Top 99 Edith Hamilton Quotes
#1. The easy way has never in the long run commanded the allegiance of mankind.
Edith Hamilton
#2. Though the outside of human life changes much, the inside changes little.
Edith Hamilton
#3. The Greeks were the first intellectualists. In a world where the irrational had played the chief role, they came forward as the protagonists of the mind.
Edith Hamilton
#4. Genius moves to creation, not to destruction. Only a very few have combined both.
Edith Hamilton
#5. It is not hard work that is dreary; it is superficial work.
Edith Hamilton
#6. Clear thinking is not the characteristic which distinguishes our literature today. We are more and more caught up by the unintelligible. People like it. This argues an inability to think, or, almost as bad, a disinclination to think.
Edith Hamilton
#7. None so good that he has no faults, None so wicked that he is worth naught.
Edith Hamilton
#8. Responsibility is the price every man must pay for freedom.
Edith Hamilton
#9. The sense of the wonder of human life, its beauty and terror and pain, and the power in men to do and to hear, is in Aeschylus and in Shakespeare as in no other writer. Thy
Edith Hamilton
#10. A magical universe was so terrifying because it was so irrational. There was no cause and effect anywhere.
Edith Hamilton
#11. To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful ... was a mark of the Greek spirit ...
Edith Hamilton
#12. Uncertainty is the prerequisite to gaining knowledge and frequently the result as well.
Edith Hamilton
#13. The author determines that the bitterest struggles are for one side of the truth to the suppression of the other side.
Edith Hamilton
#14. There is no better indication of what the people of any period are like than the plays they go to see.
Edith Hamilton
#17. Love and the Soul (for that is what Psyche means) had sought and, after sore trials, found each other; and that union could never be broken. (Cupid and Psyche)
Edith Hamilton
#20. Poetry and preaching do not go well together; when the preacher mounts the pulpit the poet usually goes away.
Edith Hamilton
#21. Euripides questioned everything. He was a misanthrope who preferred books to men.
Edith Hamilton
#22. Pain is the most individualized thing on earth. It is true that it is the great common bond as well, but that realization only comes when it is over. To suffer is to be alone. To watch another suffer is to know the barrier that shuts each of us away by himself Only individuals can suffer.
Edith Hamilton
#23. It may seem odd to say that the men who made the myths disliked the irrational and had a love for facts; but it is true, no matter how wildly fantastic some of the stories are ...
Edith Hamilton
#24. The suffering of a soul that can suffer greatly
that and only that, is tragedy.
Edith Hamilton
#25. Tell one your thoughts, but beware of two. All know what is known to three
Edith Hamilton
#26. Reality has actually very little to do with truth; there is no necessary connection between the two.
Edith Hamilton
#28. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought - that is being educated.
Edith Hamilton
#29. The Old Testament is the record of men's conviction that God speaks directly to men.
Edith Hamilton
#30. She looked at him; she did not speak. He was there beside her, yet she was far away from him, alone with her outraged love and her ruined life. His feelings had nothing in them to make him silent.
Edith Hamilton
#31. Myths are early science, the result of men's first trying to explain what they saw around them.
Edith Hamilton
#32. Faith is not belief. Belief is passive. Faith is active.
Edith Hamilton
#33. Moderately wise each one should be, Not overwise, for a wise man's heart Is seldom glad (Norse Wisdom)
Edith Hamilton
#34. It is the men of this land who are bloodthirsty and they lay their own guilt on the gods.
Edith Hamilton
#35. Very few great artists feel the giant agony of the world.
Edith Hamilton
#37. Abject submission to the power on the throne which had been the rule of life in the ancient world since kings began, and was to be the rule of life in Asia for centuries to come, was cast off by the Greeks so easily, so lightly, hardly more than an echo of the contest has come down to us. In
Edith Hamilton
#38. There are few efforts more conducive to humility than that of the translator trying to communicate an incommunicable beauty. Yet, unless we do try, something unique and never surpassed will cease to exist except in the libraries of a few inquisitive book lovers.
Edith Hamilton
#40. I came to the Greeks early, and I found answers in them. Greece's great men let all their acts turn on the immortality of the soul. We don't really act as if we believed in the soul's immortality and that's why we are where we are today.
Edith Hamilton
#41. They were the first Westerners. The spirit of the West, the modern spirit, is a Greek discovery; and the place of the Greeks is in the modern world.
Edith Hamilton
#42. In strange ways hard to know gods come to men.
Many a thing past hope they have fulfilled,
And what was asked for went another way.
A path we never thought to tread God found for us.
So this has come to pass.
Edith Hamilton
#43. Old ideas are continually being slain by new facts. There is nothing stable in the conclusions of the mind, and it is impossible that there ever should be unless we hold that the universe is made to the measure of the human mind, an assumption for which nothing in the past gives any warrant.
Edith Hamilton
#44. The heterodoxy of one generation is the orthodoxy of the next.
Edith Hamilton
#45. Tragedy cannot take place around a type. Suffering is the most individualizing thing on earth.
Edith Hamilton
#46. [W]hat is ugly and evil is apt to change and grow milder with time.
Edith Hamilton
#47. Mind and spirit together make up that which separates us from the rest of the animal world, that which enables a man to know the truth and that which enables him to die for the truth.
Edith Hamilton
#48. He was softly breathing his life away, the dark blood flowing down his skin of snow and his eyes growing heavy and dim. She kissed him, but Adonis knew not that she kissed him as he died.
Edith Hamilton
#49. All things are at odds when God sets a thinker loose on the planet
Edith Hamilton
#50. Noble self-restraint must have something to restrain.
Edith Hamilton
#51. The temper of mind that sees tragedy in life has not for its opposite the temper that sees joy. The opposite pole to the tragic view of life is the sordid view.
