Quotes by Greek Authors - Page 3

Everything is fair in love and art.
Christos Tsiolkas
The swing between confronting the dangerous or brutal and the beautiful or the kind is one of the elements of being human that I have battled with all my life. That mixture of love and savagery is there in every important relationship in our lives: with parents, siblings, lovers, our closest friends. I have always wanted to be faithful to that truth.
Christos Tsiolkas
Whatever fate ordains, danger or hurt, or death predetermined, nothing can avert.
Theognis
Again, where the people are absolute rulers of the land, they rejoice in having the openness and exuberance of youth, while a tyrant counts this a danger, and seeks to slay or silence those possessed of spirit, while the discreet fear his power and violence.
Euripides
Sameron adion asoI shall sing a sweeter song tomorrow
Theocritus
Literature is the real life of imaginary people.
Stefanos Livos
He whom the gods love dies young.
Menander
The noble man is chiefly concerned with wisdom and friendship; of these, the former is a mortal good, the latter and immortal one.
Epicurus
Do not trouble about those who practice philosophy, whether they are good or bad; but examine the thing itself well and carefully. And if philosophy appears a bad thing to you, turn every man from it, not only your sons; but if it appears to you such as I think it to be, take courage, pursue it, and practice it, as the saying is, 'both you and your house.
Socrates
for the best possible state of your soul, as I say to you: Wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good for men, both individually and collectively.
Plato
When you do anything from a clear judgment that it ought to be done, never shrink from being seen to do it, even though the world should misunderstand it; for if you are not acting rightly, shun the action itself; if you are, why fear those who wrongly censure you?
Epictetus
The spiritual eyesight improves as the physical eyesight declines.
Plato
Prosperity is not just scale adversity is the only balance to weigh friends.
Plutarch
It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours.
Diogenes of Sinope
In peace sons bury their fathers in war fathers bury their sons.
Herodotus
Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.
Socrates
It is the greatest and the tallest of trees that the gods bring low with bolts and thunder. For the gods love to thwart whatever is greater than the rest. They do not suffer pride in anyone but themselves.
Herodotus
When people lack true culture or are devoid of innovative ideas, they speak about wine, various brands of alcoholic beverages, or the quality of soap.
Dimitris Mita
Somebody who is Christ's must love Christ, and when he loves Christ he is delivered from the Devil, from hell and from death.
Elder Porphyrios
I would prefer as a friend a good man who is ignorant than one more clever who is evil too.
Euripides
The Earth is cylindrical, three times as wide as it is deep, and only the upper part is inhabited. But this Earth is isolated in space, and the sky is a complete sphere in the center of which is located, unsupported, our cylinder, the Earth, situated at an equal distance from all the points of the sky.
Anaximander
Put a man on the brink of the abyss and - in the unlikely event that she doesn't fall into it - he will become a mystic or a madman... Which is probably the same thing!
Apostolos Doxiadis
An ardent desire to go took possession of me once more. Not because I wanted to leave - I was quite all right on this Cretan coast, and felt happy and free there and I needed nothing - but because I have always been consumed with one desire; to touch and see as much as possible of the earth and the sea before I die.
Nikos Kazantzakis
A straight line is said to have been cut in extreme and mean ratio when, as the whole line is to the greater segment, so is the greater to the lesser.
Euclid
What would have become of Hercules do you think if there had been no lion, hydra, stag or boar - and no savage criminals to rid the world of? What would he have done in the absence of such challenges? Obviously he would have just rolled over in bed and gone back to sleep. So by snoring his life away in luxury and comfort he never would have developed into the mighty Hercules. And even if he had, what good would it have done him? What would have been the use of those arms, that physique, and that noble soul, without crises or conditions to stir into him action?
Epictetus
It's during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.
Aristotle Onassis
For this will cure him that is sick, and rouse him that is in dumps; one that has loved, it will remember of it; one that has not, it will instruct. For there was never any yet that wholly could escape love, and never shall there be any, never so long as beauty shall be, never so long as eyes can see. But help me that God to write the passions of others; and while I write, keep me in my own right wits.
Longus
And yet even in reaching for the beautiful there is beauty, and also in suffering whatever it is that one suffers en route.
Plato
One who knows how to show and to accept kindness will be a friend better than any possession.
Sophocles
When health is absent, wisdom cannot reveal itself, art cannot manifest, strength cannot fight, wealth becomes useless, and intelligence cannot be applied.
Herophilus
The philosopher whose dealings are with divine order himself acquires the characteristics of order and divinity.
Plato
For Time calls only once, and that determines all.
