Quotes About Greek

“The moral views now associated in the secularist mind with superstition and ignorance in fact follow inexorably from a consistent application of the metaphysical ideas we've traced back through Aquinas and the other Scholastic thinkers to Plato and Aristotle, the very greatest of the Greek founders of the Western intellectual tradition.”

— Edward Feser

“THE "educated Negroes" have the attitude of contempt toward their own people because in their own as well as in their mixed schools Negroes are taught to admire the Hebrew, the Greek, the Latin and the Teuton and to despise the African. Of the hundreds of Negro high schools recently examined by an expert in the United States Bureau of Education only eighteen offer a course taking up the history of the Negro,”

— Carter G. Woodson

“Now that the wars are coming to an end, I wish you to prosper in peace. May all mortals from now on live like one people in concord and for mutual advancement. Consider the world as your country, with laws common to all and where the best will govern irrespective of tribe. I do not distinguish among men, as the narrow-minded do, both among Greeks and Barbarians. I am not interested in the descendance of the citizens or their racial origins. I classify them using one criterion: their virtue. For me every virtuous foreigner is a Greek and every evil Greek worse than a Barbarian. If differences ever develop between you never have recourse to arms, but solve them peacefully. If necessary, I should be your arbitrator.”

— Alexander The Great

“The Greeks believed that it was a citizen's duty to watch a play. It was a kind of work in that it required attention, judgement, patience, all the social virtues."
"And the Greek were conquered by the more practical Romans, Arthur."
"Indeed, the Romans built their bridges, but they also spent many centuries wishing they were Greeks. And they, after all, were conquered by the barbarians, or by their own corrupt and small spirits.”

— Timberlake Wertenbaker

“Even the name, Celt, is not from their own Indo-European language but from Greek. Keltoi, the name given to them by Greek historians, among them Herodotus, means "one who lives in hiding or under cover." The Romans, finding them less mysterious, called them Galli or Gauls, also coming from a Greek word, used by Egyptians as well, hal, meaning "salt." They were the salt people.”

— Mark Kurlansky

“It may be prodigious, but it's all Greek to me!”

— Hergé

“She'd been a hard taskmistress - How can you be a grown-up if you can't look after yourself? she'd challenged - but she had taught him what no Greek mother ever taught a son: the basic humdrum skills required for independence.”

— Alison Fell

“In fact, the most scientific and valid evidence points to an origin for Jesus Christ as mythical and fabulous as that of the Egyptian, Greek and Roman gods of the same general era and area.”

— D.M. Murdock

“Maybe even more important than the D.B.P. [Divine Brotherhood of Pythagoras], ∞-wise is the protomystic Parmenides of Elea (c.515-? BCE), not only because of his distinction between the 'Way of Truth' and 'Way of Seeing' framed the terms of Greek metaphysics and (again) influenced Plato, but because Parmenides' #1 student and defender was the aforementioned Zeno, the most fiendishly clever and upsetting philosopher ever (who can be seen actually kicking Socrates' ass, argumentatively speaking, in Plato's Parmenides).”

— David Foster Wallace

“You know, my whole life I've taken pride in the fact that I'm Greek. But I have to say that after you and Artemis, I'm seriously beginning to hate some of my heritage. Is it congenital or is there something else that has made you such a bitch? (Tory)”

— Sherrilyn Kenyon

“In a way, it's nice to know there are Greek gods out there, because you have somebody to
blame when things go wrong. For instance, when you're walking away from a bus that's just been
attacked by monster hags and blown up by lightning, and it's raining on top of everything else.”

— Rick Riordan

“I thank God," he used to say, "that I was born Greek and not barbarian, freeman and not slave, man and not woman; but above all, that I was born in the age of”

— Will Durant

“My aunt and my mother read to me when I was three from all the old Grimm fairy tales, Andersen fairy tales, and then all the Oz books as I was growing up ... So by the time when I was ten or eleven, I was just full to the brim with these, and the Greek myths, and the Roman myths. And then, of course, I went to Sunday school, and then you take in the Christian myths, which are all fascinating in their own way ... I guess I always tended to be a visual person, and myths are very visual, and I began to draw, and then I felt the urge to carry on these myths.
If I'm anything at all, I'm not really a science-fiction writer - I'm a writer of fairy tales and modern myths about technology.”

— Ray Bradbury

“The ancient Greek definition of happiness was the full use of your powers along lines of excellence.”

— John F. Kennedy

“Religion enabled society to organise itself to debate goodness, just as Greek drama had once done.”

— Edward Bond

“Genetically, I'm pure Greek. Psychologically, environmentally, culturally, by choice, I'm a member of the black community.”

