Top 97 Mary Renault Quotes
#1. Go with your fate, but not beyond. Beyond leads to dark places.
Mary Renault
#2. There is nothing like despair to make one throw oneself upon the gods.
Mary Renault
#3. Am I beautiful? It is for you alone. Say that you love me, for without you I cannot live.
Mary Renault
#5. In hatred is love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul.
Mary Renault
#7. But it is not for the perfect vase or the polished gem to choose their owners.
Mary Renault
#8. Never destroy without thought your enemy's pretences; they are usually your best weapon against him.
Mary Renault
#9. It's not what one is, it's what one does with it.
Mary Renault
#10. The tenet of the philosopher that for each man there was only one perfect friend;
Mary Renault
#11. It gives me no joy to be praised at the expense of a better artist, by someone who does not know the difference or who thinks me too vain to be aware of it myself.
Mary Renault
#12. I saw death come for you, and I had no philosophy.
Mary Renault
#13. All men seek esteem; the best by lifting themselves, which is hard to do, the rest by shoving others down, which is much easier.
Mary Renault
#14. Tell a man what he may not sing and he is still half free; even all free, if he never wanted to sing it. But tell him what he must sing, take up his time with it so that his true voice cannot sound even in secret
there, I have seen is slavery.
Mary Renault
#15. Hephaistion had known for many ages that if a god should offer him one gift in all his lifetime, he would choose this. Joy hit him like a lightning-bolt.
Mary Renault
#16. Men would be as gods, if they had foreknowledge.
Mary Renault
#17. Often in those two months I said to myself, If I live, I will wipe this time from my mind; I cannot even bear the memory. Yet now I turn to it. He is gone; and all times when he was there seem like lost riches.
Mary Renault
#18. I was a king and a king's heir and now I am a slave.
Mary Renault
#19. The lovers of the innocent must protect them above all from the knowledge of their own cruelty.
Mary Renault
#20. It is better to believe in men too rashly, and regret, than believe too meanly. Men could be more than they are, if they would try for it. He has shown them that.
Mary Renault
#21. You cannot step twice into the same river, said Herakleitos. People in the past were not just like us; to pretend so is an evasion and a betrayal, turning our back on them so as to be easy among familiar things.
Mary Renault
#22. (Alexander)'Sometimes I forget all this for months on end. Sometimes I think of it day and night. Sometimes I think, unless I find out the truth of it, I shall go mad.'
(Hephaistion)'That's stupid. You've got me now. Do you think I'd let you go mad?
Mary Renault
#23. Money buys many things ... The best of which is freedom.
Mary Renault
#24. Never mind, mother, you weren't far out; he is Alexander too.
Mary Renault
#25. She looked up at the whirling effulgent cloud, and thought, I brought down the fire from heaven; I have lived with glory. A thunderbolt struck from the sky and all was gone.
Mary Renault
#26. Do I grudge my lord the herb that will heal him, because another gathers it? No, let him be healed.
Mary Renault
#27. If anyone has the right to be measured by the standards of his own time, it is Alexander. Hermann Bengston, The Greeks and the Persians
Mary Renault
#28. For I had felt too much and reasoned too little, hearing what I was ready to hear, not what had been said. There
Mary Renault
#29. One might have supposed that the true act of love was to lie together and talk.
Mary Renault
#30. It is the mark of little men to like only what they know; one step beyond, and they
feel the black cold of chaos.
Mary Renault
#31. What keeps the democracy alive at all but the hatred of excellence; the desire of the base to see no head higher than their own?
Mary Renault
#32. It is something, I thought, when a king can put a courtesan to the blush.
Mary Renault
#33. An audience of twenty thousand, sitting on its hands, could not have produced such an echoing silence.
Mary Renault
#34. WITHOUT LAUGHTER, WHAT MAN of sense could endure either politics or war?
Mary Renault
#35. I wanted someone to follow, I wanted him to be brave. But he wants to be brave for me; and no one can do that.
Mary Renault
#36. The rightness of a thing isn't determined by the amount of courage it takes.