Sophocles
You need to take some acting classes to learn to hide your huge crush on my husband better
Mary Papas
[W]hen men have both done and suffered injustice and have had experience of both, not being able to avoid the one and obtain the other, they think that they had better agree among themselves to have neither; hence there arise laws and mutual covenants; and that which is ordained by law is termed by them lawful and just. This they affirm to be the origin and nature of justice;—it is a mean or compromise, between the best of all, which is to do injustice and not be punished, and the worst of all, which is to suffer injustice without the power of retaliation; and justice, being at a middle point between the two, is tolerated not as a good, but as the lesser evil…
Plato
I must die. Must I then die lamenting? I must be put in chains. Must I then also lament? I must go into exile. Does any man then hinder me from going with smiles and cheerfulness and contentment?
Epictetus
[W]hen men have both done and suffered injustice and have had experience of both, not being able to avoid the one and obtain the other, they think that they had better agree among themselves to have neither; hence there arise laws and mutual covenants; and that which is ordained by law is termed by them lawful and just. This they affirm to be the origin and nature of justice;—it is a mean or compromise,between the best of all, which is to do injustice and not be punished, and the worst of all, which is to suffer injustice without the power of retaliation; and justice, being at a middle point between the two, is tolerated not as a good, but as the lesser evil…
Plato
He’d never thought of death like that, like it’s some sort of other life that you can hope for, dream of. Escape to. That it can rescue you.
M.C. Frank
For sensible men I prepare only three kraters: one for health (which they drink first), the second for love and pleasure, and the third for sleep. After the third one is drained, wise men go home. The fourth krater is not mine any more - it belongs to bad behaviour; the fifth is for shouting; the sixth is for rudeness and insults; the seventh is for fights; the eighth is for breaking the furniture; the ninth is for depression; the tenth is for madness and unconsciousness.
Eubulus
Indeed it is generally the case that men are readier to call rogues clever than simpletons honest, and are ashamed of being the second as they are proud of being the first.
Thucydides
Is it true; is it kind, or is it necessary?
Socrates
The test of any man lies in action.
Pindar
Accustom yourself to the belief that death is of no concern to us, since all good and evil lie in sensation and sensation ends with death. Therefore the true belief that death is nothing to us makes a mortal life happy, not by adding to it an infinite time, but by taking away the desire for immortality. For there is no reason why the man who is thoroughly assured that there is nothing to fear in death should find anything to fear in life. So, too, he is foolish who says that he fears death, not because it will be painful when it comes, but because the anticipation of it is painful; for that which is no burden when it is present gives pain to no purpose when it is anticipated. Death, the most dreaded of evils, is therefore of no concern to us; for while we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist. It is therefore nothing either to the living or to the dead since it is not present to the living, and the dead no longer are.
Epicurus
The sooner you make your first five thousand mistakes the sooner you will beable to correct them.
Kimon Nicolaides
Do not waste your pity on a scamp.
Aesop
As a moth gnaws a garment, so doth envy consume a [person].
John Chrysostom
I read your diary. I KNOW.
Mary Papas
As long as Man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.
Pythagoras
If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman.
Socrates
Time, as it grows old, teaches all things.
Aeschylus
... man by nature is not a wild or unsocial creature, neither was he born so, but makes himself what he naturally is not, by vicious habit; and that again on the other side, he is civilized and grows gentle by a change of place, occupation, and manner of life, as beasts themselves that are wild by nature, become tame and tractable by housing and gentler usage...
Plutarch
It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded but the fear of pain or death.
Epictetus
Nothing forces us to knowWhat we do not want to knowExcept pain
Aeschylus
Life's true face is the skull.
Nikos Kazantzakis
May the dead forgive me, I can do no otherBut as I am commanded; to do more is madness." - Ismene
Sophocles
All is flux
Heraclitus
It seems to me that whatever else is beautiful apart from absolute Beauty is beautiful because it partakes of that absolute Beauty, and for no other reason... [I]t is by Beauty that beautiful things are beautiful.
Socrates
An Ass put on a Lion's skin and wentAbout the foreset with much merriment,Scaring the foolish beasts by brooks and rocks,Till at last he tried to scare the Fox. But Reynard, hearing from beneath the mane That Raucous voice so petulant and vain,Remarked. O' Ass, I too would run away,But that I know your old familiar bray'.That's just the way with asses, just the way.
Aesop
There is no sickness worse for me than words that to be kind must lie.
Aeschylus
Similarly with regard to truth, won't we say that a soul is maimed if it hates a voluntary falsehood, cannot endure to have one in itself, and is greatly angered when it exists in others, but is nonetheless content to accept an involuntary falsehood, isn't angry when it is caught being ignorant, and bears its lack of learning easily, wallowing in it like a pig?
Plato
You know all about love, but that is not enough. You must also learn that hate comes from God as well, that it too is in the Lord's service. And in times like these, with the world fallen to the state it has, hate serves God more than love.
Nikos Kazantzakis