Quotes by Greek Authors - Page 5

Far from gay cities and the way of men.
Homer
If the soul is immortal, it demands our care not only for that part of time which we call life, but for all time: and indeed it would seem now that it will be extremely dangerous to neglect it. If death were a release from everything, it would be a boon for the wicked. But since the soul is clearly immortal, it can have no escape or security from evil except by becoming as good and wise as it possibly can. For it takes nothing with it to the next world except its education and training: and these, we are told, are of supreme importance in helping or harming the newly dead at the very beginning of his journey there.
Socrates
The unfailing rhythm of the seasons, the ever-turning wheel of life, the four facets of the earth which are lit in turn by the sun, the passing of life--all these filled me once more with a feeling of oppression. Once more there sounded within me, together with the cranes' cry, the terrible warning that there is only one life for all men, that there is no other, and that all that can be enjoyed must be enjoyed here. In eternity no other chance will be given to us.A mind hearing this pitiless warning--a warning which, at the same time, is so compassionate--would decide to conquer its weakness and meanness, its laziness and vain hopes and cling with all its power to every second which flies away forever.Great examples come to your mind and you see clearly that you are a lost soul, your life is being frittered away on petty pleasures and pains and trifling talk. "Shame! Shame!" you cry, and bite your lips.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Nothing is permanent but change.
Heraclitus
Increasingly, Christian life seems to be nothing more than a particular way of behaving, a code of good conduct. Christianity is increasingly alienated, becoming a social attribute adapted to meet the least worthy of human demands - conformity, sterile conservatism, pusillanimity and timidity; it is adapted to the trivial moralizing which seeks to adorn cowardice and individual security with the funerary decoration of social decorum.
Christos Yannaras
There is a cosmic law which says that every satisfaction must be paid for with a dissatisfaction.
G.I. Gurdjieff
A sight to touch e’en hatred’s self with pity.
Sophocles
One should never do wrong in return, nor mistreat any man, no matter how one has been mistreated by him.
Socrates
The present offers itself to our touch for only an instant of time and then eludes the senses.
Plutarch
Not too little, not too much: there safety lies.
Euripides
For fortune having hitherto seconded him in his designs, made him resolute and firm in his opinions, and the boldness of his temper raised a sort of passion in him for surmounting difficulties; as if it were not enough to be always victorious in the field, unless places and seasons and nature herself submitted to him.
Plutarch
...in the running of cities, virtually nothing is done by anyone that is conducive to political health, nor is there a single ally with whom one might go to the aid of justice and still remain alive; it would be a case of a solitary human among wild animals, neither wanting to join in their depredations nor able to stand alone against their collective savagery, dead before he'd done any good to his city or friends and useless both to himself and everybody else. Once a person has made all these calculations, he keeps his peace and minds his own business, like someone withdrawing from the prevailing wind into the shelter of a wall in a storm of dust or rain, and as he sees everyone else filling themselves full of lawlessness he is content if he himself can somehow live out life here untainted by injustice and impious actions, and leave it with fine hopes and in a spirit of kindness and good will.
Plato
And yet even in reaching for the beautiful there is beauty, and also in suffering whatever it is that one suffers en route.
Plato
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Plato
For if any man thinks that he is alone is wise--that in speech, or in mind, he hath no peer--such a soul, when laid open, is ever found empty.
Sophocles
Of all the things which wisdom provides to make us entirely happy much the greatest is the possession of friendship.
Epicurus
My discourse leads to the truth; the mind is great and guided by this teaching is able to arrive at some understanding. When the mind has understood all things and found them to be in harmony with what has been expounded by the teachings, it is faithful and comes to rest in that beautiful faith.
Hermes Trismegistus
The man who writes has an oppressive and unhappy fate. This is because the nature of his work obliges him to use words; that is, to convert his inner surge into immobility. Every word is an adamantine shell which encloses a great explosive force. To discover the meaning you must let it burst inside you like a bomb and in this way liberate the soul which it imprisons. (Report to Greco)
N. Kazantzakis
Once I was liable to the same mistakes, but, thanks to God, no longer …’Well, isn’t it just as worthwhile to have devoted and applied yourself to this goal as to have read or written fifty pages?
Epictetus
…Man’s heart is a ditch full of blood. The loved ones who have died throw themselves down on the bank of this ditch to drink the blood and so come to life again; the dearer they are to you, the more of your blood they drink.” - The Narrator.
Nikos Kazantzakis
No man undertakes a trade he has not learned even the meanest yet every one thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades - that of government.
Socrates
Love's night and a lampJudged our vows:That she would love me everAnd I should never leave her.Love's night and you, lamp,Witnessed the pact.Today the vow runs:"Oaths such as these, waterwords."Tonight, lamp,Witness her lying- In other arms.
Meleager
Into your darkest corner, you are safe in my love, you are protected. I am the openess you seek, I am your doorway. Come sit in the circular temple of my heart, & let yourself be calm.
Agapi Stassinopoulos
The Wise are Superb Observers of Nature and Rise Superior to the Blows of Fortune
Philo of Alexandria
...[W]hen death comes to a man, the mortal part of him dies, but the immortal part retires at the approach of death and escapes unharmed and indestructible... [I]t is as certain as anything can be... that soul is immortal and imperishable, and that our souls will really exist in the next world.
Socrates
For in other ways a woman is full of fear, defenseless, dreads the sight of cold steel; but, when once she is wronged in the matter of love, no other soul can hold so many thoughts of blood.
