Quotes About Ancient Greece

#1. All the plays that have ever been written, from ancient Greece to the present day, have never really been anything but thrillers ... Drama's always been realistic and there's always been a detective about ... Every play's an investigation brought to a successful conclusion.

Eugene Ionesco

#2. But, ancient Greece and ancient Rome - people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then, OK? People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#3. In ancient Greece, Socrates reportedly didn't fancy a literate society. He felt that people would lose the capacity to think for themselves, simply adopting the perspective of a handy written opinion, and that they would cease to remember what could be written down.

Nick Harkaway

#4. We are living in the era of the busybody. In ancient Greece, if a person wanted guidance, it involved a long, arduous expensive journey to consult the oracle at Delphi. Today, if you want guidance, all you have to do is unplug your ears.

Margo Kaufman

#5. In the Classical tradition, deriving from ancient Greece and Rome, beauty was perceived as the means by which the artist captured the viewer's eye in order to engage the viewer with truth and so inspire goodness.

John Walford

#6. We don't usually think of what we eat as a matter of ethics. Stealing, lying, hurting people - these acts are obviously relevant to our moral character. In ancient Greece and Rome, ethical choices about food were considered at least as significant as ethical choices about sex.

Peter Singer

#7. You can't swing a cat in Ancient Greece without hitting one of Zeus's ex-girlfriends.

Rick Riordan

#8. No account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece.

Walter Pater

#9. When the travesties scattered throughout our modern art museums are set alongside the glories of ancient Greece, the Christian heart should swell with pride.

Douglas Wilson

#10. I learned that along with the towering achievements of the cultures of ancient Greece and China there stood the culture of Africa, unseen and denied by the imperialist looters of Africa's material wealth.

Paul Robeson

#11. I read mostly historical fiction - lots of stuff set in ancient Rome and ancient Greece. I also liked sci-fi and fantasy: David Gemmell, Raymond E. Feist. It's a nice escape from the world. As much as I do love real-life stories, they can often make you hurt in a way I'd rather not hurt.

Henry Cavill

#12. Your daughter is gay? Where are all these gay people coming from? Gay friends. Gay daughters of friends. Gay sisters-in-law. Gay suspects. I ask one guy for a kiss and suddenly I'm living in Ancient Greece.

Dani Alexander

#13. Homosexuality and trance were considered abnormalities now, while in the Middle Ages people had been made saints for their trances, which were considered the highest state of being, and in Ancient Greece, as Plato makes clear, homosexuality was 'a major means to the good life.

Lily King

#14. In many ways we are all sons and daughters of ancient Greece.

Nia Vardalos

#15. Our modern world, though infinitely more complex than that of ancient Greece, is also far more superficial. Where the Greeks offered simple psychological training, we live in an age of style and spin in which perceptions of good and evil slither and shift with the political view of the moment.

David Gemmell

#16. Hercules, huh?" Percy frowned. "That guy was like the Starbucks of Ancient Greece. Everywhere you turn - there he is.

Rick Riordan

#17. I have a long view of history - my orientation is archaeological because I'm always thinking in terms of ancient Greece and Rome, ancient Persia and Egypt.

Camille Paglia

#18. In ancient Greece, the word for "cook," "butcher," and "priest" was the same - mageiros - and the word shares an etymological root with "magic.

Michael Pollan

#19. Philosophy is best practised by people in general and not by philosophers alone. Philosophy is too often a luxury now, but in ancient Greece, carpenters, masons and beggars were the main practitioners. What I am trying to develop is a philosophical system where all the subjects can be taught.

Michel Onfray

#20. In ancient Greece, skeptics were those who thought, not those who scoffed.

Gene Wolfe

#21. I had always been an enthusiastic reader of stuff about ancient Greece. I would read Herodotus and Thucydides just for fun.

Steven Pressfield

#22. Did you hear the story of Socrates? He was a philosopher in ancient Greece, so they killed him.

Troy DeNuthe

#23. Over most of the one thousand years of philosophy in ancient Greece and Rome, philosophy was assiduously studied in every generation by many ancient philosophers and their students as the best way to become good people and to live good human lives.

John M. Cooper

#24. The road to the Olympics, leads to no city, no country. It goes far beyond New York or Moscow, ancient Greece or Nazi Germany. The road to the Olympics leads - in the end - to the best within us.

Jesse Owens

#25. In ancient Greece, politics and the market were not decoupled.

George Papandreou

#26. His knowledge of ancient Greece was based entirely on a poem Edgar Allan Poe, a few homosexual encounters with restaurateurs (he ate free at almost every soda fountain in the city), and a plaster reproduction of the Akropolis which, for some reason, he had coated with red nail polish.

Leonard Cohen

#27. The model for the U.S. Constitution was not ancient Greece but the Iroquois Confederacy. Then,

Gloria Steinem

#28. That's how it goes - as soon as there's anything interesting in Ancient Greece, some arsehole with a magic hat comes along to murder it.

Catherynne M Valente

#29. What they forget is that, from Ancient Greece on, the people who returned from battle were either dead on their shields or stronger, despite and because of their scars.

Paulo Coelho

#30. In ancient Greece, adolescence was a time when young men left their biological families to become the lovers of adult men. Sexuality was but one element of an affectional and educational relationship in which youths learned the ways of manhood

Barry D. Adam

#31. In English the expression 'ancient Greece' includes the meaning of 'finished,' whereas for us Greece goes on living, for better or for worse; it is in life, has not expired yet.

Budd Schulberg

#32. I loved the myths of ancient Greece and Egypt.

