Quotes by Greek Authors - Page 25

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.
Plato
Ah my friend, if you and I could escape this fray and live forever, never a trace of age, immortal, I would never fight on the front lines again or command you to the field where men win fame.
Homer
Oh, the torment bred in the race, the grinding scream of deathand the stroke that hits the vein,the hemorrhage none can staunch, the grief,the curse no man can bear.But there is a cure in the house, and not outside it, no,not from others but from them,their bloody strife. We sing to you,dark gods beneath the earth.Now hear, you blissful powers underground --answer the call, send help.Bless the children, give them triumph now.
Aeschylus
How simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. . . . All that is required to feel that here and now is happiness is a simple, frugal heart.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Though this may be play to you Tis death to us.
Aesop
And his good wife will tear her cheeks in grief, his sons are orphans and he, soaking the soil red with his own blood, he rots away himself—more birds than women flocking round his body!
Homer
Nor when love is of this disinterested sort is there any disgrace in being deceived, but in every other case there is equal disgrace in being or not being deceived. For he who is gracious to his lover under the impression that he is rich, and is disappointed of his gains because he turns out to be poor, is disgraced all the same: for he has done his best to show that he would give himself up to any one's "uses base" for the sake of money; but this is not honourable. And on the same principle he who gives himself to a lover because he is a good man, and in the hope that he will be improved by his company, shows himself to be virtuous, even though the object of his affection turn out to be a villain, and to have no virtue; and if he is deceived he has committed a noble error. For he has proved that for his part he will do anything for anybody with a view to virtue and improvement, than which there can be nothing nobler.
Plato
Nothing could be more important than that the work of a soldier is well done. No tools will make a man a skilled workmen, or master of defense, or be of any use to him who has not learned how to handle them and has never bestowed any attention on them.
Plato
Fear? What has a man to do with fear? Chance rules our lives, and the future is all unknown. Best live as we may, from day to day.
Sophocles
And empty words are evil.
Homer
We Greeks believe that a man who takes no part in public affairs is not merely lazy, but good for nothing
Thucydides
Fear is stronger than arms.
Aeschylus
The time when you should most of all withdraw into yourself is when you are forced to be in a crowd.
Epicurus
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.
Heraclitus
but sing no more this bitter tale that wears my heart away
Homer
Oh, how crafty of religion, I cried out indignantly, to transplant rewards and punishments into a future life in order to comfort cowards and the enslaved and aggrieved, enabling them to bow their necks patiently before their masters, and to endure this earthly life without groaning (the only life of which we can be sure)!
Nikos Kazantzakis
Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.
Plato
For this will cure him that is sick, and rouse him that is in dumps; one that has loved, it will remember of it; one that has not, it will instruct. For there was never any yet that wholly could escape love, and never shall there be any, never so long as beauty shall be, never so long as eyes can see. But help me that God to write the passions of others; and while I write, keep me in my own right wits.
Longus
If you are in a bad mood go for a walk.If you are still in a bad mood go for another walk.
Hippocrates
A straight line is said to have been cut in extreme and mean ratio when, as the whole line is to the greater segment, so is the greater to the lesser.
Euclid
That mortal is a fool who, prospering, thinks his life has any strong foundation; since our fortune's course of action is the reeling way a madman takes, and no one person is ever happy all the time.
Euripides
For the whole earth is the tomb of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men. Make them your examples, and, esteeming courage to be freedom and freedom to be happiness, do not weigh too nicely the perils of war."[Funeral Oration of Pericles]
Thucydides
Do you know that disease and death must needs overtake us no matter what we are doing? ... What do you wish to be doing when it overtakes you?... If you have anything better to be doing when you are so overtaken get to work on that.
Epictetus
A good man never dies.
Callimachus
We secure our friends not by accepting favors but by doing them.
Thucydides
Be slow to fall into friendship but when thou art in continue firm and constant.
Socrates
No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.
Aesop
To think things out properly and fairly, a fellow's got to be calm and old and toothless: When you're an old gaffer with no teeth, it's easy to say: 'Damn it, boys, you mustn't bite!' But, when you've got all thirty-two teeth...
Nikos Kazantzakis
What is honored in a culture gets cultivated there.
Plato
[On what young husbands should say to their wives:] I have taken you in my arms, and I love you, and I prefer you to my life itself. For the present life is nothing, and my most ardent dream is to spend it with you in such a way that we may be assured of not being separated in the life reserved for us... I place your love above all things, and nothing would be more bitter or painful to me than to be of a different mind than you.
