Greek Quotes
82 quotes
"Don't feel bad, I'm usually about to die."
"She glared at me like she was about to punch me, but then she did something that surprised me even more. She kissed me."Be careful seaweed brain."She said putting on her invisible cap and disappearing.I probably would have sat there all day, trying to remember my name, but then the sea demons came."
"Pulvis et umbra sumus. (We are but dust and shadow.)"
"Myth, mist, and mystery all add to the illusion of love. If you need me I’ll be by the fog machine wearing a tunic and writing an epic poem in Greek."
"Call no man happy until he is dead."
"if being is many, it must be both like and unlike, and this is impossible, for neither can the like be unlike, nor the unlike like"
"Much later, when I discussed the problem with Einstein, he remarked that the introduction of the cosmological term was the biggest blunder he ever made in his life. But this 'blunder,' rejected by Einstein, is still sometimes used by cosmologists even today, and the cosmological constant denoted by the Greek letter Λ rears its ugly head again and again and again."
"For knowing is spoken of in three ways: it may be either universal knowledge or knowledge proper to the matter in hand or actualising such knowledge; consequently three kinds of error also are possible."
"All teaching and all intellectual learning come about from already existing knowledge."
"Πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται φύσει. Σημεῖον δ᾽ ἡ τῶν αἰσθήσεων ἀγάπησις: καὶ γὰρ χωρὶς τῆς χρείας ἀγαπῶνται δι᾽ αὑτάς, καὶ μάλιστα τῶν ἄλλων ἡ διὰ τῶν ὀμμάτων. Οὐ γὰρ μόνον ἵνα πράττωμεν ἀλλὰ καὶ μηθὲν μέλλοντες πράττειν τὸ ὁρᾶν αἱρούμεθα ἀντὶ πάντων ὡς εἰπεῖν τῶν ἄλλων. Αἴτιον δ᾽ ὅτι μάλιστα ποιεῖ γνωρίζειν ἡμᾶς αὕτη τῶν αἰσθήσεων καὶ πολλὰς δηλοῖ διαφοράς."
"He who chooses to know for the sake of knowing will choose most readily that which is most truly knowledge."
"Thales was asked what was very difficult; he said: "To know one's self.""
"Πᾶσα τε ἐπιστήμη χωριζομένη δικαιοσύνης καὶ τῆς ἄλλης ἀρετῆς πανουργία, οὐ σοφία φαίνεται."
"Ἕν οἶδα, ὅτι οὐδὲν οἶδα."
"Φεῦ φεῦ, φρονεῖν ὡς δεινὸν ἔνθα μὴ τέλη / λύῃ φρονοῦντι..."
"When health is absent, wisdom cannot reveal itself, art cannot manifest, strength cannot fight, wealth becomes useless, and intelligence cannot be applied."
"She glared at me like she was about to punch me, but then she did something that surprised me even more. She kissed me."Be careful seaweed brain." She said putting on her invisible cap and disappearing.I probably would have sat there all day, trying to remember my name, but then the sea demons came."
"Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn't see their thoughts as belonging to them. When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love. Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy, but now they call this free will.At least the ancient Greeks were being honest."
"…Perses, hear me out on justice, and take what I have to say to heart; cease thinking of violence. For the son of Kronos, Zeus, has ordained this law to men: that fishes and wild beasts and winged birds should devour one another, since there is no justice in them; but to mankind he gave justice which proves for the best."
"Derisively, Ronan said, 'No. The ancient Greeks didn't have a word for Blue.'Everyone at the table looked at him.'What the hell, Ronan?' said Adam.'It's hard to imagine," Gansey mused, 'how this evidently successful classical education never seems to make it into your school papers.''They never ask the right questions,' Ronan replied."
"There are few things more mysterious than endings. I mean, for example, when did the Greek gods end, exactly? Was there a day when Zeus waved magisterially down from Olympus and Aphrodite and her lover Ares, and her crippled husband Hephaestus ) I always felt sorry for him), and all the rest got rolled up like a worn-out carpet?"
