Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts And eloquence. — John Milton
The Greeks had invented democracy, built the Acropolis and called it a day. — David Sedaris
Drink, live like the Greeks, eat, gorge. — Plautus
If you deconstruct Greece, you will in the end see an olive tree, a grapevine, and a boat remain. That is, with as much, you reconstruct her. — Odysseas Elytis
There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Greeks only agree with each other about going to the toilet — Greek Proverbs
Earth proudly wears the Parthenon As the best gem upon her zone. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
...one Greek city state had a fundamental law: anyone proposing revisions to the constitution did so with a noose around his neck. If his proposal lost he was instantly hanged. — Aristotle
The spirit of Greece, passing through and ascending above the world, hath so animated universal nature, that the very rocks and woods, the very torrents and wilds burst forth with it. — Walter Savage Landor
Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries. — Gilbert Murray
Style is a fraud. I always felt the Greeks were hiding behind their columns. — Willem de Kooning
Plato, quite decadently, wore an earring while young. — Sextus Empiricus
After shaking hands with a Greek, count your fingers. — Albanian Proverbs
Aphrodite strikes again, huh? You're gonna be the best-dressed warrior in town, beauty queen. — Rick Riordan
The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism. — Georg C. Lichtenberg
Short Grecian Quotes
Trust not the horse, O Trojans. Be it what it may, I fear the Grecians even when they offer gifts. — Virgil
Sweet as sweetest Grecian honey will my song be when I sing, O Beloved, in the season of the Spring! — Ruben Dario
The Grecian ladies counted their age from their marriage, not their birth. — Homer
Curiously, neither God nor the devil may wear modern dress, but must retain Grecian vestments. — Sinclair Lewis
I met a redneck on a Grecian isle who did the Goat Dance very well. — Joni Mitchell
The magnet's name the observing Grecians drew. From the magnetic region where it grew. — William Gilbert
Greek Quotes
Illnesses do not come upon us out of the blue. They are developed from small daily sins against Nature. When enough sins have accumulated, illnesses will suddenly appear. — Hippocrates
There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. — Paul the Apostle
When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser. — Socrates
If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools. — Plato
There is no possession more valuable than a good and faithful friend. — Socrates
What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others. — Pericles
He who has overcome his fears will truly be free. — Aristotle
Nothing exists; even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and even if something can be known about it, knowledge about it can't be communicated to others. — Gorgias
Now you fear punishment and beg for your lives, so I will let you free, if not for any other reason so that you can see the difference between a Greek king and a barbarian tyrant, so do not expect to suffer any harm from me. A king does not kill messengers. — Alexander The Great
Your looks are laughable, unphotographable, yet you're my favorite work of art. Is your figure less than Greek, is your mouth a little weak? When you open it to speak, are you smart? — Chet Baker
Ancient Greek Quotes
I have a high art, I hurt with cruelty those who would damage me. — Archilochus
Sex and sleep alone make me conscious that I am mortal. — Alexander The Great
Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners. — Vladimir Lenin
As the ancient Greeks replaced myth-based explanations with mechanistic models of the Solar System, their emphasis shifted from asking why to asking how. — Max Tegmark
The ancient Greek definition of happiness was the full use of your powers along lines of excellence. — John F. Kennedy
We look at the ancient Greeks with their gods on a mountain top throwing lightning bolts and say, 'Those ancient Greeks. They were so silly. So primitive and naive. Not like our religions. We have burning bushes talking to people and guys walking on water. We're ...sophisticated.' — Paul Provenza
Chaos does not mean total disorder. Chaos means a multiplicity of possibilities. Chaos is from the ancient Greek words that means a thing that is birthed from the void. And it was about that which is possible, not about disorder. — Jok Church
He is the richest who is content with the least. — Socrates
Few men have the natural strength to honor a friend's success without envy. — Aeschylus
Old Greek Quotes
A good man will take care of his horses and dogs, not only while they are young, but when old and past service. — Plutarch
The old Lie:Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori. — Wilfred Owen