Michelle Paver

#33. The heroes of ancient Greece wept more often than our silly, sentimental modern women. They knew it did no good to hold it back. Our ideal is the impassive courage of a statue. Unnecessary. Be sad and then you'll soon be over it.

Erich Maria Remarque

#34. I think of myself as a political idiot. Idiot, in ancient Greece, denoted a common person without access to knowledge and information--all women, by definition, and most men. I am unable to make judgments. I see no options I can identify with. Is that normal?

Jasmina Tesanovic

#35. And besides, we lovers fear everything

Ovid

#36. With reason did the Athenians adjudge Diagoras guilty of atheism, in that he not only divulged the Orphic doctrine, and published the mysteries of Eleusis and of the Cabiri, and chopped up the wooden statue of Hercules to boil his turnips, but openly declared that there were no gods at all.

Athenagoras Of Athens

#37. Our journey is one of discovery on Sicily.
Like the past Greek writers.orators,historians and philosophers we are all searching for answers on Earth

Daniel Peter Buckley

#38. You will have memories
Because of what we did back then
When we were new at this,
Yes, we did many things, then - all
Beautiful ...

Sappho

#39. It is not the bloodletting that calls down power. It is the consenting.

Mary Renault

#40. of the ancient cities of Greece and

Philippa Gregory

#41. Don't you have a class this morning, Georgie?"
Day mumbled something that sounded like
"Ancient History of the Near East and Greece."
"Poof!" scoffed Everhart, flourishing his fork,
"Come with me and see the Near East.

Jack Kerouac

#42. Like that star of the waning summer who beyond all stars rises bathed in the ocean stream to glitter in brilliance.

Homer

#43. This was a man who moved like the gods were watching: every gesture he made was upright and correct. There was no one else it could be but Hector

Madeline Miller

#44. But no city-state ever solved the problem of incorporating new territories and new populations into its existing structure, or involving really large numbers of people in its political life (p. 11)

Joseph Reese Strayer

#45. As the profoundest philosophy of ancient Rome and Greece lighted her taper at Israel's altar, so the sweetest strains of the pagan muse were swept from harps attuned on Zion's hill.

Edward Thomson

#46. Ancient art was the tyrant of Egypt, the mistress of Greece and the servant of Rome.

Henry Fuseli

#47. A servile race Who, in mere want of fault, all merit place; Who blind obedience pay to ancient schools, Bigots to Greece, and slaves to musty rules.

Charles Churchill

#48. The fact is that men who know nothing of decency in their own lives are only too ready to launch foul slanders against their betters and to offer them up as victims to the evil deity of popular envy.

Plutarch

#49. If we were living in ancient Rome or Greece, I would be considered sickly and unattractive. The times dictate that thin is better for some strange reason, which I think is foolish.

Gwyneth Paltrow

#50. The ancient Oracle said that I was the wisest of all the Greeks. It is because I alone, of all the Greeks, know that I know nothing.

Socrates

#51. The center of Western culture is Greece, and we have never lost our ties with the architectural concepts of that ancient civilization.

Stephen Gardiner

#52. Thence to the famous orators repair, Those ancient, whose resistless eloquence Wielded at will that fierce democratie, Shook the arsenal, and fulmin'd over Greece, To Macedon, and Artaxerxes' throne.

John Milton

#53. It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written.

Karl Marx

#54. When boyhood's fire was in my blood
I read of ancient freemen
Of Greece and Rome who bravely stood
Three hundred men and three men

And then I prayed I yet might see
Our fetters rent in twain
And Ireland long a province be
A nation once again

Thomas Osborne Davis

#55. Two thousand summers have imparted to the monuments of Grecian literature, as to her marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect them against the corrosion of time.

Henry David Thoreau

#56. Even people who know nothing about Greece know something about Greece. The very name sparks visions of ancient civilizations that dominated the Mediterranean.

Polly Letofsky

#57. OEDIPUS:
O, O, O, they will all come,
all come out clearly! Light of the sun, let me
look upon you no more after today!
I who first saw the light bred of a match
accursed, and accursed in my living
with them I lived with, cursed in my killing.

Sophocles

#58. TEIRESIAS:
You have your eyes but see not where you are
in sin, nor where you live, nor whom you live with.
Do you know who your parents are? Unknowing
you are enemy to kith and kin
in death, beneath the earth, and in this life.

Sophocles

#59. JOCASTA:
So clear in this case were the oracles,
so clear and false. Give them no heed, I say;
what God discovers need of, easily
he shows to us himself.

Sophocles

#60. Now any King who wants to call himself my equal wherever I went let him go."
Sargon the Great / Enheduanna from
Heaven Earth and Time by D P BUCKLEY

Daniel Peter Buckley

#61. Internationally, ancient Rome and Greece cultures are just so fascinating. I don't think audiences will ever tire of it, because it's such an advanced society.

Jeremy Bolt

#62. That is the god's work, spinning threads of death through the lives of mortal men, and all to make a song for those to come ...

Homer

#63. The golden section was discovered by the Egyptians, and has been used in art and architecture, most commonly, during the classical ages of Egypt and Greece.

Steven L. Griffing

#64. I judge wisely ... as if nothin ever surprise me,
Loungin, between two pillars of ivory.
I'm lively, my dome piece is like buildin stones in Greece.
My poems are deep, from ancient thrones I speak.

Killah Priest

#65. Feel no fear before the multitude of men, do not run in panic,
but let each man bear his shield straight toward the fore-fighters,
regarding his own life as hateful and holding the dark spirits of death as dear as the radiance of the sun.

Tyrtaeus

#66. Captive Greece took captive her savage conquerer and brought the arts to rustic Latium

Horace