Greek And Latin Quotes

#1. Botany is the art of insulting flowers in Greek and Latin.

Alphonse Karr

#2. I must confess the language of symbols is to me
A Babylonish dialect
Which learned chemists much affect;
It is a party-coloured dress
Of patch'd and piebald languages:
'T is English cut on Greek and Latin,
Like fustian heretofore on satin.

Sir Richard Phillips

#3. Proverbs were bright shafts in the Greek and Latin quivers ...

Isaac D'Israeli

#4. The suffix 'naut' comes from the Greek and Latin words for ships and sailing. Astronaut suggests 'a sailor in space.' Chimponaut suggests 'a chimpanzee in sailor pants'.

Mary Roach

#5. It has always seemed to me a pity that the young people of our generation should grow up with such scant knowledge of Greek and Latin literature, its wealth and variety, its freshness and its imperishable quality.

James Loeb

#6. If Greek and Latin characters are paving stones, Arabic is rain.

Don DeLillo

#7. There is no doubt that Greek and Latin are great and handsome ornaments, but we buy them too dear.

Michel De Montaigne

#8. Pulvis et umbra sumus. (We are but dust and shadow.)

Horace

#9. Other demigods could understand Latin and Greek. Leo could speak Creak and Squeak.

Rick Riordan

#10. Unless you're like my friend, poet Brooks Haxton (who translates Greek, Latin, French, Hebrew, and German), throwing in three-dollar words will just make you look like a dick.

Mary Karr

#11. I was made to learn Latin and Greek, but I resented it, being of opinion that it was silly to learn a language that was no longer spoken. I believe that all the little good I got from years of classical studies I could have got in adult life in a month.

Bertrand Russell

#12. It is my great good luck the words I use are English words, which means I live in a very old nation of open borders; a rich, deep, multi-layered, promiscuous universe, infused with Latin, German, French, Greek, Arabic and countless other tongues.

Geraldine Brooks

#13. Harmony is an obscure and difficult musical science, but most difficult to those who are not acquainted with the Greek language; because it is necessary to use many Greek words to which there are none corresponding in Latin.

Vitruvius

#14. Oh, you're in television! That's interesting. No, I mean, the word television is interesting. It's a hybrid, you see: tele- comes from the greek, and -vision comes from the latin. It should have been either "telerama", or "procolvision".

Graham Chapman

#15. I'm a multi-lingual Kundalini-dancing shapeshifter to the 69th degree.
I know French, Italian, Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Greek, Latin, Gaelic, Scottish, English, and American English.
I'm cunninglingual.

Sienna McQuillen

#16. There are many examples of women that have excelled in learning, and even in war, but this is no reason we should bring em all up to Latin and Greek or else military discipline, instead of needle-work and housewifery.

Bernard De Mandeville

#17. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones.

George Orwell

#18. In Hebrew, His name is Jesus, in Greek, Soter, in Latin, Salvator; but men say Christus in Greek, Messias in Hebrew, Unctus in Latin, that is, King and Priest.

Thomas Aquinas

#19. In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in High School to teaching remedial English in college.

Joseph Sobran

#20. And though thou hadst small Latin, and less Greek.

Ben Jonson

#21. Ennius was the father of Roman poetry, because he first introduced into Latin the Greek manner and in particular the hexameter metre.

Quintus Ennius

#22. He was born a King. The wise men came from the East and asked, 'Where is He that is born King of the Jews?' (Matthew 2:2). He died a King.
In Greek, in Latin, and in Hebrew the description was written above His cross, 'This is Jesus, The King' (Matthew 27:37)

W. A. Criswell

#23. Princeton applicants had to know Virgil, Cicero's orations, and Latin grammar and also had to be 'so well acquainted with Greek as to render any part of the four Evangelists in that language into Latin or English.

Ron Chernow

#24. How do we define "normal?" Quite literally it comes from the Latin norma meaning "carpenter's square." Straight. And "abnormal?" That's from the Greek anomalos, and the Latin abnormis meaning "monstrosity.