A landscape, torn by mists and clouds, in which I can see ruins of old churches, as well as of Greek temples - that is Brahms. — Edvard Grieg
I envy those old Greek bathers, into whose hands were delivered Pericles, and Alcibiades, and the perfect models of Phidias. They had daily before their eyes the highest types of Beauty which the world has ever produced; for of all things that are beautiful, the human body is the crown. — Bayard Taylor
Shipping magnate of the 20th century If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning. — Aristotle
I am wonderfully pleased when I meet with any passage in an old Greek or Latin author, that is not blown upon, and which I have never met with in any quotation. — Joseph Addison
There is a misleading, unwritten rule that states if a quote giving advice comes from someone famous, very old, or Greek, then it must be good advice. — Bo Bennett
There is a misleading, unwritten rule that states if a quote giving advice comes from someone famous, very old, or Greek, then it must be good advice. — Robert Foster Bennett
America is not fighting to win a war. We are fighting to give an application to an old Greek proverb, which is that the purpose of war is not to annihilate an enemy but to get him to mend his ways. And we are confident we can get the enemy to mend his. — Arthur Goldberg
Proportions are what makes the old Greek temples classic in their beauty. They are like huge blocks, from which the air has been literally hewn out between the columns. — Arne Jacobsen
Ancient Greece Quotes
Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws we lie. — Steven Pressfield
The road to the Olympics, leads to no city, no country. It goes far beyond New York or Moscow, ancient Greece or Nazi Germany. The road to the Olympics leads — in the end — to the best within us. — Jesse Owens
Nobody can say a word against Greek: it stamps a man at once as an educated gentlemen. — George Bernard Shaw
In many ways we are all sons and daughters of ancient Greece. — Nia Vardalos
We are living in the era of the busybody. In ancient Greece, if a person wanted guidance, it involved a long, arduous expensive journey to consult the oracle at Delphi. Today, if you want guidance, all you have to do is unplug your ears. — Margo Kaufman
And so, inevitably, one returns to the centre of Western culture, Greece, and we have never, in any sense, lost our ties with the architectural concepts that this country's ancient civilization explored and demonstrated, nor with the political and social freedom that lay behind them. — Stephen Gardiner
Ancient of days! august Athena! where, Where are thy men of might? thy grand in soul? Gone--glimmering through the dream of things that were; First in the race that led to glory's goal, They won, and pass'd away--Is this the whole? — Lord Byron
I judge wisely...as if nothin ever surprise me,
Loungin, between two pillars of ivory.
I'm lively, my dome piece is like buildin stones in Greece.
My poems are deep, from ancient thrones I speak. — Killah Priest
I learned that along with the towering achievements of the cultures of ancient Greece and China there stood the culture of Africa, unseen and denied by the imperialist looters of Africa's material wealth. — Paul Robeson
Greek Art Quotes
The future science of government should be called 'la cybernétique' (1843) Coining the French word to mean 'the art of governing,' from the Greek (Kybernetes = navigator or steersman), subsequently adopted as cybernetics by Norbert Weiner for the field of control and communication theory. — Andre-Marie Ampere
Botany is the art of insulting flowers in Greek and Latin. — Alphonse Karr
The Dance of the Future will have to become again a high religious art as it was with the Greeks. For art which is not religious is not art, it is mere merchandise — Isadora Duncan
The oldest theory of art belongs to the Greeks, who regarded art as an imitation (mimesis) of reality. The strength of that theory is that it explains the way in which art takes its materials from real life. — Leland Ryken
Prehistoric art came to move me much more than Greek art. Greek art has beautiful women and handsome men, but I don't care. — Pierre Soulages
I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living. — Raymond Chandler
All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent. — John Ruskin
I would like my work to be recognized as being in the classical tradition (Coptic, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese), as representing the Ideal in the mind. Classical art cannot possibly be eclectic. One must see the ideal in one's own mind. It is like a memory - an awareness -of perfection. — Agnes Martin
I was the executive editor on a little magazine called Greek Accent, whose only claim to fame is that its art director went on to be the art director of Discover for many years. — Jane Haddam
One meets the cat in nearly all forms of art...curiously enough she is not a conspicuous figure in Roman or Greek art. — Carl Van Vechten
