Top 68 Quotes About Ancient Greeks
#1. The ancient Greeks, as Plato reports, believed that we discover truth through "reminiscence," that is by "remembering," by intuitively searching into our own experience.
Rollo May
#2. Stop drifting. You're not going to re-read your Brief Comments, your Deeds of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, the commonplace books you saved for your old age. Sprint for the finish. Write off your hopes, and if your well-being matters to you, be your own savior while you can.
Marcus Aurelius
#3. The ancient Greeks and Romans were comfortable with any number of deities and were quite open to allowing conquered nations to continue to worship in whatever ways they saw fit, as long as they didn't mind having an emperor who required taxes and tributes.
Jay Parini
#4. All in all, I was harking back to the Ancient Greeks. When you get old, you always hark back to the Ancient Greeks.
Michel Houellebecq
#5. The ancient Greeks could laugh at themselves. The Romans could not. That is why France is a civilized society and Spain is not.
John Fowles
#6. Did the Ancient Greeks ever write anything funny - like slapstick? I mean, I think I speak for everyone when I say that there's nothing wrong with a little bit of well-written physical comedy.
Elle Lothlorien
#7. The ancient Greeks had two words for time. The first was chronos. The second was kairos. The
Greg McKeown
#8. This approach shares an assumption, one dating from the ancient Greeks, that human reasoning can be a source of knowledge.
Peter V. Rabins
#9. We look at the ancient Greeks with their gods on a mountain top throwing lightning bolts and say, 'Those ancient Greeks. They were so silly. So primitive and naive. Not like our religions. We have burning bushes talking to people and guys walking on water. We're ... sophisticated.'
Paul Provenza
#10. I work in an old tradition that goes back to the ancient Greeks. You hold a mirror to crime to see what's happening in society. I could never write a crime story just for the sake of it, because I always want to talk about certain things in society.
Henning Mankell
#11. Again, if there are really no fairies, why do people believe in them, all over the world? The ancient Greeks believed, so did the old Egyptians, and the Hindoos, and the Red Indians, and is it likely, if there are no fairies, that so many different peoples would have seen and heard them?
Andrew Lang
#12. Strangers used to gather together at the cinema and sit together in the dark, like Ancient Greeks participating in the mysteries, dreaming the same dream in unison.
Angela Carter
#13. For the ancient Greeks, who lacked our social media, the only way to achieve mass duplication of the details of one's life in the apprehension of others was to do something wondrously worth the telling. Our wondrous technologies might just save us all the personal bother. Kleos is a tweak away.
Rebecca Goldstein
#14. Equilibrium is the state of death, only chaos produces life
The Ancient Greeks have been driven to extinction by too much search for architectural harmony.
Stephane Lupasco
#15. The games of the ancient Greeks were, in their original institutions, religious solemnities.
Dorothea Brande
#16. The ancient Greeks were the first ones to say an unexamined life is not worth living. They don't tell you of course what we found out, an examined life not that fascinating either.
Colin Quinn
#17. The human eye has long fascinated lovers, artists and physicians. The ancient Greeks dissected eyes, but struggled to understand how they worked, unclear as to whether they received or emanated light.
Tim Birkhead
#18. We will have have the dead at our councils. The ancient Greeks voted by stones; these shall vote by tombstones. It is all quite regular and official, for most tombstones, like most ballot papers, are marked with a cross.
G.K. Chesterton
#19. The ancient Greeks considered love a mental illness that led to suicide, homicide, betrayal, war, all sorts of fun.
Marion G. Harmon
#20. The ancient Greeks have a knack of wrapping truths in myths.
George Lloyd
#21. The Ancient Greeks? If they had steam engines, why didn't they have trains?'
. . .
'They were philosophers; they put two and two together and got a goldfish.'
(p. 76)
Natasha Pulley
#22. Well, love is insanity. The ancient Greeks knew that. It is the taking over of a rational and lucid mind by delusion and self-destruction. You lose yourself, you have no power over yourself, you can't even think straight.
Marilyn French
#23. In world mythology, there are countless examples of tragic characters whose greatest strength is also the source of their undoing. But the ancient Greeks and Romans also held the view that acceptance is the beginning of wisdom.
Simon Van Booy
#24. The ancient Greeks kept women athletes out of their games. They wouldn't even let them on the sidelines. I'm not sure but that they were right.
Avery Brundage
#25. You study any pretty democracy, from the ancient Greeks forward, and you'll see that the only way each system functions is with a working class of slaves. Peons to haul the garbage so the upper crust can campaign and vote.
Chuck Palahniuk
#26. I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas ... To the ancient Greeks and Romans, the known world comprised
Carl Sagan
#27. The ancient Greeks believed that when you read aloud, it was actually the dead, borrowing your tongue, in order to speak again.
Ruth Ozeki
#28. In all of Western civilization, there have been societies that celebrating the homosexuality, the ancient Greeks. But they, in fact, protected the institution of marriage as a union between one man and one woman. They got the joke. And the American people get the joke.
Ken Blackwell
#29. The ancient Greeks, poets, authors and philosophers all puzzled over the question but nobody really knows what love is - including me. Longing for another person is an exciting mental experience.
Nicole Kidman
#30. Lets dedicate ourselves to what the ancient greeks wrote so many years ago, to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that
Robert F. Kennedy
#31. I've met and sketched most of the great athletes from the past five decades and their movement, grace and energy have kept me captivated over the years. That's what the ancient Greeks first saw and that's what caught my interest.