John Chrysostom
...[F]rom me you shall hear the whole truth; not, I can assure you, gentlemen, in flowery language... decked out with fine words and phrases; no, what you will hear will be a straightforward speech in the first words that occur to me, confident as I am in the justice of my cause; and I do not want any of you to expect anything different.
Socrates
The poets are only the interpreters of the gods.
Socrates
Do not believe that you alone can be right.The man who thinks that,The man who maintains that only he has the powerTo reason correctly, the gift to speak, the soul—A man like that, when you know him, turns out empty.
Sophocles
One who prays ceaselessly is one who combines prayer with work and work with prayer.
Origen
The best way of writing sex scenes is to do the first draft, orgasm, and then start editing. You can be objective post-orgasm.
Christos Tsiolkas
Madness, Brother Masseo, is the salt which prevents good sense from rotting.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Prosperity cannot be experienced by living detached from Nature. Everything else is only a gradation of materialistic, earthly ambitions. We came from the stars and there lies the path to our substantive evolution.
Grigoris Deoudis
Men are men they needs must err.
Euripides
Freedom is secured not by the fulfilling of men's desires, but by the removal of desire.
Epictetus
But virtue, by the bare statement of its actions, can so affect men's minds as to create at once both admiration of the things done and desire to imitate the doers of them. The goods of fortune we would possess and would enjoy; those of virtue we long to practise and exercise. We are content to receive the former from others, the latter we wish others to experience from us. Moral good is a practical stimulus; it is no sooner seen, than it inspires an impulse to practice, and influences the mind and character not by a mere imitation which we look at, but by the statement of the fact creates a moral purpose which we form.
Plutarch
If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you but answer, "He was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone.
Epictetus
Is it not the same distance to God everywhere?
Epictetus
We long to have again the vanished past, in spite of all its pain.
Sophocles
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
Aesop
While Leonidas was preparing to make his stand, a Persian envoy arrived. The envoy explained to Leonidas the futility of trying to resist the advance of the Great King's army and demanded that the Greeks lay down their arms and submit to the might of Persia. Leonidas laconically told Xerxes, "Come and get them.
Plutarch
All that sweetness makes me feel weird. My sister was never the loving type.
Mary Papas
Come back. Even as a shadow, even as a dream.
Euripides
How ought we to love God, Father?" he asked in a whisper."By loving men, my son""And how ought we to love men?" "By trying to guide them along the right path""And what is the right path?""The one that rises"- Nikos Kazanzakis, Christ Recrucified
Nikos Kazantzakis
There is nothing good or evil save in the will.
Epictetus
...an irresistible sleep fell deeply on his eyes, the sweetest, soundest oblivion, still as the sleep of death itself...
Homer
Knowledge unqualified is knowledge simply of something learned.
Plato
We are bound to our bodies like an oyster to its shell.
Plato
How could I, who loved life so intensely, have let myself be entangled for so long in that balderdash of books and paper blackened with ink!
Nikos Kazantzakis
He indeed who believes that by studying isolated histories he can acquire a fairly just view of history as a whole, is, as it seems to me, much in the case of one, who, after having looked at the dissevered limbs of an animal once alive and beautiful, fancies he has been as good as an eyewitness of the creature itself in all its action and grace.
Polybius
Culture cannot be a monolithically universal phenomenon without some kind of demonic imposition of one culture over the rest of cultures. Nor is it possible to dream of a universal "Christian culture" without denying the dialectic between history and eschatology which is so central, among other things, to the eucharist itself. Thus, if there is a transcendence of cultural divisions on a universal level - which indeed must be constantly aimed at by the Church - it can only take place via the local situations expressed in and through the particular local Churches and not through universalistic structures which imply a universal Church.
John D. Zizioulas
...[I]f at the time of its release the soul is tainted and impure, because it has always associated with the body and cared for it and loved it, and has been so beguiled by the body and its passions and pleasures that nothing seems real to it but those physical things which can be touched and seen and eaten and drunk and used for sexual enjoyment; and if it is accustomed to hate and fear and avoid what is invisible and hidden from our eyes, but intelligible and comprehensible by philosophy - if the soul is in this state, do you think that it will escape independent and uncontaminated?
Socrates
Nothing endures but change.
Heraclitus
Against necessity against its strength no one can fight and win.
Aeschylus
Excess of liberty, whether it lies in state or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.
Plato
The Muse herself makes some men inspired, from whom a chain of other men is strung out who catch their own inspiration from theirs.
Plato