Greek Culture Quotes
In business you need two Jews for one Greek, two Greeks for one Syrian and two Syrians for one Armenian — Greek Proverbs
Superheroes fill a gap in the pop culture psyche, similar to the role of Greek mythology. There isn't really anything else that does the job in modern terms. For me, Batman is the one that can most clearly be taken seriously. — Christopher Nolan
American culture is kind of a universal culture, I guess. It's things Greeks grew up with, common references you can use. It's very interesting. — Yorgos Lanthimos
Kant does represents a distinctively modern view of the human condition in contrast to that of ancient high culture, found in ancient Greek ethics and also in ancient Chinese ethics. — Allen W. Wood
The Greeks, with their truly healthy culture, have once and for all justified philosophy simply by having engaged in it, and having engaged in it more fully than any other people. — Friedrich Nietzsche
Greek culture is pleasant to contemplate because of its great simplicity and naturalness, and because of the absence of gadgets, each of which is sooner or later a cause of servitude. — George Sarton
I had the good luck a few years ago to visit the archeological site of Zippori in Israel ... I could see here displayed the Greek culture that Jesus decisively rejected, the same Greek culture that infiltrated the Christian religion soon after his death and has dominated Christianity ever since. — Freeman Dyson
Genetically, I'm pure Greek. Psychologically, environmentally, culturally, by choice, I'm a member of the black community. — Johnny Otis
Just as the ideal of classic Greek culture was the most perfect harmony of mind and body, so a human and a bicycle are the perfect synthesis of body and machine. — Richard Ballantine
Classical music is a special taste like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand. — Allan Bloom
I must confess the language of symbols is to me
A Babylonish dialect
Which learned chemists much affect;
It is a party-coloured dress
Of patch'd and piebald languages:
'T is English cut on Greek and Latin,
Like fustian heretofore on satin. — Sir Richard Phillips
At 20, I realized that I could not possibly adjust to a feminine role as conceived by my father and asked him permission to engage in a professional career. In eight months I filled my gaps in Latin, Greek and mathematics, graduated from high school, and entered medical school in Turin. — Rita Levi-Montalcini
English has been this vacuum cleaner of a language, because of its history meeting up with the Romans and then the Danes, the Vikings and then the French and then the Renaissance with all the Latin and Greek and Hebrew in the background. — David Crystal
In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in High School to teaching remedial English in college. — Joseph Sobran
The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity is of wonderful structure, more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin and more exquisitely refined than either. — William Jones
He was born a King. The wise men came from the East and asked, 'Where is He that is born King of the Jews?' (Matthew 2:2). He died a King.
In Greek, in Latin, and in Hebrew the description was written above His cross, 'This is Jesus, The King' (Matthew 27:37) — W. A. Criswell
When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall; And when Rome falls--the World. — Lord Byron
I was a fighter pilot, flying Hurricanes all round the Mediterranean. I flew in the Western Desert of Libya, in Greece, in Syria, in Iraq and in Egypt. — Roald Dahl
Ruin, eldest daughter of Zeus, she blinds us all, that fatal madness—she with those delicate feet of hers, never touching the earth, gliding over the heads of men to trap us all. She entangles one man, now another. — Homer
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. — Alexander The Great
The cure of many diseases remains unknown to the physicians of Hellos (Greece) because they do not study the whole person. — Socrates
Your ancestors invaded Macedonia and the rest of Greece and did us great harm, though we had done them no prior injury; ... [and] I have been appointed leader of the Greeks. — Arrian
We are not only talking about waves of refugees coming to Greece, to Italy, and elsewhere. Destabilizing the Balkans means Lebanonization, and that means destabilizing all of Europe. — Fatos Nano
Shall I pass by and leave you lying there because of the expedition you led against Greece, or shall I set you up again because of your magnanimity and your virtues in other respects? — Alexander The Great
If Greece had gone through a very normal political life, I may have not been in politics. But just the fact that I lived through huge upheavals and very difficult struggles and polarization and the barbarism of dictatorships - that made me feel that we had to change this country. — George Papandreou