Mary Renault
#37. I should think more crimes have probably been committed by chaps with inferiority complexes trying to demonstrate their virility, than even for money.
Mary Renault
#38. Power is the test. Some, once they have it, are content to buy the show of liking, and punish those who withhold it; then you have a despot. But some keep a true eye for how they seem to others, and care about it, which holds them back from much mischief.
Mary Renault
#39. May the Mother curse him and all gods below, and may Night's Daughters hunt him down into the ground! And on the hand that sheds his blood let there be a blessing.
Mary Renault
#40. He was filled with a vast sense of the momentous, of unknown mysteries. He did not know what he should demand of himself, nor did it seem to matter, for he had not chosen this music he moved to, it had chosen him.
Mary Renault
#41. It is bitter to lose a friend to evil, before one loses him to death.
Mary Renault
#42. In all men is evil sleeping; the good man is he who will not awaken it, in himself or in other men.
Mary Renault
#43. What is democracy? It is what it says, the rule of the people. It is as good as the people are, or as bad.
Mary Renault
#44. There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare.
Mary Renault
#45. It is better to learn war early from friends, than late from enemies
Mary Renault
#46. During this time he got news that a famous statue of Orpheus, enshrined in south Macedon, had started to sweat profusely. The seers, pondering the omen, decided that the new King's exploits would give the poets work.
Mary Renault
#47. Clouds of black birds rose up wailing and screaming, like the thoughts of my heart.
Mary Renault
#48. Speak for me, Nikeratos. Someone's soul is always listening. Someone's always is, I suppose, if one only knew. Plato never forgot it.
Mary Renault
#49. That there are fashions in admiration and denigration is inevitable; they should not however be followed at the expense of truth.
Mary Renault
#50. I could not tell what I should fill even this one day with; and there were years ahead. She
Mary Renault
#51. If one sat up as long as an hour past bedtime, except on Christmas and birthdays, one would be ill. Laurie, who had had this explained to him many times and accepted it as incontrovertible fact, inferred from it that after three hours one would probably die.
Mary Renault
#52. If you know about yourself, presumably you know about at least one other person.
Mary Renault
#53. How can people trust the harvest, unless they see it sown?
Mary Renault
#54. Now for the first time he realized how important it had been not to admit any alternative to the hard, decent, orthodox choice which need not be regarded as a choice at all; how important not to be different.
Mary Renault
#55. Love is a boaster at heart, who cannot hide the stolen horse without giving a glimpse of the bridle.
Mary Renault
#56. Friendship is perfect when virtuous men love the good in one another; for virtue gives more delight than beauty, and is untouched by time.
Mary Renault
#57. But courage without conduct is the virtue of a robber, or a tyrant.
Mary Renault
#58. I said, 'We have dreamed, dear friend. Another time, we might awaken. Let it be a dream forgotten at morning.' That seemed a better way of saying it than, 'Never remind me of this, for fear I should stick a knife in you.
Mary Renault
#59. He kept telling me I was queer, and I didn't like it. The word, I mean. Shutting you away, somehow; roping you off with a lot of people you don't feel much in common with, half of whom hate the other half anyway, and just keep together so that they can lean up against each other for support.
Mary Renault
#60. Half the world's troubles come from men not being trained to resent a fallacy as much as an insult.
Mary Renault
#61. There is truth and truth,' said the priest of Delos. 'It is true after its kind.
Mary Renault
#62. One must live as if it would be forever, and as if one might die each moment. Always both at once.
Mary Renault
#63. In grief more than in joy, man longs to know that the universe turns around him.
Mary Renault
#64. He looked as if he were anxiously balancing a large handful of tact, without quite knowing where to put it down.
Mary Renault
#65. War's such a boomerang it's impossible to guarantee anyone's protection in the long run.
Mary Renault
#66. It is not the bloodletting that calls down power. It is the consenting.
Mary Renault
#67. The maxim of the famous Spartan nurses: never expose a small child to fear, let him enter confidently on boyhood.
