knowledge is the food of the soul.
Plato
To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils.
Socrates
He’d never thought of death like that, like it’s some sort of other life that you can hope for, dream of. Escape to. That it can rescue you.
M.C. Frank
A sympathetic friend can be quite dear as a brother.
Homer
Kindness gives birth to kindness.
Sophocles
At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet
Plato
As a moth gnaws a garment so doth envy consume a man.
Saint John Chrysostom
To find yourself, think for yourself.
Socrates
The misuse of language induces evil in the soul
Socrates
No one believes a liar even when he tells the truth
Aesop
The perfect state is one where men weep and rejoice over the same things.
Plato
How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?
Plato
The swing between confronting the dangerous or brutal and the beautiful or the kind is one of the elements of being human that I have battled with all my life. That mixture of love and savagery is there in every important relationship in our lives: with parents, siblings, lovers, our closest friends. I have always wanted to be faithful to that truth.
Christos Tsiolkas
Freedom is not procured by a full enjoyment of what is desired but by controlling that desire.
Epictetus
If your callswere measures of Time,a day would last a centuryand in between us would beAn Eternity.
Natasha Tsakos
No gossip ever dies away entirely if many people voice it: it too is a kind of divinity.
Hesiod
Bear and forbear.
Epictetus
Why should I fear death?If I am, then death is not.If Death is, then I am not.Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?Long time men lay oppressed with slavish fear.Religious tyranny did domineer.At length the mighty one of GreeceBegan to assent the liberty of man.
Epicurus