Albania, Macedonia and Greece have managed to create a good partnership in the south of the Continent and are making progress in blocking the spread of the conflict. But any spillover could destroy this European-oriented partnership and create problems for the European Union countries themselves. — Fatos Nano
Greek God Quotes
If you could meet your grandkids as elderly citizens in the year 2100 … you would view them as being, basically, Greek gods… that's where we're headed. — Michio Kaku
For me Esoteric Hitlerism is being possessed by the archetypes of the collective unconscious which the Greeks used to call gods. — Miguel Serrano
The Greeks bequeathed to us one of the most beautiful words in our language--the word 'enthusiasm'--en theos--a god within. The grandeur of human actions is measured by the inspiration from which they spring. Happy is he who bears a god within, and who obeys it. — Louis Pasteur
If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama. — Lillian Hellman
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. — Carl Jung
The Serbs have only two friends, God and the Greeks. — Radovan Karadzic
Rachel: You're a half-blood, too? Annabeth: Shhh! Just announce it to the world, how about? Rachel: Okay. Hey, everybody! These two aren't human! They're half Greek god!...They don't seem to care. — Rick Riordan
The Greeks, it will be recalled, regarded Eros, the god of love, as the eldest of the gods; but also as the youngest, born fresh and dewy-eyed in every living heart. — Joseph Campbell
What good are Greek, commentaries, insight, gift, and all the rest, if there is no heart for Christ? — Jim Elliot
...it seemed to me I was living in an insane asylum of my own making. I wnt about with all these fantastic figures: centaurs, nymphs, satyrs, gods and goddesses, as though they were patients and I was analyzing them. I read a Greek or Negro myth as if a lunatic were telling me his anamnesis. — Carl Jung
Greek Civilization Quotes
The war of ideas is a Greek invention. It is one of the most important inventions ever made. Indeed, the possibility of fighting with with words and ideas instead of fighting with swords is the very basis of our civilization, and especially of all its legal and parliamentary institutions. — Karl Popper
First there was Greek civilization. Then there was the Renaissance. Now we’re entering the Age of the Ass. — Jean-Luc Godard
Civil servants and priests, soldiers and ballet-dancers, schoolmasters and police constables, Greek museums and Gothic steeples, civil list and services list -- the common seed within which all these fabulous beings slumber in embryo is taxation. — Karl Marx
All the wonders of the Greek civilization heaped together are less wonderful than the single book of Psalms. Greece had all that this world could give her; but the flowers of Paradise blossomed in Palestine alone. — William E. Gladstone
The sentiments attributed to Christ are in the Old Testament. They were familiar in the Jewish schools and to all the Pharisees, long before the time of Christ, as they were familiar in all the civilizations of the earth - Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian, Greek, and Hindu. — Joseph McCabe
We were discussing civilization and the fact that young men among the Greeks at that time were idiots and uneducated, so the men had emotional and friendly relationships with members of their own sex — Marion Zimmer Bradley
I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded. — Simone Weil
In all of Western civilization, there have been societies that celebrating the homosexuality, the ancient Greeks. But they, in fact, protected the institution of marriage as a union between one man and one woman. They got the joke. And the American people get the joke. — Ken Blackwell
I'm sure back in the Greek days or the Roman Empire days, when guys fought in arenas and were fighting lions, people were talking smack. Every era in history has someone talking smack. No way you can have talent and not proclaim your victory. — J. B. Smoove
The western nations of Europe, who now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors, and stand at the summit of civilization, owe little or none of their superiority to direct inheritance from the old Greeks, though they owe much to the written works of that wonderful people. — Charles Darwin
Foreign influence is truly the Grecian horse to a republic. We cannot be too careful to exclude its influence. — Alexander Hamilton
ZEUS /n./ The chief of Grecian gods, adored by the Romans as Jupiter and by the modern Americans as God, Gold, Mob and Dog. — Ambrose Bierce
Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enameling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come. — William Butler Yeats
Two thousand summers have imparted to the monuments of Grecian literature, as to her marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect them against the corrosion of time. — Henry David Thoreau