— Johnny Otis

“Once, in his first term, Cartwright had been bold enough to ask him why he was clever, what exercises he did to keep his brain fit. Healey had laughed.
"It's memory, Cartwright, old dear. Memory, the mother of the Muses ... at least that's what thingummy said."
"Who?"
"You know, what's his name, Greek poet chap. Wrote the Theogony ... what was he called? Begins with an 'H'."
"Homer?"
"No, dear. Not Homer, the other one. No, it's gone. Anyway. Memory, that's the key.”

— Stephen Fry

“In the original Greek, one of the meanings of sin [hamartia] is simply to miss the mark.”

— Adyashanti

“Wine was served during the meal (rich and heavy, it was usually diluted with water), but the real drinking began once the food had been cleared away. This was the commissatio-a ceremonial drinking competition at which goblets had to be drained in a single gulp. Healths were drunk. This was the time for conversation and debate, which might last well into the evening, and was the Roman equivalent to the Greek symposium.”

— Anthony Everitt

“The growth of art seems to be in cycles, and often its vigorous lifetime is restricted to a century or two. The periods of distinctive drama, Greek, English, Spanish, fall within such a limit; the schools of painting and sculpture likewise; and, in poetry, the Victorian age or the school of Pope will serve as examples.”

— George Edward Woodberry

“People who look at Greek statues never say it's a shame because they're not complete.”

— Giles Duley

“The Greek philosopher Epictetus said, First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.”

— Laini Taylor

“Everyone asks me why someone Turkish is making Greek yogurt. In Greece, it is not called 'Greek yogurt.' Everywhere in the world it is called 'strained yogurt.' But because it was introduced in this country by a Greek company, they called it 'Greek yogurt.'”

— Hamdi Ulukaya

“Whether you're talking about Shakespeare or, you know, if you look at Greek tragedies. I mean, every playwright, every songwriter, every artist who's ever sat down and been moved to create something, has been living in a context. A political moment that's most often reflected in their work. Even if you're, you know, kind of a nature poet.”

— Sarah Jones

“She began to whisper something in my ear. It's the strangest thing about poetry-you can tell it's poetry, even if you don't speak the language. You can hear Homer's Greek without understanding a word, and you still know it's poetry. I've heard Polish poetry, and Inuit poetry, and I knew what it was without knowing. Her whisper was like that. I didn't know the language, but her words washed through me, perfect, and in my mind's eye I saw towers of glass and diamond; and people with eyes of the palest green; and, unstoppable, beneath every syllable, I could feel the relentless advance of the ocean.”

— Neil Gaiman

“My best vacation was renting a boat and motoring along the Adriatic, going along the Croatian coast, before it became so fashionable. I've also sailed around the Turkish islands, the Greek islands and Sicily.”

— Ian Schrager

“And, of course, it must be asked: is it proper to transact with the Turks for the most reassured of Greek possessions when Greece is under Turkish invasion and subjugation?”

— Melina Mercouri

“Nature's God really descends from an ancient Greek tradition that was passed along to the early modern philosophers. And these were quite radical thinkers who were really challenging the ways of thinking of their time and the established religion.”

— Matthew Stewart

“I used to think when I was younger and writing that each idea had a certain shape and when I started to study Greek and I found the word morphe it was for me just the right word for that, unlike the word shape in English which falls a bit short morphe in greek means the sort of plastic contours that an idea has inside your all your senses when you grasp it the first moment and it always seemed to me that a work should play out that same contour in its form. So I can't start writing something down til I get a sense of that, that morphe. And then it unfolds, I wouldn't say naturally, but it unfolds gropingly by keeping only to the contours of that form whatever it is.”

— Anne Carson

“If you think about it, Jesus was this religious genius who grows up on the Silk Road, and so He's getting from the West all these Greek ideas from Plato about body and soul.”

— Jay Parini

“The task of defining Jesus's message fell instead to a new crop of educated, urbanized, Greek-speaking Diaspora Jews who would become the primary vehicles for the expansion of the new faith. As these extraordinary men and women, many of them immersed in Greek philosophy and Hellenistic thought, began to reinterpret Jesus's message so as to make it more palatable both to their fellow Greek-speaking Jews and to their gentile neighbors in the Diaspora, they gradually transformed Jesus from a revolutionary zealot to a Romanized demigod, from a man who tried and failed to free the Jews from Roman oppression to a celestial being wholly uninterested in any earthly matter.”

