Greek quotes
604 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
"Youths of the Pellaians and of the Macedonians and of the Hellenic Amphictiony and of the Lakedaimonians and of the Corinthians... and of all the Hellenic peoples, join your fellow-soldiers and entrust yourselves to me, so that we can move against the barbarians and liberate ourselves from the Persian bondage, for as Greeks we should not be slaves to barbarians."
"The oldest, shortest words - 'yes' and 'no' - are those which require the most thought."
"The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return."
"According to Greek mythology, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves."
"I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."
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"Your ancestors came to Macedonia and the rest of Hellas [Greece] and did us great harm, though we had done them no prior injury. I have been appointed leader of the Greeks, and wanting to punish the Persians I have come to Asia, which I took from you."
"The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation."
"He is the richest who is content with the least."
"The ancient Greek definition of happiness was the full use of your powers along lines of excellence."
"Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks."
"Of all the small nations of this earth, perhaps only the ancient Greeks surpass the Scots in their contribution to mankind."
"We Irish will never achieve anything; but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks"
"It is by far the most elegant worship, hardly excepting the Greek mythology. What with incense, pictures, statues, altars, shrines, relics, and the real presence, confession, absolution, - there is something sensible to grasp at. Besides, it leaves no possibility of doubt; for those who swallow their Deity, really and truly, in transubstantiation, can hardly find any thing else otherwise than easy of digestion."
"Sanskrit has ninety-six words for love; ancient Persian has eighty; Greek three; and English simply one."
"Agnostic is the Greek word, for the Latin word, for ignorant"
"Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries."
"We are living in what the Greeks called the kairos - the right moment - for a 'metamorphosis of the gods', of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing."
"You can learn technological things, you can learn about specific things, but the real problems that people deal with in any subject, existential subjects or romantic subjects, you never learn anything. So you make a fool of yourself when you're 20, you make a fool of yourself at 40, at 60 at 80. The ancient Greeks were dealing with these problems. They screwed up all the time. People do now."
"The world is more than the sum of its suffering."
"Shipping magnate of the 20th century If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning."
"One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality. That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing."
"Nobody can say a word against Greek: it stamps a man at once as an educated gentlemen."
"In our household, the Bible, the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology"
"The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place."
"Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading."