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make — William Butler Yeats
If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies. — William Faulkner
The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies. — William Faulkner
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
- Ode to a Grecian Urn — John Keats
Our enemies, like the Grecian hero, have one vulnerable point. You have not touched it yet. What should have been their element of weakness has been suffered to remain an element of strength. — Jay Alan Sekulow
Our enemies, like the Grecian hero, have one vulnerable point. You have not touched it yet. What should have been their element of weakness has been suffered to remain an element of strength. — Jay Sekulow
As some people say, we're already in a Singularity relative to ancient Grecians, inasmuch as they couldn't understand our world at all... and I think it's true in the opposite direction, too. — William Deresiewicz
The Grecian are youthful and erring and fallen gods, with the vices of men, but in many important respects essentially of the divine race. — Henry David Thoreau
Confidence in one's self is the chief nurse of magnanimity, which confidence, notwithstanding, doth not leave the care of necessary furniture for it; and therefore, of all the Grecians, Homer doth ever make Achilles the best armed. — Philip Sidney
A Grecian history, perfectly written should be a complete record of the rise and progress of poetry, philosophy, and the arts. — Thomas B. Macaulay
Such were garrulous and noisy eras, which no longer yield any sound, but the Grecian or silent and melodious era is ever soundingand resounding in the ears of men. — Henry David Thoreau
If one doubts whether Grecian valor and patriotism are not a fiction of the poets, he may go to Athens and see still upon the walls of the temple of Minerva the circular marks made by the shields taken from the enemy in the Persian war, which were suspended there. We have not far to seek for living and unquestionable evidence. The very dust takes shape and confirms some story which we had read. — Henry David Thoreau
When Julian ascended the throne, he declared his impatience to embrace and reward the Syrian sophist, who had preserved, in a degenerate age, the Grecian purity of taste, of manners and of religion. The emperor's prepossession was increased and justified by the discreet pride of his favourite. — Edward Gibbon
It is well known that a loose and easy dress contributes much to give to both sexes those fine proportions of body that are observable in the Grecian statues, and which serve as models to our present artists. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
So far as female beauty is concerned, the Circassian women have no superiors. They have preserved in their mountain home the purity of the Grecian models, and still display the perfect physical loveliness, whose type has descended to us in the Venus de Medici. — Bayard Taylor
The Ethiop gods have Ethiop lips, Bronze cheeks, and woolly hair; The Grecian gods are like the Greeks, As keen-eyed, cold and fair. — Walter Bagehot
As the spring comes on, and the densening outlines of the elm give daily a new design for a Grecian urn, — its hue, first brown with blossoms, then emerald with leaves, — we appreciate the vanishing beauty of the bare boughs. In our favored temperate zone, the trees denude themselves each year, like the goddesses before Paris, that we may see which unadorned loveliness is the fairest. — Thomas Wentworth Higginson
The Grecian’s maxim would indeed be a sweeping clause in Literature; it would reduce many a giant to a pygmy; many a speech to a sentence; and many a folio to a primer. — Charles Caleb Colton
What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods, from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Grecians and Romans were strongly possessed of the spirit of liberty but not the principle, for at the time they were determined not to be slaves themselves, they employed their power to enslave the rest of mankind. — Thomas Paine
There have been two lines of progress in this world-political and religious. In the former the Greeks are everything, the modern political institutions being only the development of the Grecian; in the latter the Hindus are everything. — Swami Vivekananda
It was a grey day, that least fleshly of all weathers; a day of dreams and far hopes and clear visions. It was a day easily associated with those abstract truths and purities that dissolve in the sunshine or fade out in mocking laughter by the light of the moon. The trees and clouds were carved in classical severity; the sounds of the countryside had harmonized to a monotone, metallic as a trumpet, breathless as the Grecian urn. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
In Conclusion
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