Quotes About Greek Language

#1. Light means knowledge in the Greek language it can also be translated as illumination, knowledge, insight, understanding and wisdom

Sunday Adelaja

#2. 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

#3. It would take a while for me not to think of the Greek language as the father who walked out on me

Deborah Levy

#4. Classical music is a special taste like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand.

Allan Bloom

#5. 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

#6. Greek is a musical and prolific language, that gives a soul to the objects of sense, and a body to the abstractions of philosophy.

Edward Gibbon

#7. The Greeks understood the mysterious power of the below things. They are the ones who gave us one of the most beautiful words in our language, the word enthusiasm.

Louis Pasteur

#8. Greek mathematics is the real thing. The Greeks first spoke a language which modern mathematicians can understand ... So Greek mathematics is 'permanent', more permanent even than Greek literature.

G.H. Hardy

#9. In addition to English, at least one ancient language, probably Greek or Hebrew, and two modern languages would be required.

W. H. Auden

#10. If there were a god of New York, it would be the Greek's Hermes, the Roman's Mercury. He embodies New York qualities: the quick exchange, the fastness of language and style, craftiness, the mixing of people and crossing of borders, imagination.

James Hillman

#11. Greek is doubtless the most perfect [language] that has been contrived by the art of man.

Edward Gibbon

#12. Arabic, like Greek, had been a scientific language early on,

Kim Stanley Robinson

#13. The stories about the life and teachings of Jesus were mainly told in Greek, the original language of the gospels.

Jay Parini

#14. Greek is a wonderfully rich and expressive language, which makes it one of the harder of the European tongues to learn. The active vocabulary is much bigger than other European languages. The constructions and the different endings are not easy to master, especially if you are an English speaker.

John Mole

#15. While Egyptian speakers learned Greek, it was rare that anyone ventured in the opposite direction. To the punishing study of Egyptian, however, Cleopatra applied herself. She was allegedly the first and only Ptolemy to bother to learn the language of the 7 million people over whom she ruled.

Stacy Schiff

#16. 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

#17. I very much wish that some day or other you may have time to learn Greek, because that language is an idea. Even a little of it is like manure to the soil of the mind, and makes it bear finer flowers.

Sara Coleridge

#18. Soon the two men were chattering away sounding excited, they could only be discussing trivialities yet their voices, their gestures might lead the observer to suppose they were arguing about life and death. Such was the Greek manner of conversation.

Margaret Yorke

#19. As a text, the Quran is more than the foundation of the Islamic religion; it is the source of Arabic grammar. It is to Arabic what Homer is to Greek, what Chaucer is to English: a snapshot of an evolving language, frozen forever in time

Reza Aslan

#20. 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

#21. Words travel, because the word arctic comes from arktos, Greek for bear. Cancer comes from the Greek word for crab, karkinos. Memory, or one of its locations in the brain, the hippocampus, means seahorse. A bestiary is buried in our language.

Rebecca Solnit

#22. Kyrie ! The radiance of the intellect. I ought to profess Greek, the language of the mind.

James Joyce

#23. I suppose you heard him yelling as the doctor set his leg."
"I never knew there were so many rude words in the English language. Or French, German, Italian, Latin,or ... there was another language I didn't quite recognize."
"Greek.

Karen Hawkins

#24. Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries.

Gilbert Murray

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. Evidently there is difficulty, real difficulty, in learning a foreign language at all, as if it sprinkled all the sweet flavor of the Greek mythical stories with a foul taste.

Augustine Of Hippo

#28. She might be the best-dressed little girl in her elementary school class, but she was still a Greek. Her parents spoke a foreign language, their food was different, and she looked different from the children she went to school with in Corktown.

Suzanne Jenkins

#29. 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

#30. For the first few months I went round in a linguistic fog. Often I only realized what someone had said minutes or even days or weeks afterwards.

John Mole

#31. Faction is the greatest evil and the most common danger. "Faction" is the conventional English translation of the Greek stasis, one of the most remarkable words to be found in any language.

Moses Finley

#32. The Greeks distinguished between good and bad behavior, language that enhanced or diminished persons. Being intoxicated with scientism, we fail to recognize that the seemingly technical terms used to identify psychiatric illnesses and interventions are simply dyphemisms and euphemisms.

Thomas Szasz

#33. Words were torn from him. Ones he'd never spoken, in a language long since extinct, but only they could truly convey what she was to him, how much she meant.

Eternity wouldn't be enough...

Setta Jay

#34. Speak any language, Turkish, Greek, Persian, Arabic, but always speak with love

Rumi

#35. The difficulties besetting the translators of the LXX were very great. It was almost impossible to reproduce the native inimitableness of a Semitic language in an Aryan tongue. They had to adopt new constructions, some lexical and syntactical forms which were foreign to the older Greek.

John Courtenay James

#36. Unlike their brethren in the Holy Land, Diaspora Jews spoke Greek, not Aramaic: Greek was the language of their thought process, the language of their worship.

Reza Aslan

#37. Homosexual,' generally used in scientific works is of course a bastard word. 'Homogenic' has been suggested, as being from two roots, both Greek, i.e., 'homos,' same, and 'genos,' sex.

Edward Carpenter

#38. I would love with all my heart to be able to speak Greek, classical or modern or both. It is a beautiful language, both aurally and in terms of the intricacy of its construction. I took four semesters of Ancient Greek in college, but it's all rusted away now - and I never learned to speak it anyway.

Sarah Monette

#39. Epicurus (341-270 B.C.) was the last major Greek philosopher of the classical era to make significant original contributions to the study of language, developing a socio-anthropological theory of the origin of language.

Richard E. McDorman

#40. Knowing some Greek helped defuse forbidding words - not that I counted much on using them. You'll find only trace elements of this language in the poem.

James Merrill

#41. The Macedonian people and their kings were of Greek stock, as their traditions and the scanty remains of their language combine to testify.

J. B. Bury

#42. It seems likely that Jesus, being a scholarly young man, learned some Hebrew, but that's conjecture. It's more likely that Jesus spoke some Greek, as this language dominated the region after the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century.

Jay Parini

#43. 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

#44. I much preferred Latin to Greek. I loved the language being such a pattern that you could not shift a word without the whole sentence falling to pieces.

Alice Oswald

#45. It is useless to read Greek in translation; translators can but offer us a vague equivalent.

Virginia Woolf