LeRoy Neiman
#32. Mind out of the gutter, Suze. Eros is only one kind of love, eh? Ancient Greeks recognised four.
Peter Watts
#33. While the willingness of the ancient Greeks to sacrifice their lives for glory brings tears to my eyes, I cannot ultimately condone the choice of Achilles.
Tim O'Reilly
#34. Dying, we tell ourselves, is like going to sleep. This figure of speech occurs very commonly in everyday thought and language, as well as in the literature of many cultures and many ages. It was apparently quite common even in the time of the ancient Greeks.
Raymond Moody
#35. The question of the composition of perceptible objects is one which already occupied the mind of the ancient Greeks.
Johannes Stark
#36. The ancient Greeks, according to Pirsig, saw the future as something that came upon them from behind their backs, with the past receding away before their eyes.
Sean Carroll
#37. The ancient Greeks noticed that a man with arms and legs extended described a circle, with his navel as the center.
Stephen Gardiner
#38. That's what the ancient Greeks thought life was," I said. "A distraction that ends badly.
Elliott James
#39. The ancient greeks called all of those stars and planets in our night sky. "Wanderers." I don't think anyone has come up with a better name for all of those lovely suns.
Steve Merrick
#40. Maybe this had been something like the colour blindness of the ancient Greeks, before words had ushered in vision - we do not see that which we have no language to understand.
Jennifer DuBois
#41. For the ancient Greeks, the ultimate test of the educational system was the moral and political quality of the students that it produced
Henry A. Giroux
#42. To the ancient Greeks the word, dikaiosini,justice was often synonymous with ekdikisis,vengeance.
Sidney Sheldon
#43. Of all the small nations of this earth, perhaps only the ancient Greeks surpass the Scots in their contribution to mankind.
Winston S. Churchill
#44. As the ancient Greeks replaced myth-based explanations with mechanistic models of the Solar System, their emphasis shifted from asking why to asking how.
Max Tegmark
#45. The ancient Greeks who created the magnificent sculptures and structures were the same people who could be utterly cruel and barbaric.
Julia Vickers
#46. The best teachers, one hopes, don't shout at their students - because they are skilled at wooing as well as demanding the best efforts of others. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, this wooing was a sufficiently fine art in itself to be the central focus of education.
Tom Chatfield
#47. The aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks.
Harold Bloom
#48. When we spend money on others, for example, we feel more content than when we spend money on ourselves. This is a kind of well-being rooted in meaning, connection, and equanimity - called eudaimonia by the ancient Greeks and in modern times perhaps called "inner" or "true" happiness.
Daniel J. Siegel
#49. As Littlewood said to me once [of the ancient Greeks], they are not clever school boys or 'scholarship candidates,' but 'Fellows of another college.
G.H. Hardy
#50. The ancient Greeks did not have to wrestle with the philosophical problem of the existence of evil. They did not claim their gods were good, just magnificent.
Margaret Visser
#51. the waking day of a mythically vibrant people, the ancient Greeks, for instance, is in fact more akin to dream than to the day of a sober scientific thinker. If
Friedrich Nietzsche
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. It is not we Greeks alone who are the inheritors of Greek civilisation... all, of whatever nationality, who share the ancient Greek attitude to life, are Greeks.
Leonard Cottrell
#55. 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
#56. Everything we know and believe about deity and divinity nowadays, is a direct origin of old civilizations. Everybody, Greeks, Saxons, Assyrians and Soumerians, all imitate the ancient ways of the first tribes of central Africa (Mason father to his son in The Omniconstant
Christos Rodoulla Tsiailis
#57. To test a perfect theory with imperfect instruments did not impress the Greek philosophers as a valid way to gain knowledge.
Isaac Asimov
#58. The distinction between nerves and vessels was not demonstrated until the Third Century B.C., when it was made clear by Erasistratos.
James Henry Breasted
#59. We have no adequate conception of the perfection of the ancient tragic dance. The pleasure which the greeks received from it had for its basis difference; & the more unfit the vehicle, the more lively was the curiosity & intense the delights at seeing the difficulty overcome.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#60. They too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape; they'd had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home.
Donna Tartt
#61. Choose,' she says, reaching out towards him. 'Choose to which of us the apple most belongs...
Emily Hauser
#62. In many traditions, hawks are sacred: Apollo's messengers for the Greeks, sun symbols for the ancient Egyptians and, in the case of the Lakota Sioux, embodiments of clear vision, speed and single-minded dedication.
John Burnside
#64. * Pindar, a Thebian Greek wrote (circa 350 B.C.E.) War is sweet to those who have no experience of it. But the experienced man trembles exceedingly in his heart at its approach.
Pindar
#65. Artificial creatures date back to the ancient Chinese and Greeks. Renaissance automata were designed primarily to entertain, reflecting the value placed on leisure.
Ken Goldberg
#66. In the ancient world and, above all, among the Greeks, human nature was held in high esteem.
Elie Metchnikoff
#67. 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
#68. The English language is a rich verbal tapestry woven together from the tongues of the Greeks, the Latins, the Angles, the Klaxtons, the Celtics, and many more other ancient peoples, all of whom had severe drinking problems." Let
Steven Pinker