— Reza Aslan

“Lull me to sleep, ye winds, whose fitful sound
Seems from some faint Aeolian harp-string caught;
Seal up the hundred wakeful eyes of thought
As Hermes with his lyre in sleep profound
The hundred wakeful eyes of Argus bound;
For I am weary, and am overwrought
With too much toil, with too much care distraught,
And with the iron crown of anguish crowned.
Lay thy soft hand upon my brow and cheek,
O peaceful Sleep! until from pain released
I breathe again uninterrupted breath!
Ah, with what subtile meaning did the Greek
Call thee the lesser mystery at the feast
Whereof the greater mystery is death!”

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“I'm Greek. My body produces feta cheese.”

— Zach Galifianakis

“Reverend Samuel H. Weed, at my request selected two Greek words, 'cheir' and 'praktikos', meaning when combined, 'done by hand.' From which I coined the word, 'CHIROPRACTIC.'”

— Daniel D. Palmer

“In Greek mythology, Antaeus was a giant who was strong as long as he had contact with the earth. When he was lifted from the earth he lost strength. So it is with engineers. They must not become isolated from the real world.”

— Hyman Rickover

“White folks was in the caves while we [blacks] was building empires ... We built pyramids before Donald Trump ever knew what architecture was ... we taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.”

— Al Sharpton

“Translating from one language to another, unless it is from Greek and Latin, the queens of all languages, is like looking at Flemish tapestries from the wrong side, for although the figures are visible, they are covered by threads that obscure them, and cannot be seen with the smoothness and color of the right side.”

— Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

“Books that Uncle bought in Odessa or acquired in Heidelberg, books that he discovered in Lausanne or found in Berlin or Warsaw, books he ordered from America and books the like of which exist nowhere but in the Vatican Library, in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, classical and modern Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, medieval Arabic, Russian, English, German, Spanish, Polish, French, Italian, and languages and dialects I had never even heard of, like Ugaritic and Slovene, Maltese and Old Church Slavonic.”

— Amos Oz

“Atticus's rule was that while he would never lend a book, any of his friends were free whenever they liked to come up and read or even make their own copies. And it was here, beneath a head of Aristotle, that we found Atticus reclining that afternoon, dressed in the loose white tunic of a Greek, and reading, if I remember rightly, a volume of Kyriai doxai, the principal doctrines of Epicurus. He came straight to the point. I was at dinner last”

— Robert Harris

“Hysteria derives from the Greek word for "uterus," and the extreme emotional state it denotes was once thought to be due to a wandering womb; men were by definition”

— Rebecca Solnit

“The world no doubt is the best or most serviceable schoolmaster; but the world's curriculum does not include Latin and Greek.”

— E. V. Lucas

“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

“The teachings of Osho, in fact, encompass many religions, but he is not defined by any of them. He is an illuminating speaker on Zen, Taoism, Tibetan Buddhism, Christianity and ancient Greek philosophy ... and also a prolific author.”

— Nevill Drury

“My point is, as civilization is progressing, Mosaic law came down from the mountain, was handed to civilization, it emerged through the Greek civilization as the Greeks were developing their Age of Reason. And we're talking about the foundation of Western Civilization, and almost concurrently with that, Roman law was emerging as well.”

— Steve King

“Negativland through rose colored glasses. If 'mice are from Mars,' Greek Buck is from Venus.”

— Terre Thaemlitz

“You get most out of walking by going along briskly, swinging the arms and breathing deeply. It also helps promote the circulation of blood to the brain. The Greek philosophers promenaded as they philosophized.”

— Paul Dudley White

“Philo of Alexandria introduced in the first century what has been described as the 'Hellenizing of the Old Testament,' or the allegorical method of exegesis. By this, as Erdmann observes, the Bible narrative was found to contain a deeper, and particularly an allegorical interpretation, in addition to its literal interpretation; this was not conscious disingenuousness but a natural mode of amalgamating the Greek philosophic with the Hebraic doctrines.”

— Philo

“The Church was redeemed at the price of Christ's blood. Jew or Greek, it makes no difference; but if he has believed, he must circumcise himself from his sins [in baptism (Col. 2:11-12)] so that he can be saved ... for no one ascends into the kingdom of heaven except through the sacrament of baptism ... "Unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God"”

— Ambrose

“One Greek city state had a fundamental law: anyone proposing revisions to the constitution did so with a noose around his neck. If his proposal lost he was instantly hanged.”

— Aristotle

“It all started off with stirring speeches, Greek columns, the thrill of something new. Now all that's left is a presidency adrift, surviving on slogans that already seem tired, grasping at a moment that has already passed, like a ship trying to sail on yesterday's wind.”

— Paul Ryan