The Greek temple is the creation, par excellence, of mind and spirit in equilibrium.
A man without fear cannot be a slave.
The modern mind is never popular in its own day. People hate being made to think.
The Greeks were realists. They saw the beauty of common things and were content with it.
An ancient writer says of Homer that he touched nothing without somehow honoring and glorifying it.
Liberty depends on self-restraint. Freedom is freedom only when controlled and limited.
Kiss me yet once again, the last, long kiss, Until I draw your soul within my lips And drink down all your love.
This idea the Greeks had of him is best summed up not by a poet, but by a philosopher, Plato: “Love – Eros – makes his home in men’s hearts, but not in every heart, for where there is hardness he departs. His greatest glory is that he cannot do wrong nor allow it; force never comes near him. For all men serve him of their own free will. And he whom Love touches not walks in darkness.
Genius moves to creation, not to destruction. Only a very few have combined both.
Tragedy cannot take place around a type. Suffering is the most individualizing thing on earth.
The early Greek mythologists transformed a world full of fear into a world full of beauty.
Tell him, too,” she said, “never to pluck flowers, and to think every bush may be a goddess in disguise.
He was softly breathing his life away, the dark blood flowing down his skin of snow and his eyes growing heavy and dim. She kissed him, but Adonis knew not that she kissed him as he died.
To the Greeks, the word “character” first referred to the stamp upon a coin. By extension, man was the coin, and the character trait was the stamp imprinted upon him. To them, that trait, for example bravery, was a share of something all mankind had, rather than means of distinguishing one from the whole.
A magical universe was so terrifying because it was so irrational. There was no cause and effect anywhere.
It is the men of this land who are bloodthirsty and they lay their own guilt on the gods.
Far better die,” she said. She took in her hand a casket which held herbs for killing, but as she sat there with it, she thought of life and the delightful things that are in the world; and the sun seemed sweeter than ever before.
Intelligence did not figure largely in anything he did and was often conspicuously absent.
If Hesiod did write it, then a humble peasant, living on a lonely farm far from cities, was the first man in Greece to wonder how everything had happened, the world, the sky, the gods, mankind, and to think out an explanation. Homer never wondered about anything.
The fifth race is that which is now upon the earth: the iron race. They live in evil times and their nature too has much of evil, so that they never have rest from toil and sorrow. As the generations pass, they grow worse; sons are always inferior to their fathers. A time will come when they have grown so wicket that they will worship power, might will be right to them, and reverence for the good will cease to be.