Top 100 Quotes About The Greeks
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. The Greeks could be a crushing bore. I recommend dressing everyone in combat fatigues or S&M gear.
Sophocles
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. She is an excellent creature, but she can never remember which came first, the Greeks or the Romans.
Benjamin Disraeli
#8. The Greeks - who knew everything - knew that immortality without youth was to be feared rather than desired.
Erica Jong
#9. 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
#10. 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
#12. The adoration of human nature by the Greeks appeared in Greek plastic art and was the cause of its excellence.
Elie Metchnikoff
#13. Rule No. 41. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks.
Michael Pollan
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. The Greeks not only face facts. They have no desire to escape from them.
Edith Hamilton
#22. If my body is a Temple, then The Greeks and Romans ransacked it years ago
Josh Stern
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. The Greeks saw everything in forms which we are trying to ascertain as law, and classify as cause.
Margaret Fuller
#26. 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
#27. What can we expect from nations still less advanced in civilization than the Greeks?
Jean-Baptiste Say
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. [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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. Drink, live like the Greeks, eat, gorge.
Plautus
#42. 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
#43. The Muse gave the Greeks genius and the art of the well-turned phrase.
Horace
#44. 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
#45. The greatest tragedies were written by the Greeks and Shakespeare ... neither knew chocolate.
Sandra Boynton
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. I guess the Greeks weren't big fans of online shopping, because they had lots of wars with the Amazons.
Rick Riordan
#49. 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
#50. Satire among the Romans, but not among the Greeks, was a bitter invective poem.
John Dryden
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. For me Esoteric Hitlerism is being possessed by the archetypes of the collective unconscious which the Greeks used to call gods.
Miguel Serrano
#60. There are proofs that date back to the Greeks that are still valid today.
Andrew Wiles
#61. The Olympics have just started and the Greeks are already 14 medals in debt.
Conan O'Brien
#62. What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.
Edward Bond
#63. The Greeks were realists. They saw the beauty of common things and were content with it.
Edith Hamilton
#64. Whatever, in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is an anachronism is due to mediaevalism.
Oscar Wilde
#65. A lot of people don't know that my background is completely classical. For a while there, I was all about Moliere and the Greeks and Brecht and Tennessee Williams.
Katy Mixon
#66. 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
#67. As far as the job of President goes, its rewarding and I've given before this group the definition of happiness for the Greeks. I'll define it again: the full use of your powers along lines of excellence. I find, therefore, that the Presidency provides some happiness.
John F. Kennedy
#68. For the Greeks, there was no single canonical version of creation, but a number of overlapping stories.
Neil MacGregor
#69. 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
#70. The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.
E. M. Forster
#72. He also said that he marvelled that among the Greeks, those who were skilful in a thing contend together; but those who have no such skill act as judges of the contest.
Diogenes Laertius
#73. The Greeks got into Troy by trying, my pretties; everything's done by trying.
Theocritus
#74. The Greeks called this place the omphalos, literally the belly button of the earth, though they never specified whether it was an innie or an outie.
Rick Riordan
#75. Hollywood grew to be the most flourishing factory of popular mythology since the Greeks.
Alistair Cooke
#76. It is almost as if the Greeks, at a time when they were about to disappear from history, wished to avenge themselves for their own incomprehension by imposing on a whole section of mankind the limitations of their own mental horizons.
Rene Guenon
#77. The Greeks had considered hope the final evil in Pandora's box. They also gave us an image of perfect nobility: a human being lovingly doing her duty to another human being despite all threats, and going to her death with pride and courage, not deterred by any hope - Antigone.
Walter Kaufmann
#78. Eventually, Aristotle appeared among the Greeks. He improved the methods of logic and systematized its problems and details. He assigned to logic its proper place as the first philosophical discipline and the introduction to philosophy. Therefore he is called the First Teacher.
Ibn Khaldun
#79. The reason the Greeks don't pay taxes is they don't trust where their taxes are going, because they know these other Greeks are taking money from the state for doing nothing. It's an essentially corrupt society.
Michael Lewis
#80. (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
#81. 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
#82. To me there is no past or future in 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 that it ever was.
Pablo Picasso
#83. The squabbles of philandering Zeus and shrewish Hera are the Greeks' comment on married life.
Mason Cooley
#84. The civilized East is immeasurably in advance of any savage tribes; the Greeks and Romans have improved upon the East; the Christian nations have been stricter in their views of the marriage relation than any of the ancients.
Plato
#85. The greater the monument, the greater the man. The stone the Greeks quarry for his grave is huge and white, stretching up to the sky. A C H I L L E S, it reads. It will stand for him, and speak to all who pass: he lived and died, and lives again in memory.
Madeline Miller
#86. Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state.
Thomas Jefferson
#87. The superiority of the Greeks seems not so much the result of climate and society, as of the simplicity of their end and the uniformity of their means.
Henry Fuseli
#88. I've never studied the classics, but I'd like to. My teacher offered to show me how the Greeks were able to sculpt someone perfectly. From there, you can go off and experiment - sort of like jazz. Once you learn to play anything, you can break the form and go and do something even bigger.
Channing Tatum
#89. For the sake of historical truth I must verify that only the Greeks, of all the adversaries who confronted us, fought with bold courage and highest disregard of death.
Adolf Hitler
#90. Very few societies on Earth developed science as we know it today. On the other hand, the number is not zero - the Greeks, the Chinese, and the Maya did, among others. Once invented, science proved so useful that it spread like mold on a petri dish.
Seth Shostak
#91. From Pandora's Box, where all the ills of humanity swarmed, the Greeks drew out hope after all the others, as the most dreadful of all. I know no more stirring symbol; for, contrary to the general belief, hope equals resignation. And to live is not to resign oneself.
Albert Camus
#92. There was a time when all dark-skinned people were called Ethiopians, for the Greeks referred to Africa as, 'The Land Of The Burnt-Face People.'
John Henrik Clarke
#93. To make America the greatest is my goal, so I beat the Russian and I beat the Pole. And for the U.S.A. won the medal of gold. The Greeks said, 'You're better than the Cassius of old.'
Muhammad Ali
#94. We were discussing civilization and the fact that young men among the Greeks at that time were idiots and uneducated, so the men had emotional and friendly relationships with members of their own sex.
Marion Zimmer Bradley
#95. I love Shakespeare and the Greeks - learned a lot studying them at one time.
Daniel Woodrell
#96. The theatre, our theatre, comes from the Greeks.
Edward Bond
#97. Greece isn't a democracy now it's run through a troika - three foreign officials that fly into Athens airport and tell the Greeks what they can and can't do.
Nigel Farage
#98. Drink," says the White Logic. "The Greeks believed that the gods gave them wine so that they might forget the miserableness of existence.
Jack London
#99. It was a Roman who said it was sweet to die for one's country. The Greeks never said it was sweet to die for anything. They had no vital lies.
Edith Hamilton
#100. Creation stories, so central in the religions of the Middle East, play a surprisingly marginal part in Greek myth. The Greeks had nothing to set alongside the resounding 'In the beginning' in the book of Genesis, where one eternal God creates the universe out of nothing.
Neil MacGregor
