Jane Ellen Harrison > Quotes

“Greek writers of the fifth century B.C. have a way of speaking of, an attitude towards, religion, as though it were wholly a thing of joyful confidence, a friendly fellowship with the gods, whose service is but a high festival for man. In Homer sacrifice is but, as it were, the signal for a banquet of abundant roast flesh and sweet wine; we hear nothing of fasting, of cleansing, and atonement. This we might perhaps explain as part of the general splendid unreality of the heroic saga, but sober historians of the fifth century B.C. express the same spirit. Thucydides is assuredly by nature no reveller, yet religion is to him in the main 'a rest from toil.' He makes Pericles say: 'Moreover we have provided for our spirit very many opportunities of recreation, by the celebration of games and sacrifices throughout the year.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion

“Life does not cease when you are old,
it only suffers a rich change. You go on
loving, only your love, instead of a burning,
fiery furnace, is the mellow glow of an
autumn sun.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Reminiscences of a Student's Life

“Nowadays it seems you learn only what is reasonable
and relevant. I went to Rome with a young
friend, educated on the latest lines, and who
had taken historical honours at Cambridge.
The first morning the pats of butter came
up stamped with the Twins. “ Good old
Romulus and Remus,” said I. “ Good old
who? ” said she. She had never heard of
the Twins and was much bored when I told
her the story; they had no place in “ con¬
stitutional history ”, and for her the old wolf
of the Capitol howled in vain: “ Great God!
I’d rather be ”!”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Reminiscences of a Student's Life

“I like to live spaciously, but rather plainly, in large halls with great spaces and quiet libraries. I like to wake in the morning with the sense of a
great, silent garden round me.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Reminiscences of a Student's Life

“A heroic society is almost a contradiction in terms.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“I mention these ritual dances, this ritual
drama, this bridge between art and life,
because it is things like these that I was all
my life blindly seeking. A thing has little
charm for me unless it has on it the patina
of age. Great things in literature, Greek
plays for example, I most enjoy when behind
their bright splendours I see moving darker
and older shapes.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Reminiscences of a Student's Life

“We translate the word “Justice,” but Dikè means, not Justice as between man and man, but the order of the world, the way of life.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“To be a heretic to-day is almost a human obligation.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison

“The word tělětē means rite of growing up, becoming complete.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“At his house I often met Henry James. I liked
to watch that ingenious spider weaving his
webs, but to me he had no appeal.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Reminiscences of a Student's Life

“The dramas of Æschylus certainly, and perhaps also those of Sophocles and Euripides, were played not upon the stage, and not in the theatre, but, strange though it sounds to us, in the orchestra.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“It is impiety to alter the myth of your local hero, it is impossible to recast the myth of your local dæmon—that is fixed forever—his conflict, his agon, his death, his pathos, his Resurrection and its heralding, his Epiphany.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“Hebrew is a language which has no tenses at all, it has only aspects.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos

“We know from tradition that in Athens ritual became art, a dromenon became the drama, and we have seen that the shift is symbolized and expressed by the addition of the theatre, or spectator-place, to the orchestra, or dancing-place.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“Thus among the Carrier Indians 33 when a man wants to become a Lulem, or Bear, however cold the season, he tears off his clothes, puts on a bearskin and dashes into the woods, where he will stay for three or four days.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“There is a little dull ache for Oblomov and his dreams. Man does not live by bread alone, not even by the most wholesome bread punctually served. There is dream-stuff as well as bread-stuff. Sometimes man's strength is to sit still.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos

“We seem to have come to a sort of impasse, the spirit of the dromenon is dead or dying, the spectators will not stay long to watch a doing doomed to monotony.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“But it was not to give him up to the gods that they killed him, not to “sacrifice” him in our sense, but to have him, keep him, eat him, live by him and through him, by his grace.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“And then last, but oh, so utterly
first, came George Eliot. It was in the days
when her cult was at its height—thank heaven
I never left her shrine!—and we used to wait
outside Macmillan’s shop to seize the new
instalments of Daniel Deronda. She came
for a few minutes to my room, and I was
almost senseless with excitement. I had just
repapered my room with the newest thing in
dolorous Morris papers. Some one must have
called her attention to it, for I remember that
she said in her shy, impressive way, “Your
paper makes a beautiful background for your
face.” The ecstasy was too much, and I
knew no more.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Reminiscences of a Student's Life

“But sacrifice does not mean “death” at all.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“When we say art is unpractical, we mean that art is cut loose from immediate action.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“It was worth many hardships to
see forty German professors try to mount
forty recalcitrant mules. My own horseman¬
ship, as already hinted, is nothing to “ write
home about ”, but compared to those German
professors I am a centaur.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Reminiscences of a Student's Life

“An agon, or contest, or wrangling, there will probably be, because Summer contends with Winter, Life with Death, the New Year with the Old. A tragedy must be tragic, must have its pathos, because the Winter, the Old Year, must die.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

“Language, after the purely emotional interjection, began with whole sentences, holophrases, utterances of a relation in which subject and object have not yet got their heads above water, but are still submerged in a situation. A holophrase utters a holopsychosis. Out of these holophrases emerge our familiar 'Parts of Speech' rightly so called for speech was before its partition. [...] Uneducated and impulsive people even to-day tend to show a certain holophrastic savagery. They not infrequently plunge into a statement of relations before they tell you who they are talking about.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos

“When I first came to London I became a Life Member of the London Library. London life was
costly, but I felt that, if the worst came to the
worst, with a constant supply of books and a
small dole for tobacco, I could cheerfully
face the Workhouse.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Reminiscences of a Student's Life

“Then Ruskin came.
I showed him our small library. He looked
at it with disapproving eyes. “ Each book ”,
he said gravely, “ that a young girl touches
should be bound in white vellum.” I thought
with horror of the red moroccos and Spanish
leather that had been my choice. A few
weeks later the old humbug sent us his own
works bound in dark blue calf!”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Reminiscences of a Student's Life

“It is this living into things that a new generation demands, and it is this, because she is young among the nations, that Russia has to offer.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos

“No one knows better than this accomplished scholar [Professor Kennett] and no one could say more plainly that all the supposed futures in 'prophecies' have nothing to do with the future at all. Oh what burning controversies might have been saved had only theologians known a little more grammar!”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos

“Youth is, I believe, contrary to all tradition, the time when Rational Thought dominates and allures. It is because they turned on the world the eager clear-eyed curiosity of a noble child that the Greeks are always young and their language essentially the language of youth.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos

“Again a great procession is led forth, the senate and the priests walk in it, and with them come representatives of each class of the State—children and young boys, and youths just come to manhood, epheboi, as the Greeks called them.”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual