Gilbert Murray Quotes

#1. Sometimes Aristotle analyses his terms, but very often he takes them for granted; and in the latter case, I think, he is sometimes deceived by them.

Gilbert Murray

#2. It is doubtless one of Aristotle's great services that he conceived so clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a history.

Gilbert Murray

#3. Things of a day! what are we and what not? A dream of a shaddow is man; yet when some god-given splendor falls, a glory of light comes over him and his life is sweet

(Pindar)

Gilbert Murray

#4. Where words can be translated into equivalent words, the style of an original can be closely followed; but no translation which aims at being written in normal English can reproduce the style of Aristotle.

Gilbert Murray

#5. A machine is a great moral educator. If a horse or a donkey won't go, men lose their tempers and beat it; if a machine won't go, there is no use beating it. You have to think and try till you find what is wrong. That is real education.

Gilbert Murray

#6. Ten thousand men possess ten thousand hopes. A few bear fruit in happiness; the others go awry. But he who garners day by day the good life, he is happiest.

Gilbert Murray

#7. Be careful in dealing with a man who cares nothing for comfort or promotion, but is simply determined to do what he believes to be right. He is a dangerous uncomfortable enemy, because his body, which you can always conquer, gives you little purchase upon his soul.

Gilbert Murray

#8. Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading.

Gilbert Murray

#9. The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths.

Gilbert Murray

#10. The life and liberty and property and happiness of the common man throughout the world are at the absolute mercy of a few persons whom he has never seen, involved in complicated quarrels that he has never heard of.

Gilbert Murray

#11. The fashions of the ages vary in this direction and that, but they vary for the most part from a central road which was struck out by the imagination of Greece.

Gilbert Murray

#12. Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries.

Gilbert Murray

#13. The fact is that much misunderstanding is often caused by our modern attempts to limit too strictly the meaning of a Greek word.

Gilbert Murray