Top 100 Quotes About Greeks
#1. Aristotle and Plato considered Greeks so innately superior to barbarians that slavery is justified so long as the master is Greek and the slave barbarian.
Bertrand Russell
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. The more they measure, the more they realize how much the Greeks departed from regular and banal lines in order to produce their effect.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
#5. Greece is at a crucial crossroads. The choices that are made and the policies that are enforced will have a decisive impact on the wellbeing of Greeks. The way forward will not be easy but the problems can be solved, and will be solved, if there is unity, co-operation and consensus.
Lucas Papademos
#6. Hero," he said softly, in a manner that was much like his father's. "Vengeance and glory are the ways of the Greeks and the Trojans. We are of the Herdsmen.
Sulari Gentill
#7. The Greeks could be a crushing bore. I recommend dressing everyone in combat fatigues or S&M gear.
Sophocles
#8. The legion was raised by Mark Antony. He filled the ranks with men from Cleopatra's army. When Antony was defeated by Octavian, the Twenty-Second was integrated into the rest of the army and has been stationed on the Nile since then. They're a mix of Greeks and Egyptians from the Nile cities.
Simon Scarrow
#9. To the Greeks [the Macedonians] were uncouth, semi-civilized barbarians. The Macedonians for their part despised the Greeks as effete, wishy-washy Greeklings. Both regarded the Thracians as scarcely capable of walking on their hind legs.
Nicholas Sekunda
#10. 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
#11. We honor the Greeks because in their art, literature, philosophy and civic history we discern the early stirrings of our own ideals - rationalism, humanism, democracy - which first took firm root in Athenian soil.
Caroline Alexander
#12. She is an excellent creature, but she can never remember which came first, the Greeks or the Romans.
Benjamin Disraeli
#13. The Greeks - who knew everything - knew that immortality without youth was to be feared rather than desired.
Erica Jong
#14. On with you, horse-taming Trojans! Never give Greeks best in your will to fight! They are not made of stone or iron. Their flesh can't keep out penetrating spears when they are hit.
Homer
#15. I understand what the Greeks meant by this: Love is an act of faith and its face should always be covered in mystery. Every moment should be lived with feeling and emotion because if we try to decipher it and understand it, the magic disappears.
Paulo Coelho
#16. The ancient Greeks had two words for time. The first was chronos. The second was kairos. The
Greg McKeown
#17. This approach shares an assumption, one dating from the ancient Greeks, that human reasoning can be a source of knowledge.
Peter V. Rabins
#18. 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
#19. SARCOPHAGUS, n. Among the Greeks a coffin which being made of a certain kind of carnivorous stone, had the peculiar property of devouring the body placed in it.
Ambrose Bierce
#21. The adoration of human nature by the Greeks appeared in Greek plastic art and was the cause of its excellence.
Elie Metchnikoff
#22. Rule No. 41. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks.
Michael Pollan
#23. 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
#26. It has been that way ever since the Greeks - a blind fuck in the mud and then a quick spawn and then death.
Henry Miller
#27. The great universal literature has always had a tragic relation with freedom. The Greeks renounced absolute freedom and imposed order on chaotic mythology, like a tyrant.
Ismail Kadare
#28. Louis thought he would be all for a back-to-the-basics drive in education: a teacher, an olive tree, a bit of midday wine (the Greeks had watered theirs down to keep their heads lucid), and, last but not least, six or seven eager and receptive youths seated at one's feet.
Paul Russell
#29. The world, which the Greeks called Beauty, has been made such by being gradually divested of every ornament which was not fitted to endure.
Henry David Thoreau
#30. Greeks are born talkers," wrote Harriet. The deputies were no exception, with or without their twirling conversation beads. They seldom used notes, at times she wished they had; a few facts and figures would have been a relief from the sweeping statements.
Mary Allsebrook
#31. A part of me, of course, was reminding myself over and over and over again that I should never have tried to lie to the higher angels of the Ephorate. Hubris, the Greeks called that. "A dumbshit move," might be a more contemporary way of putting it.
Tad Williams
#32. The Greeks do not think correctly about coming-to-be and passing-away; for no thing comes to be or passes away, but is mixed together and dissociated from the things that are. And thus they would be correct to call coming-to-be mixing-together and passing-away dissociating
Anaxagoras
#33. The Greeks not only face facts. They have no desire to escape from them.
Edith Hamilton
#34. If my body is a Temple, then The Greeks and Romans ransacked it years ago
Josh Stern
#35. The Greeks said grandly in their tragic phrase, 'Let no one be called happy till his death;' to which I would add, 'Let no one, till his death, be called unhappy.'
