Quotes by Greek Authors - Page 5

Have I added to their building blocks, shoring them up with strength and their own magnificence? Have I shown them enough color? Did I let them have enough ice cream and leave them alone enough without my anxieties? How can we know which is the right way? We have to go with our inner instincts and the feeling in our bones. But I can contribute to their growing cells, show them some foods that are better than others, walk with them, and encourage their own tastes. I can teach them to love and appreciate food, help them treat their bodies like gold, listen to them wanting more or less. The rest I have to trust.
Tessa Kiros
Not for the first time I find our lives are a shadow, and I am not afraid to say that people who think they have everything figured out and are masters of logic - they are responsible for the greatest folly. No human being is happy. Strike it rich and you are luckier than your neighbor - but happy, never.
Euripides
There's nothing in the world so demoralizing as money.
Sophocles
good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws
Plato
Best to live lightly unthinkingly.
Sophocles
The poets are only the interpreters of the gods.
Socrates
if someone got to see the Beautiful itself, absolute, pure, unmixed, not polluted by human flesh or colors or any other great nonsense of mortality, but if he could see the divine Beauty itself in its one form? Do you think it would be a poor life for a human being to look there and to behold it by that which he ought, and to be with it? Or haven't you remembered that in that life alone, when he looks at Beauty in the only way what Beauty can be seen - only then will it become possible for him to give birth no to images of virtue but to true virtue. The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given birth to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he.
Plato
Great wealth can make a man no happier than moderate means, unless he has the luck to continue in propsperity to the end. Many very rich men have been unfortunate, and many with a modest competence have had good luck. The former are better off than the latter in two respects only, whereas the poor but lucky man has the advantage in many ways; for though the rich have the means to satisfy their appetites and to bear calamities, and the poor have not, the poor, if they are lucky, are more likely to keep clear of trouble, and will have besides the blessings of a sound body, health, freedom from trouble, fine children, and good looks.Now if a man thus favoured died as he has lived, he will be just the one you are looking for: the only sort of person who deserves to be called happy. But mark this: until he is dead, keep the word “happy” in reserve. Till then, he is not happy, but only lucky.
Herodotus
For in other ways a woman is full of fear, defenseless, dreads the sight of cold steel; but, when once she is wronged in the matter of love, no other soul can hold so many thoughts of blood.
Euripides
Mortal as I am, I know that I am born for a day. But when I follow at my pleasure the serried multitude of the stars in their circular course, my feet no longer touch the earth.
Ptolemy
Because the new the stories we tell, the art we make, the rockets we build, will influence the future that shapes our present.
Natasha Tsakos
There is a Revolution, it’s a human and technological revolution
Natasha Tsakos
Another such victory over the Romans, and we are undone.
Pyrrhus
Just as we can’t fully explain what is beautiful, so we can’t fully explain why we are friends with someone in a way that will make the grounds of our attraction obvious to another — and even to ourselves. Our efforts always leave something out. And it is what is always left out that we try to gesture toward when we say that it is not something ABOUT our friends that we love but our friends THEMSELVES. But the self that we love is always just one one step behind whatever we can actually articulate. And so we are faced with a choice between saying something that seems informative but is never enough of an explanation ('loyal, practical, unworldly and so on') and saying something else that seems like an explanation but is completely uninformative ('the individual, in the uniqueness and integrity of his or her individuality').
Alexander Nehamas
Only a philosopher's mind grows wings, since its memory always keeps it as close as possible to those realities by being close to which the gods are divine.
Plato
In fact she herself once blamed meKyprogeneiabecause I prayed this word:I want.
Sappho
But virtue, by the bare statement of its actions, can so affect men's minds as to create at once both admiration of the things done and desire to imitate the doers of them. The goods of fortune we would possess and would enjoy; those of virtue we long to practise and exercise. We are content to receive the former from others, the latter we wish others to experience from us. Moral good is a practical stimulus; it is no sooner seen, than it inspires an impulse to practice, and influences the mind and character not by a mere imitation which we look at, but by the statement of the fact creates a moral purpose which we form.
Plutarch
You, you insolent brazen bitch—you really dare to shake that monstrous spear in Father’s face?
Homer
Ask not that events should happen as you will but let your will be that events should happen as they do and you shall have peace.
Epictetus
Be content with your lot one cannot be first in everything.
Aesop
Stupidity is doomed,therefore, to cringeat every syllableof wisdom.
Heraclitus
The sun is new each day.
Heraclitus
It seems that nonsense is the only sensible recourse to remedy the nonsense of society’s accepted normalcy
Natasha Tsakos
I have gazed so much on beautythat my eyes overflow with it.
Constantinos P. Cavafis
God is a circle whose center is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere.
Empedocles
Those swift to think are not always secure.
Sophocles
With the passage of days in this godly isolation [desert], my heart grew calm. It seemed to fill with answers. I did not ask questions any more; I was certain. Everything - where we came from, where we are going, what our purpose is on earth - struck me as extremely sure and simple in this God-trodden isolation. Little by little my blood took on the godly rhythm. Matins, Divine Liturgy, vespers, psalmodies, the sun rising in the morning and setting in the evening, the constellations suspended like chandeliers each night over the monastery: all came and went, came and went in obedience to eternal laws, and drew the blood of man into the same placid rhythm. I saw the world as a tree, a gigantic poplar, and myself as a green leaf clinging to a branch with my slender stalk. When God's wind blew, I hopped and danced, together with the entire tree.