Edith Hamilton
#52. An ancient writer says of Homer that he touched nothing without somehow honoring and glorifying it.
Edith Hamilton
#54. A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.
Edith Hamilton
#55. The wise are doubtful,' Socrates returned, 'and I should not be singular if I too doubted.
Edith Hamilton
#56. He drew iron tears down Pluto's cheek and make Hell grant what Love did seek.
Edith Hamilton
#57. When the mind withdraws into itself and dispenses with facts it makes only chaos.
Edith Hamilton
#58. A word is no light matter. Words have with truth been called fossil poetry, each, that is, a symbol of a creative thought.
Edith Hamilton
#59. The Greeks not only face facts. They have no desire to escape from them.
Edith Hamilton
#60. He was there beside her; yet she was far away from him, alone with her outraged love and her ruined life.
Edith Hamilton
#61. Ages of faith and of unbelief are always said to mark the course of history.
Edith Hamilton
#62. None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.
Edith Hamilton
#63. Sooner or later, if the activity of the mind is restricted anywhere it will cease to function even where it is allowed to be free.
Edith Hamilton
#64. Our word 'idiot' comes from the Greek name for the man who took no share in public matters.
Edith Hamilton
#66. Liberty depends on self-restraint. Freedom is freedom only when controlled and limited.
Edith Hamilton
#67. When faith is supported by facts or by logic it ceases to be faith.
Edith Hamilton
#68. One good thing, however, was there - Hope. It was the only good thing the casket had held among the many evils, and it remains to this day mankind's sole comfort in misfortune.
Edith Hamilton
#69. The comedy of each age holds up a mirror to the people of that age, a mirror that is unique.
Edith Hamilton
#70. It is by our power to suffer, above all, that we are of more value than the sparrows.
Edith Hamilton
#71. The power of good is shown not by triumphantly conquering evil, but by continuing to resist evil while facing certain defeat.
Edith Hamilton
#72. Far better die, she said. She took in her hand a casket which held herbs for killing, but as she sat there with it, she thought of life and the delightful things that are in the world; and the sun seemed sweeter than ever before.
Edith Hamilton
#73. She would have given her soul to him if he had asked her. And now both were fixing their eyes on the ground, abashed, and again were throwing glances at each other, smiling with love's desire.
Edith Hamilton
#74. Saint Paul said the invisible must be understood by the visible. That was not a Hebrew idea, it was Greek.
Edith Hamilton
#75. It was a Roman who said it was sweet to die for one's country. The Greeks never said it was sweet to die for anything. They had no vital lies.
Edith Hamilton
#76. Aeschylus was the poet of a new era. He bridged the tremendous gulf between the poetry of the beauty of the outside world and the poetry of the beauty of the pain of the world. He
Edith Hamilton
#77. ..,No love cannot leave where there is no trust..,~cupid and psyche..,"Greek mythology of Edith Hamilton
Edith Hamilton
#78. Love, however, cannot be forbidden. The more that flame is covered up, the hotter it burns. Also love can always find a way. It was impossible that these two whose hearts were on fire should be kept apart. (Pyramus and Thisbe)
Edith Hamilton
#79. The fundamental facts about the Greek was that he had to use his mind. The ancient priest had said, "Thus far and no farther. We set the limits of thought." The Greeks said, All things are to be examined and called into question. There are no limits set on thought.
Edith Hamilton
#80. When she came into Venus' presence the goddess laughed aloud and asked her scornfully if she was seeking a husband since the one she had had would have nothing to do with her because he had almost died of the burning wound she had given him.
Edith Hamilton
#81. We hold there is no worse enemy to a state than he who keeps the law in his own hands.
Edith Hamilton
#82. When we speak of beauty, we're speaking of something we're more or less indifferent to.
Edith Hamilton
#83. The Greeks were realists. They saw the beauty of common things and were content with it.
Edith Hamilton
#84. Freedom was born in Greece because there men limited their own freedom ... The limits to action established by law were a mere nothing compared to the limits established by a man's free choice.
Edith Hamilton
#85. Not because he had complete courage based on overwhelming strength, which is merely a matter of course, but because, by his sorrow for wrongdoing ad his willingness to do anything to expiate it, he showed greatness of soul.
Edith Hamilton
#86. They would allow no woman to be forced to marry against her will they told the newcomers, nor would they surrender any suppliant, no matter how feeble, and no matter how powerful the pursuer.
Edith Hamilton
#87. Kiss me yet once again, the last, long kiss, Until I draw your soul within my lips And drink down all your love.
Edith Hamilton
#88. In theology the conservative temper tends to formalism.
Edith Hamilton
#89. The modern mind is never popular in its own day. People hate being made to think.
Edith Hamilton
#91. The American classicist Edith Hamilton once described the great works of literature, the strong fortresses of the spirit which men have built through the ages.
Edith Hamilton
#92. The modern minds in each generation are the critics who preserve us from a petrifying world, who will not leave us to walk undisturbed in the ways of our fathers.
Edith Hamilton
#93. Theories that go counter to the facts of human nature are foredoomed.
Edith Hamilton
#94. The anthropologists are busy, indeed, and ready to transport us back into the savage forest where all human things ... have their beginnings; but the seed never explains the flower.
Edith Hamilton
#95. Great art is the expression of a solution of the conflict between the demands of the world without and that within.
Edith Hamilton
#96. I take courage," Aeneas said. "Here too there are tears for things, and hearts are touched by the fate of all that is mortal.
Edith Hamilton
#97. There is no dignity like the dignity of a soul in agony.
Edith Hamilton
#98. The Greek temple is the creation, par excellence, of mind and spirit in equilibrium.
Edith Hamilton
#99. For all men serve him of their own free will. And he whom Love touches not walks in darkness.
Edith Hamilton
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top