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
#36. The Greeks bequeathed to us one of the most beautiful words in our language
the word 'enthusiasm'
en theos
a god within. The grandeur of human actions is measured by the inspiration from which they spring. Happy is he who bears a god within, and who obeys it.
Louis Pasteur
#37. The Greeks saw everything in forms which we are trying to ascertain as law, and classify as cause.
Margaret Fuller
#38. The western nations of Europe, who now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors, and stand at the summit of civilization, owe little or none of their superiority to direct inheritance from the old Greeks, though they owe much to the written works of that wonderful people.
Charles Darwin
#39. Italians and Greeks have uncles, aunts, cousins and grandparents as far as the eye can see.
Joe Novella
#40. The great Jewish Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, "The Greeks learned in order to comprehend. The Hebrews learned in order to revere. The modern man learns in order to use" ('God in Search of Man' p34)
Paul F Herring
#42. What can we expect from nations still less advanced in civilization than the Greeks?
Jean-Baptiste Say
#43. Your ancestors came to Macedonia and the rest of Hellas [Greece] and did us great harm, though we had done them no prior injury. I have been appointed leader of the Greeks, and wanting to punish the Persians I have come to Asia, which I took from you.
Alexander The Great
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. The Greeks, it will be recalled, regarded Eros, the god of love, as the eldest of the gods; but also as the youngest, born fresh and dewy-eyed in every living heart.
Joseph Campbell
#48. The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#49. Without warning, Hera had plucked up Percy Jackson, Annabeth's boyfriend, wiped his memory, and sent him to the Roman camp. In exchange, the Greeks had gotten Jason. None of that was Jason's fault; but every time Annabeth saw him, she remembered how much she missed Percy.
Rick Riordan
#50. 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
#51. This (scanning project) is our chance to one-up the Greeks! It is really possible with the technology of today, not tomorrow. We can provide all the works of humankind to all the people of the world. It will be an achievement remembered for all time, like putting a man on the moon.
Brewster Kahle
#52. Where two Greeks are gathered together, there will be at least three political parties represented, and possibly more.
Mary Stewart
#53. Dead man, listen well. The Great Keep is not like the Otherworld. The Great Keep has many names. To the Norse it is Valhalla, Hall of the Lords. To the Greeks it is Olympus. There are as many names as there are men who would speak them.
Kami Garcia
#54. 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
#55. Whereas the Greeks gave to will the boundaries of reason, we have come to put the will's impulse in the very center of reason, which has, as a result, become deadly.
Albert Camus
#56. [It] has been said that the difference between Greek and Israelite religion was that the Greeks worshiped the 'holiness of beauty' whereas the Jews worshiped 'the beauty of holiness.
Everett Ferguson
#57. 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
#58. Human curiosity. Such a very interesting thing. Think of what we owe to it throughout history. It is said to be usually associated with the cat. Curiosity killed the cat. But I should say really that the Greeks were the inventors of curiosity.
Agatha Christie
#59. To me there is no past or future in my art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was ...
Pablo Picasso
#60. Drink, live like the Greeks, eat, gorge.
Plautus
#61. If you decide to tell a kid that looks don't matter, she can prove you wrong every day. Because they see it everywhere. That is age-old, going back to the Greeks, but now we're bombarded nonstop.
Catherine Hardwicke
#62. 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
#63. NOMISMA, MEANING 'COIN', was used by both Greeks and Romans. Our own word 'money' derives, via the French monnaie, from the Latin moneta, meaning the mint, where coins are struck. (In early Rome the mint was situated on the Capitoline Hill in the temple of Juno Moneta.)
Norman Davies
#64. The Muse gave the Greeks genius and the art of the well-turned phrase.
Horace
#65. Life to most Greeks may be either tragic or comic or a mixture of both; but one thing it never is - and that is, meaningless.
Helen Clark MacInnes
#66. The marriage of Zeus and Hera can hardly be reframed into a "happy one" and yet Hera is the Goddess of marriage. Hera and Zeus could be described as quarrelsome predecessors of the Holy Family. For the Greeks they symbolized marriage par excellence.
Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig
#67. The greatest tragedies were written by the Greeks and Shakespeare ... neither knew chocolate.
Sandra Boynton
#68. We, to some degree, are like what we are because we inherited certain things from the Greeks and the Romans. One of them that's so striking is the whole area of politics.
Donald Kagan
#69. Modern society calls the beggar bum and panhandler and gives him the bum's rush. But the Greeks used to say that people in need are the ambassadors of the gods
Peter Maurin
#70. I guess the Greeks weren't big fans of online shopping, because they had lots of wars with the Amazons.