Matt Fraction

#25. Shakespeare's bitter play [Troilus and Cressida] is therefore a dramatization of a part of a translation into English of the French translation of a Latin imitation of an old French expansion of a Latin epitome of a Greek romance. (p. 55)

Gilbert Highet

#26. In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.

Victor Hugo

#27. Thanks to my memory, which enabled me to quote Latin and to discuss Greek and Roman civilization, it became obvious to some of my colleagues in other fields that I was interested in things outside mathematics. This lead quickly to very pleasant relationships.

Stanislaw Ulam

#28. I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat.

Winston S. Churchill

#29. At 20, I realized that I could not possibly adjust to a feminine role as conceived by my father and asked him permission to engage in a professional career. In eight months I filled my gaps in Latin, Greek and mathematics, graduated from high school, and entered medical school in Turin.

Rita Levi-Montalcini

#30. Well, with the French language, which I understood and spoke, however imperfectly, and read in great quantities, at certain times, the matter I suppose was slightly different from either Latin or Greek.

Robert Fitzgerald

#31. The power of the Latin classic is in character , that of the Greek is in beauty . Now character is capable of being taught, learnt, and assimilated: beauty hardly.

Matthew Arnold

#32. I grew up in England and we spent most of the time on Latin and Greek and very little on science, and I think that was good because it meant we didn't get turned off. It was ... Science was something we did for fun and not because we had to.

Freeman Dyson

#33. Latin, Greek, and English, plus a smattering of Italian and fucking French." "Fucking French, you say? Well . . ." "Oui," said I, in perfect fucking French.

Christopher Moore

#34. I wanted to get the most broad foundation for a lifelong education that I could find, and that was studying Latin and the classics. Meaning Roman and Greek history and philosophy and ancient civilizations.

Tim Blake Nelson

#35. Then he said: "Y'all really took that Socratic method shit to heart."
"The benefits," I intoned, "of a Precepture education ."
"Yes," deadpanned Grego. "We were raised on Latin and Greek instead of love.

Erin Bow

#36. The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity is of wonderful structure, more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin and more exquisitely refined than either.

William Jones

#37. The Good Spirit never cared for the colleges, and though all men and boys were now drilled in Greek, Latin, and Mathematics, it had quite left these shells high on the beach, and was creating and feeding other matters [science] at other ends of the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#38. But a central message there is, and it is the recognition of this that has led to the common treatment of the Bible as a book, and not simply a collection of books - just as the Greek plural biblia (books) became the Latin singular biblia (the book).

Philip W. Comfort

#39. The world no doubt is the best or most serviceable schoolmaster; but the world's curriculum does not include Latin and Greek.

E. V. Lucas

#40. The eastern part of the Roman Empire spoke mostly Greek, and the western parts spoke mostly Latin. So very soon, you begin getting different emphases between the Eastern church and the Western church.

Justo L. Gonzalez

#41. Yiddish is the voice of exile, the tongue of ghettos, but I'll shed a tear when it joins ancient Greek and dead Latin. For gossip and insult, you can't beat Yiddish.

Linda Barnes

#42. They spoke in Latin, so that all might understand; but the quotations they flung at each other were Greek and Hebrew, Turkish, Persian.

Dorothy Dunnett

#43. A lot of names in America and Europe have their roots in Latin and Greek words. A lot of them go back to archetypes and their stories.

Maynard James Keenan

#44. Knowing Latin and having two years of Attic Greek gave me the strong foundation upon which I've built a career. I think the classical training, more than anything, has provided me with longevity.

Rita Mae Brown

#45. English has been this vacuum cleaner of a language, because of its history meeting up with the Romans and then the Danes, the Vikings and then the French and then the Renaissance with all the Latin and Greek and Hebrew in the background.

David Crystal

#46. The Crusaders come to one immediate decision. They decide that the Orthodox Greek Christians, the Georgian Christians, the Armenian Christians and the Jacobite Christians no longer could hold services in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Only the Latin rite could be celebrated in Jerusalem.

Paul L. Williams

#47. I am wonderfully pleased when I meet with any passage in an old Greek or Latin author, that is not blown upon, and which I have never met with in any quotation.

Joseph Addison