Mary Renault
#68. Alexander, of whom men tell many legends, lived by his own. Achilles must have Patroklos. He might love his Briseis; but Patroklos was the friend till death. At their tombs in Troy, Alexander and Hephaistion had sacrificed together. Wound Patroklos, and Achilles will have your blood.
Mary Renault
#69. A starving man won't notice a dirty plate.
Mary Renault
#70. You can make an audience see nearly anything, if you yourself believe in it.
Mary Renault
#72. When we serve the great, they are our destiny.
Mary Renault
#73. We Persians have a saying that one should deliberate serious matters first drunk, then sober.
Mary Renault
#74. True friends share everything, except the past before they met.
Mary Renault
#75. People like me are blamed for curiosity; having lost part of our lives, we are apt to fill the gap from the lives of others. In this I am like the rest, and make no pretences.
Mary Renault
#76. The perpetual stream of human nature is formed into ever-changing shallows, eddies, falls and pools by the land over which it passes. Perhaps the only real value of history lies in considering this endlessly varied play between the essence and the accidents.
Mary Renault
#77. I came for the cause. Since I could not help, at least don't let me remember that I hindered it. I've learned how to manage on the ship; it will be nothing, after all this. Goodbye, Niko. You have made me a truer philosopher. Go with God.
Mary Renault
#78. Often beauty grows dull or common when speech breaks the mask ...
Mary Renault
#79. Certainly, I thought, Dion means to have his way. But I suppose that's what makes a king.
Mary Renault
#80. He stood between death and life as between night and morning, and thought with a soaring rapture, 'I am not afraid.
Mary Renault
#81. and Alexander was nothing if not resourceful. He had had the legs of her chair cut down.
Mary Renault
#82. There is madness in youth, but sometimes a god inspires it.
Mary Renault
#83. It had come to him that no one would ever look from these eyes but he: that among all the lives, numerous beyond imagination, in which he might have lived, he was this one, pinned to this single point of infinity; the rest always to be alien, he to be I.
Mary Renault
#84. Some would take nothing, like Perdiccas; whose inclusion suggests, in spite of Ptolemy, that he did the right thing at Thebes. "What are you keeping for yourself?" he asked. "Hope," said Alexander, to which Perdiccas' prophetic answer was, "That I'll share.
Mary Renault
#85. Everything is change; and you cannot step twice into the same river.
Mary Renault
#86. As i was beginning to understand, this kind of love was foreign ground to him. I may add that he never did, as far as I know, accept a suitor ... Sometimes indeed I asked myself whether he lacked the capacity for loving men at all; but I liked him too well to offend him by such a question.
Mary Renault
#87. Great anguish lies in wait for those who long too greatly.
Mary Renault
#89. Miss Searle had always considered boredom an intellectual defeat.
Mary Renault
#90. Each generation has its own dream of beauty. I have lived long enough to watch it change. Just then, he was what all sculptors were reaching after, and only the great achieved.
Mary Renault
#91. It can be good to be given what you want; it can be better, in the end, never to have it proved to you that this is what you wanted
Mary Renault
#92. Do not believe that others will die, not you ... I have wrestled with Thanatos knee to knee and I know how death is vanquished. Man's immortality is not to live forever; for that wish is born of fear. Each moment free from fear makes a man immortal.
Mary Renault
#93. A man is at his youngest when he thinks he is a man, not yet realizing that his actions must show it.
Mary Renault
#94. Alexander could transmit imagination as some other could transmit lust.
Mary Renault
#95. Plato, in his opinion, had committed too much to love.
Mary Renault
#96. Reg coughed repressively.Habit had made of the standard nouns and adjectives in his own vocabulary something merely conventional,like italics or points of exclamation.He sometimes found Laurie's conversation highly obscene,and would have voiced his disapproval to anyone he had liked less.
Mary Renault
#97. I thought, There goes my lord, whom I was born to follow. I have found a King.
And, I said to myself, looking after him as he walked away, I will have him, if I die for it.
Mary Renault
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