Rick Riordan
#71. It is astonishing to think that millions of people in my time-now, too, I suppose-actually thought that at a given moment in history two human beings had evolved to a higher state than that of all the gods that ever were or ever will be. This is titanism, as the Greeks would say. This is madness.
Gore Vidal
#72. Satire among the Romans, but not among the Greeks, was a bitter invective poem.
John Dryden
#73. The Greeks were more preoccupied with, where these ousted gods resided. That is: The fallen son's of God could go where humans were, but humans could not go where they were. According to Greek mythology, Tartarus was an imposed condition for bad gods
not bad humans. (page 10)
Michael Ben Zehabe
#74. Creative people ... are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of 'divine madness,' to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks.
Rollo May
#75. The rationalism of the creative minds was tempered by abundant fantasies, and the supreme beauty of the monuments was probably spoiled by the circumambient vanities and ugliness; in a few cases the Greeks came as close to perfection as it was possible to do, yet they were human and imperfect.
George Sarton
#76. Before beheading one such Brahmin, when Alexander asked him as to why he instigated a certain Indian ruler against the Greeks, he fearlessly and firmly replied that it was his most sacred tenet and that if he were to live, he ought to live honorably, else he should die honorably.
V D Savarkar
#77. Don't trust the horse, Trojans. Whatever it is, I fear the Greeks even bearing gifts. -Equo ne credite, Teucri. Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes
Virgil
#78. We should return to the Greeks, play in the open air: the drama dies of stalls and boxes and evening dress, and people who come to digest their dinner.
Eleanora Duse
#79. Most people know who Pegasus is, for instance, but few realize that he was born from the blood of snake-headed Medusa immediately after she was slain by Perseus. The luminous winged stallion of the Greeks emerged from the life force of womanly wisdom in its darkest, most disturbing aspect,
Linda Kohanov
#80. The Greeks say it's a sin against the gods to love something beyond all reason. And do you remember that they say when someone is loved so, the gods become jealous, and strike the object down in the very fullness of its flower?
Colleen McCullough
#81. The Greeks had the greatest architectonic gifts. Every art has its climax at some point, and here architecture had its high point. Modeling and painting reached their climax elsewhere. Despite the gigantic pyramids, the most wonderful architecture appears in the Greek temple.
Rudolf Steiner
#82. I enquire now as to the genesis of a philologist and assert the following: 1. A young man cannot possibly know what Greeks and Romans are. 2. He does not know whether he is suited for finding out about them.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#83. For me Esoteric Hitlerism is being possessed by the archetypes of the collective unconscious which the Greeks used to call gods.
Miguel Serrano
#84. There are proofs that date back to the Greeks that are still valid today.
Andrew Wiles
#85. The Olympics have just started and the Greeks are already 14 medals in debt.
Conan O'Brien
#86. The games of the ancient Greeks were, in their original institutions, religious solemnities.
Dorothea Brande
#87. What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.
Edward Bond
#88. The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation.
Stella Adler
#89. LYSISTRATA May gentle Love and the sweet Cyprian Queen shower seductive charms on our bosoms and all our person. If only we may stir so amorous a feeling among the men that they stand firm as sticks, we shall indeed deserve the name of peace-makers among the Greeks.
Aristophanes
#90. Everyone - whether it's the Jews, the Greeks, the Catholics - everybody is entitled to religious beliefs and entitled to their traditions.
John Catsimatidis
#91. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts,
Virgil
#92. In Classical Greek the word pathos was the same for both suffering and experience. Those Greeks knew a good joke when they heard one.
Peter Straub
#93. How can any educated person stay away from the Greeks? I have always been far more interested in them than in science.
Albert Einstein
#94. 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
#95. The Greeks said the artist doesn't actually have to travel and look around. You stay where God has put you, and you dig as deep as you can. This is what I've done.
Gian Carlo Menotti
#96. Somebody should have warned the Trojans. Beware of gifts bearing Greeks.
David Gerrold
#97. The vast majority of Greeks accept the need for reform and want to keep our country inside the euro zone.
Evangelos Venizelos
#98. 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
#99. The Jews were destroying both Greeks and Romans. They ate the flesh of their victims, made belts for themselves out of their entrails, and daubed themselves with their blood ... In all, 220,000 men perished in Cyrene and 240,000 in Cyprus, and for this reason no Jew may set foot in Cyprus today.
Cassius Dio
#100. (The Hellenistic Age begins with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and ends in 30 BC, with the death of Cleopatra. It has been perhaps best defined as a Greek era in which the Greeks played no role.)
Stacy Schiff
