Ancient Greece Quotes

“We had old architects and were working with what we had on hand. You’ve hired this new, young architect now, and, Pericles, I’m going to build you a statue of Athena—all gold and ivory, think of that, Pericles—and taller than our city walls.” Pericles raised his eyes toward the birds.”
― Yvonne Korshak, Pericles and Aspasia: A Story of Ancient Greece

“It had happened. Thucydides, his archrival, was a general. Glaucon, from his own tribe, was a general. And Pericles was no longer a general. He was just a citizen with one vote. And an idea”
― Yvonne Korshak, Pericles and Aspasia: A Story of Ancient Greece

“...like that star of the waning summer who beyond all stars rises bathed in the ocean stream to glitter in brilliance.”
― Homer, The Iliad

“And besides, we lovers fear everything”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses

“Sexual frenzy is our compensation for the tedious moments we must suffer in the passage of life. 'Nothing in excess,' professed the ancient Greeks. Why if I spend half the month in healthy scholarship and pleasant sleep, shouldn't I be allowed the other half to howl at the moon and pillage the groins of Europe's great beauties?”
― Roman Payne

“Animals walk around in a state of permanent religious intoxication. This is the natural condition of the mind and intellect, the moment-to-moment perception, of man as well. I heard some computer fool say that religion is the 'older virtual reality' experience, to justify his scam industry. No, the denuded state of the spirit and intellect, where you walk around 'demystified' and 'disenchanted' is the virtual reality condition, and a terrible condition at that.”
― Bronze Age Pervert, Bronze Age Mindset

“The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of Greece and Rome—not by favour of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world were alike despicable.”
― Thomas H. Huxley, Agnosticism and Christianity and Other Essays

“It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written.”
― Karl Marx

“TEIRESIAS:
You have your eyes but see not where you are
in sin, nor where you live, nor whom you live with.
Do you know who your parents are? Unknowing
you are enemy to kith and kin
in death, beneath the earth, and in this life.”
― Sophocles, The Complete Greek Tragedies

“TEIRESIAS:
Alas, how terrible is wisdom when
it brings no profit to the man that's wise!
This I knew well, but had forgotten it,
else I would not have come here.”
― Sophocles, The Complete Greek Tragedies

“Il segreto più profondo di Olimpia è racchiuso in quest'unica nota cristallina: lottare è un gioco, vivere è un gioco, morire è un gioco; profitti e perdite non sono che distinzioni passeggere, ma il gioco pretende tutte le nostre forze, e la sorte accetta, come posta, unicamente i nostri cuori.”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, Pellegrina e straniera

“Periclean Greeks employed the term idiotis, without any connotation of stupidity or subnormality, to mean simply 'a person indifferent to public affairs.' Obviously, there is something wanting in the apolitical personality. But we have also come to suspect the idiocy of politicization—of the professional pol and power broker. The two idiocies make a perfect match, with the apathy of the first permitting the depredations of the second.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports

“better not bring up a lion inside your city,
But if you must, then humour all his moods.”
― Aristophanes, The Frogs

“Tragedy's language stresses that whatever is within us is obscure, many faceted, impossible to see. Performance gave this question of what is within a physical force. The spectators were far away from the performers, on that hill above the theatre. At the centre of their vision was a small hut, into which they could not see. The physical action presented to their attention was violent but mostly unseen. They inferred it, as they inferred inner movement, from words spoken by figures whose entrances and exits into and out of the visible space patterned the play. They saw its results when that facade opened to reveal a dead body. This genre, with its dialectics of seen and unseen, inside and outside, exit and entrance, was a simultaneously internal and external, intellectual and somatic expression of contemporary questions about the inward sources of harm, knowledge, power, and darkness.”
― Ruth Padel, In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self

“JOCASTA:
So clear in this case were the oracles,
so clear and false. Give them no heed, I say;
what God discovers need of, easily
he shows to us himself.”
― Sophocles, The Complete Greek Tragedies

“OEDIPUS:
O, O, O, they will all come,
all come out clearly! Light of the sun, let me
look upon you no more after today!
I who first saw the light bred of a match
accursed, and accursed in my living
with them I lived with, cursed in my killing.”
― Sophocles, The Complete Greek Tragedies

