Greek Poetry Quotes

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

Gilbert Murray

#2. How pleasant a world would be in which no man was allowed to operate on the Stock Exchange unless he could pass and examination in economics and Greek poetry, and in which politicians were obliged to have a competent knowledge of history and modern novels.

Bertrand Russell

#3. If you read every poem in every anthology of Greek poetry, you wouldn't read one poem in which a character of the woman who's loved is described or matters.

Kathy Acker

#4. The word poetry comes from the Greek word poiesis which just means "a making". So if you've made it, it's poetry. Even if it's breakfast.

Benedict Smith

#5. 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

#6. What cannot be borne in reality, becomes a source of pleasure when it is transposed into the visual and somatic fiction of the dramatic spectacle.

Claude Calame

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

Quintus Ennius

#8. The law, in its majestic impartiality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under the bridges of Paris.

Anatole France

#9. Students were expected to learn hundreds of lines from the Greek and Roman classics, then, later, from poetry in their native tongues. This tradition has faded from our lives, and something powerful has been lost.

Ken Ludwig

#10. I remember once, actually the first race I ran, I fell.

Usain Bolt

#11. Although it is true that petros and petra can mean 'stone' and 'rock' respectively in earlier Greek, the distinction is largely confined to poetry.

Frank E. Gaebelein

#12. ]
]you will remember
]for we in our youth
did these things

yes many and beautiful things
]
]
]

Sappho

#13. Money is speech. It's incongruous to say a multimillionaire can spend as much on his own campaign as he wants, but you can only give $2,300. His free speech rights are different from yours, thus violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. It's absurd.

Roger Stone

#14. The touched heart madly stirs,
your laughter is water hurrying over pebbles -
every gesture is a proclamation,
every sound is speech ...

Sappho

#15. Men ought to be most annoyed by the sufferings which come from their own faults.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#16. neither for me honey nor the honey bee

Sappho

#17. We are all debts owed to death.

Simonides

#18. Mega biblion, mega kakon (Big book, big evil)

Callimachus

#19. Where the Greeks had modesty, we have cant; where they had poetry, we have cant; where they had patriotism, we have cant; where they had anything that exalts, delights, or adorns humanity, we have nothing but cant, cant, cant.

Thomas Love Peacock

#20. I live my life because I dare. I dare to show up when everyone else might hide their faces and hide their bodies in shame.

Gabourey Sidibe

#21. gathering flowers so very delicate a girl

Sappho

#22. but if you love us
choose a younger bed
for I cannot bear
to live with you when I am the older one

Sappho

#23. Though I knew how this failure would hurt you, I had to fold like a grey moth and let go.
You could not believe I was more than your echo.

Margaret Atwood

#24. One of the rules of Greek lament poetry is that it mustn't mention the dead by name in case of invoking a ghost. Maybe the 'Iliad,' crowded with names, is more than a poem. Maybe it's a dangerous piece of the brightness of both this world and the next.

Alice Oswald

#25. Take us to the in-between,
Where earth meets sky, and wake meets dream.
And time rushes by, unseen.

Take us to the infinite night,
Where up is down, and left is right,
And dark vanquishes light.

S.L. Stacy

#26. Trying to pump breath into a fairy tale is as arduous and tragic as ancient Greek theatre.

Terry A. O'Neal

#27. In Poetry class, Professor Sappho teaches us how to compose love ballads. She's a swell teacher and all but I'm not sure I understand her. She's always going on and on about her weekend trips with the other goddesses to the island of Lesbos.

Tai

#28. Great poetry, whether written in Greek or in English, needs no other interpreter than a responsive heart.

Helen Keller

#29. Eros the melter of limbs (now again) stirs me -
sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in

Sappho