Nikos Kazantzakis
When man will return to nature, nature will return to him.
Grigoris Deoudis
There is no greater failure than success through wrong means
Nicholas C. Rossis
The pain of dying will surely be nothing, for the pain of love is so much stronger and agonizing.
Marilena Mexi
Once I was liable to the same mistakes, but, thanks to God, no longer …’Well, isn’t it just as worthwhile to have devoted and applied yourself to this goal as to have read or written fifty pages?
Epictetus
The present will not long endure.
Pindar
But being overborne with numbers, and nobody daring to face about, stretching out his hands to heaven, [Romulus] prayed to Jupiter to stop the army, and not to neglect but maintain the Roman cause, now in extreme danger. The prayer was no sooner made, than shame and respect for their king checked many; the fears of the fugitives changed suddenly into confidence.
Plutarch
Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.
Euripides
Whoever cannot seek the unforeseen sees nothing for the known way is an impasse.
Heraclitus
No one loves the messenger who brings bad news.
Sophocles
It is more disgraceful for a king to tell lies than anyone else.
Arrian
Choose always the way that seems the best however rough it may be custom will soon render it easy and agreeable.
Pythagoras
Even God lends a hand to honest boldness.
Menander
A dog has the soul of a philosopher.
Plato
Ask the gods nothing excessive.
Aeschylus
Do you imagine that a city can continue to exist and not be turned upside down, if the legal judgments which are pronounced in it have no force but are nullified and destroyed by private persons?
Socrates
Is it not true that the clever rogue is like the runner who runs well for the first half of the course, but flags before reaching the goal: he is quick off the mark, but ends in disgrace and slinks away crestfallen and uncrowned. The crown is the prize of the really good runner who perseveres to the end.
Plato
What you shun enduring yourself, attempt not to impose on others. You shun slavery- beware enslaving others! If you can endure to do that, one would think you had been once upon a time a slave yourself. For vice has nothing in common with virtue, nor Freedom with slavery.
Epictetus
Fame is the perfume of heroic deeds.
Socrates
The wildest colts make the best horses.
Plutarch
The person who has trust in divine justice is neither upset when treated unfairly, nor seeks his justice; on the contrary, he accepts the false accusations as if they were true, and does not try to convince others that he has been slandered; instead he asks to be forgiven...
Elder Paisios of the Holy Mountain
He was in a strange, badly lit room, wearing even stranger clothes, getting an earful from an unknown woman, in a language that he could and couldn’t exactly place in a very disturbing way.These were not his memories.
Angelo Tsanatelis
If all misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion most people would be contented to take their own and depart.
Socrates
He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.
Plato
The god abandons AntonyWhen at the hour of midnight an invisible choir is suddenly heard passingwith exquisite music, with voices ― Do not lament your fortune that at last subsides, your life’s work that has failed, your schemes that have proved illusions. But like a man prepared, like a brave man, bid farewell to her, to Alexandria who is departing. Above all, do not delude yourself, do not say that it is a dream, that your ear was mistaken. Do not condescend to such empty hopes. Like a man for long prepared, like a brave man, like the man who was worthy of such a city, go to the window firmly, and listen with emotion but not with the prayers and complaints of the coward (Ah! supreme rapture!) listen to the notes, to the exquisite instruments of the mystic choir,and bid farewell to her, to Alexandria whom you are losing.
Constantinos P. Cavafis
That’s what love is like: mother of the greatest bliss and stepmother of the most tragic misery.
Stefanos Livos
He held his seat a friend to human race.
Homer
Be silent or let thy words be worth more than silence.
Pythagoras
We are always going somewhereelse
Natasha Tsakos
Each man is capable of doing one thing well. If he attempts several he will fail to achieve distinction in any.
Plato
Caterpillars chew their way through ecosystems leaving a path of destruction as they get fatter and fatter. When they finally fall asleep and a chrysalis forms around them, tiny new imaginal cells, as biologists call them, begin to take form within their bodies. The caterpillar’s immune system fights these new cells as though they were foreign intruders, and only when they crop up in greater numbers and link themselves together are they strong enough to survive. Then the caterpillar’s immune system fails and its body dissolves into a nutritive soup which the new cells recycle into their developing butterfly. The caterpillar is a necessary stage but becomes unsustainable once its job is done. There is no point in being angry with it and there is no need to worry about defeating it. The task is to focus on building the butterfly, the success of which depends on powerful positive and creative efforts in all aspects of society and alliances built among those engaged in them.
Elisabet Sahtouris
The Sun is bad enough even while he is single, drying up our marshes with his heat as he does. But what will become of us if he marries and and begets other suns?
Aesop
Kindness gives birth to kindness.
Sophocles
You must study the Masters but guard the original style that beats within your soul and put to sword those who would try to steal it.
El Greco