Euripides
As a moth gnaws a garment so doth envy consume a man.
St. Chrysostom
Do not think that we say that these things are only to be received by faith, but also that they are to be asserted by reason. For indeed it is not safe to commit these things to bare faith without reason, since assuredly truth cannot be without reason.
Clement of Alexandria
It was all about taking the leap of faith. It said that the fear that stops us from doing what we really want, is often not based on reality. We shape our fears in our heads, but things are so much easier than we think.
Effrosyni Moschoudi
But now, as it is, sorrows, unending sorrows must surge within your heart as well—for your own son’s death. Never again will you embrace him stiding home. My spirit rebels—I’ve lost the will to live, to take my stand in the world of men—
Homer
Heaven ne'er helps the man who will not help himself.
Sophocles
Wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good for men, both individually and collectively.
Socrates
I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled [poets] to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.
Socrates
Jumping from failure to failure with undiminished enthusiasm is the big secret to success.
Savas Dimopoulos
To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity is to continue in a state of childhood all our days.
Plutarch
The human soul is heavy, clumsy, held in the mud of the flesh. Its perceptions are still coarse and brutish. It can divine nothing clearly, nothing with certainty.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Then as for those who gaze upon many beautiful things but don't see the beautiful itself, and aren't even capable of following someone else who leads them to it, and upon many just things but not the just itself, and all the things like that, we'll claim that they accept the seeming of everything but discern nothing of what they have opinions about.
Plato
May the dead forgive me, I can do no otherBut as I am commanded; to do more is madness." - Ismene
Sophocles
No human being will ever know the truth, for even if they happened to say it by chance, they would not know they had done so.
Xenophon
Tell me what you do with the food you eat, and I'll tell you who you are. Some turn their food into fat and manure, some into work and good humor, and others, I'm told, into God. So there must be three sorts of men. I'm not one of the worst, boss, nor yet one of the best. I'm somewhere in between the two. What I eat I turn into work and good humor. That's not too bad, after all!'He looked at me wickedly and started laughing.'As for you, boss,' he said, 'I think you do your level best to turn what you eat into God. But you can't quite manage it, and that torments you. The same thing's happening to you as happened to the crow.''What happened to the crow, Zorba?''Well, you see, he used to walk respectably, properly - well, like a crow. But one day he got it into his head to try and strut about like a pigeon. And from that time on the poor fellow couldn't for the life of him recall his own way of walking. He was all mixed up, don't you see? He just hobbled about.
Nikos Kazantzakis
[I would] rather discover one cause than gain the kingdom of Persia.
Democritus
Her grandparents’ house was an old crammed up space just like all the others there, but to Sofia it had the luxuries of a palace and the reverence of a church.
Effrosyni Moschoudi
Grandma calls it the Socratic Method. She considers it the highest pedagogical technique. I call it cornering a person. Instead of just telling you what I want you to know, I ambush you with questions. You try to escape, but you can’t. You can run whichever way you like, but in the end you’ll fall right into my trap.
Sophia Nikolaidou
Mister if you want more to join,’ She said half-choked ‘you’ll have to put in the coin.
Angelo Tsanatelis
Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.
Plato
What you shun enduring yourself, attempt not to impose on others. You shun slavery- beware enslaving others! If you can endure to do that, one would think you had been once upon a time a slave yourself. For vice has nothing in common with virtue, nor Freedom with slavery.
Epictetus
For Ares, lord of strife,tWho doth the swaying scales of battle hold,t War’s money-changer, giving dust for gold,t Sends back, to hearts that held them dear,tScant ash of warriors, wept with many a tear,tLight to the hand, but heavy to the soul;t Yea, fills the light urn fullt With what survived the flame—tDeath’s dusty measure of a hero’s frame!
Aeschylus
He that always gives way to others will end in having no principles of his own.
Aesop
To excavate is to open a book written in the language that the centuries have spoken into the earth.
Spyridon Marinatos
Know thyself.
Socrates
Piety, then, is that which is dear to the gods, and impiety is that which is not dear to them.
Plato
Grief teaches the steadiest minds to waver.
Sophocles
It is not so much what happens to you as how you think about what happens." Epictetus
Epictetus
Wherever the art of Medicine is loved, there is also a love of Humanity.
Hippocrates
And whenever any one informs us that he has found a man who knows all the arts, and all things else that anybody knows, and every single thing with a higher degree of accuracy than any other man –whoever tells us this, I think that we can only imagine him to be a simple creature who is likely to have been deceived by some wizard or actor whom he met, and whom he thought all-knowing, because he himself was unable to analyze the nature of knowledge and ignorance and imitation.
Plato
Thy life is safe while any god saves mine.
Sophocles
Men perish by the sword cowards by disease.
Phillippus
«Δεν έχω μάθει να μιλάω με λέξεις. Αν έχω κάτι να σου πω, θα σου το πω με τα μάτια. Γι’ αυτό εκεί να με κοιτάς. Διαφορετικά, δεν θα με ακούσεις ποτέ...»
Nektaria Markaki
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 sneses, and the mind is no longer in him.
Plato
When Mathematics unfold through Origamis, when video games target Medicine and Education, when architecture embraces nature, when we defy gravity, when physics dance, and dance clubs play Einstein, when we stop playing war, when TV starts saying something, when we produce without wasting, when engineering meets humanity’s primary needs, when all of these are not just casualties, but a standard we all live UP to: Then we’ll know. I’ll know: we really live in the 21st century
Natasha Tsakos