A people’s literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.
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.
Great art is the expression of a solution of the conflict between the demands of the world without and that within.
In theology the conservative temper tends to formalism.
There is no better indication of what the people of any period are like than the plays they go to see.
Mind and spirit together make up that which separates us from the rest of the animal world, that which enables a man to know the truth and that which enables him to die for the truth.
I came to the Greeks early, and I found answers in them. Greece’s great men let all their acts turn on the immortality of the soul. We don’t really act as if we believed in the soul’s immortality and that’s why we are where we are today.
He was there beside her, yet she was far away from him, aone with her outraged love and her ruined life.
All things are at odds when God sets a thinker loose on the planet.
Tell one your thoughts, but beware of two. All know what is known to three.
Theories that go counter to the facts of human nature are foredoomed.
When the world is storm-driven and bad things happen, then we need to know all the strong fortresses of the spirit which men have built through the ages.
To be able to be caught up into the world of thought-that is educated.
None so good that he has no faults, None so wicked that he is worth naught.
Myths are early science, the result of men’s first trying to explain what they saw around them.
The temper of mind that sees tragedy in life has not for its opposite the temper that sees joy. The opposite pole to the tragic view of life is the sordid view.
Poetry and preaching do not go well together; when the preacher mounts the pulpit the poet usually goes away.
Reality has actually very little to do with truth; there is no necessary connection between the two.
A word is no light matter. Words have with truth been called fossil poetry, each, that is, a symbol of a creative thought.
The heterodoxy of one generation is the orthodoxy of the next.