“Our journey is one of discovery on Sicily.
Like the past Greek writers.orators,historians and philosophers we are all searching for answers on Earth”
― Daniel Peter Buckley, Heaven Earth and Time

“Now any King who wants to call himself my equal wherever I went let him go."
Sargon the Great / Enheduanna from
Heaven Earth and Time by D P BUCKLEY”
― Daniel Peter Buckley, Heaven Earth and Time

“But no city-state ever solved the problem of incorporating new territories and new populations into its existing structure, or involving really large numbers of people in its political life (p. 11)”
― Joseph Reese Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State

“The sciences were financially supported, honoured everywhere, universally pursued; they were like tall edifices supported by strong foundations. Then the Christian religion appeared in Byzantium and the centres of learning were eliminated, their vestiges effaced and the edifice of Greek learning was obliterated. Everything the ancient Greeks had brought to light vanished, and the discoveries of the ancients were altered out of recognition.”
― Al Masudi, From The Meadows of Gold

“A third view, even more destructive, was that of Critias (c. 460-403), who made a character in a play say that the gods are an invention of some great teacher who wished to frighten men into keeping the laws and did so by saying that thunder and lightning are the work of gods.”
― Cecil Maurice Bowra, The Greek Experience

“Both [Aristotle] and Plato denied the greatness of Periclean Athens and rejected its fundamental assumption, that its citizens could be trusted to take even the most important decisions because they were free and responsible men.”
― Cecil Maurice Bowra, The Greek Experience

“In their education they learned no foreign languages, almost no natural science, little geography or history, and no economics. But they learned music and poetry, and when they listened to a poet’s work, they understood it with that almost instinctive ease which comes from early training and prolonged practice. They were prepared, as very few people have ever been, to understand almost as experts the intricacies and difficulties of a mature art.”
― Cecil Maurice Bowra, The Greek Experience

“Some, indeed, conform to the strict notion that a myth is a story invented to make sense of some ritual whose significance has been forgotten, if indeed it has ever been fully understood.”
― Cecil Maurice Bowra, The Greek Experience

“Unbridled arrogance shocked the Greeks morally, politically, and aesthetically. It was, in their view, quite different from legitimate ambition, since it was possible only with a large degree of self-control and even of self-sacrifice.”
― Cecil Maurice Bowra, The Greek Experience

“Greek politics [(including the litany of fascist city-states)] were at least founded on the conviction that men have a right to live for their won sake and not for the sake of some exalted individual or supernatural system.”
― Cecil Maurice Bowra, The Greek Experience

“We cannot doubt that the distinction of the Athenian democracy owed much to slavery, since it provided the free citizen with leisure to spend his time on other matters than finding his livelihood. The majority of citizens had still to work hard, but at least they had times when they could leave their work and attend to public affairs or the graces of leisure. However much we may deplore slavery in any form, we must remember that in Athens the variety of origin in slaves and their relatively small numbers prevented the development of anything like a ‘colonial’ economy.”
― Cecil Maurice Bowra, The Greek Experience

“The Greeks of historical times were physically a mixed people, and advocates of ‘purity’ of breed will find in them no support for their views. If their sculpture and painting present recognizably standard type, that is probably because climatic conditions exert their own control and not only give preference in survival to a type which has long been adapted to them but make acclimatization slow and difficult. The Greeks were not the blond giants of Teutonic fancy. The majority of them seem to have been, as they are today, dark-haired and olive-skinned, but among them, then as now, there were a few whose fair hair marked them out for admiring comment, like Homer’s Menelaus, who is called xanthos and looks as if he had brown hair.”
― Cecil Maurice Bowra, The Greek Experience

“Pythagoras divided men into three classes: the seekers of knowledge, the seekers of honour, and the seekers of gain, and in comparing life to the Olympic Games, matches the first class with the onlookers, the second with the competing athletes, and the third with the hucksters.”
― Cecil Maurice Bowra, The Greek Experience

“They [, the Greek Gods,] do what they please, and their society is what human society would be if men could follow their desires without risk of failure.”
― Cecil Maurice Bowra, The Greek Experience