"You know, Mac,”Cadmus said still looking out the window. “We may have to work on the way we tell our story …apparently it’s not amusing enough.” “I’ll try to include a joke between ‘he bled to death’and ‘the city burned’.”Machaon responded tersely."
"The whole of life but labours in the dark.For just as children tremble and fear allIn the viewless dark, so even we at timesDread in the light so many things that beNo whit more fearsome than what children feign,Shuddering, will be upon them in the dark.This terror then, this darkness of the mind,Not sunrise with its flaring spokes of light,Nor glittering arrows of morning can disperse,But only nature's aspect and her law."
"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."
"It is not easy to soothe the immortal gods from their vengeance."
"Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer’s 'Odyssey' as if it were the sweet body of a woman."
"Rumours voiced by women come to nothing."
"If a Greek woman tells you to do something, you do it."
Dave Barry, Best. State. Ever.: A Florida Man Defends His Homeland
"White IrisThe iris danced acrossthe ancient Grecian skiesgliding with her embossedsatiny milken sides ..."
"It seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate."
"The true Epicurean cultivates the capacity to take pleasure in simple things, while those around him chase pleasure in more things."
"Stunned by how little he'd gotten over her and she'd gotten over him, he walked away understanding, as outside his reading in classical Greek drama he'd never had to understood before, how easily life can be one thing rather than another and how accidentally a destiny is made..."
"I have seen or heard of no other man whom destiny treated with such enmity as it did Philoktetes"
"As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or do not exist. For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge, both the obscurity of the question and the shortness of human life."
"You must remember that no one lives a life free from pain and suffering."
"If a separate personal Paradise exists for each of us, mine must be irreparably planted with trees of words which the wind silvers like poplars, by people who see their confiscated justice given back, and by birds that even in the midst of truth of death insist on singing in Greek and saying eros, eros, eros."
"The word ecology is derived from the Greek oikos, the word for home."
"Let's stop kidding ourselves that Greek debt is the Euro's key problem. With Greece gone, who's next ?"
"Hero,” said Machaon to his sister who was still muttering to her gods. “Please stop. Surely the gods would have heard you by now … let’s try not to annoy them."
"Light means knowledge in the Greek language it can also be translated as illumination, knowledge, insight, understanding and wisdom"
"Come back. Even as a shadow, even as a dream."
"At morn we buried Melanippus; as the sun set the maiden Basilo died by her own hand, as she could not endure to lay her brother on the pyre and live; and the house beheld a two-fold woe, and all Cyrene bowed her head, to see the home of happy children made desolate."
"Life is Not a perpetual climb towards Greatness.For our family, ourselves, and friends,It is but sad Decay, so,Let every girl die after her Hebé (Ἥβη).And every man after his Aristeia(ἀριστεία)."
"I heard the voice of that bird, son of Polypas, whose piercing outcryand whose arrival announces to men the season when fieldsare plowed, and the voice of her broke the heart that darkens within me,since other men posess my flourishing acres now,and not for me are the mules dragging the plow through the grainland,since I have given my heart to the restless seafarer's life."
"But they could neither of them persuade me, for there is nothing dearer to a man than his own country and his parents, and however splendid a home he may have in a foreign country, if it be far from father or mother, he does not care about it."
"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."
"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."
"Good fortune will elevate even petty minds, and gives them the appearance of a certain greatness and stateliness, as from their high place they look down upon the world; but the truly noble and resolved spirit raises itself, and becomes more conspicuous in times of disaster and ill fortune..."
"The original text of the Bible was perhaps written in Hebrew and Aramaic and later translated into Greek."
Sudhir Ahluwalia, Holy Herbs : Modern Connections to Ancient Plants
"You’re probably wondering: why were Medusa’s kids a golden warrior and a winged horse? And how had they been stuck in Medusa’s body all those years?Heck, I dunno. I’m just telling you how it was. You want stuff to make sense, you’re in the wrong universe"
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