Ancient Greece Quotes

“We had old architects and were working with what we had on hand. You’ve hired this new, young architect now, and, Pericles, I’m going to build you a statue of Athena—all gold and ivory, think of that, Pericles—and taller than our city walls.” Pericles raised his eyes toward the birds.”
― Yvonne Korshak, Pericles and Aspasia: A Story of Ancient Greece

“It had happened. Thucydides, his archrival, was a general. Glaucon, from his own tribe, was a general. And Pericles was no longer a general. He was just a citizen with one vote. And an idea”
― Yvonne Korshak, Pericles and Aspasia: A Story of Ancient Greece

“...like that star of the waning summer who beyond all stars rises bathed in the ocean stream to glitter in brilliance.”
― Homer, The Iliad

“And besides, we lovers fear everything”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses

“Sexual frenzy is our compensation for the tedious moments we must suffer in the passage of life. 'Nothing in excess,' professed the ancient Greeks. Why if I spend half the month in healthy scholarship and pleasant sleep, shouldn't I be allowed the other half to howl at the moon and pillage the groins of Europe's great beauties?”
― Roman Payne

“Animals walk around in a state of permanent religious intoxication. This is the natural condition of the mind and intellect, the moment-to-moment perception, of man as well. I heard some computer fool say that religion is the 'older virtual reality' experience, to justify his scam industry. No, the denuded state of the spirit and intellect, where you walk around 'demystified' and 'disenchanted' is the virtual reality condition, and a terrible condition at that.”
― Bronze Age Pervert, Bronze Age Mindset

“The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of Greece and Rome—not by favour of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world were alike despicable.”
― Thomas H. Huxley, Agnosticism and Christianity and Other Essays

“It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written.”
― Karl Marx

“TEIRESIAS:
Alas, how terrible is wisdom when
it brings no profit to the man that's wise!
This I knew well, but had forgotten it,
else I would not have come here.”
― Sophocles, The Complete Greek Tragedies

“TEIRESIAS:
You have your eyes but see not where you are
in sin, nor where you live, nor whom you live with.
Do you know who your parents are? Unknowing
you are enemy to kith and kin
in death, beneath the earth, and in this life.”
― Sophocles, The Complete Greek Tragedies

“Il segreto più profondo di Olimpia è racchiuso in quest'unica nota cristallina: lottare è un gioco, vivere è un gioco, morire è un gioco; profitti e perdite non sono che distinzioni passeggere, ma il gioco pretende tutte le nostre forze, e la sorte accetta, come posta, unicamente i nostri cuori.”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, Pellegrina e straniera

“Periclean Greeks employed the term idiotis, without any connotation of stupidity or subnormality, to mean simply 'a person indifferent to public affairs.' Obviously, there is something wanting in the apolitical personality. But we have also come to suspect the idiocy of politicization—of the professional pol and power broker. The two idiocies make a perfect match, with the apathy of the first permitting the depredations of the second.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports

“better not bring up a lion inside your city,
But if you must, then humour all his moods.”
― Aristophanes, The Frogs

“Tragedy's language stresses that whatever is within us is obscure, many faceted, impossible to see. Performance gave this question of what is within a physical force. The spectators were far away from the performers, on that hill above the theatre. At the centre of their vision was a small hut, into which they could not see. The physical action presented to their attention was violent but mostly unseen. They inferred it, as they inferred inner movement, from words spoken by figures whose entrances and exits into and out of the visible space patterned the play. They saw its results when that facade opened to reveal a dead body. This genre, with its dialectics of seen and unseen, inside and outside, exit and entrance, was a simultaneously internal and external, intellectual and somatic expression of contemporary questions about the inward sources of harm, knowledge, power, and darkness.”
― Ruth Padel, In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self

“JOCASTA:
So clear in this case were the oracles,
so clear and false. Give them no heed, I say;
what God discovers need of, easily
he shows to us himself.”
― Sophocles, The Complete Greek Tragedies

“OEDIPUS:
O, O, O, they will all come,
all come out clearly! Light of the sun, let me
look upon you no more after today!
I who first saw the light bred of a match
accursed, and accursed in my living
with them I lived with, cursed in my killing.”
― Sophocles, The Complete Greek Tragedies

“Know this: we are a long time dead. Life may be short, but it is sweet.”
― Stephen Fry, Heroes: Mortals and Monsters, Quests and Adventures

“Our journey is one of discovery on Sicily.
Like the past Greek writers.orators,historians and philosophers we are all searching for answers on Earth”
― Daniel Peter Buckley, Heaven Earth and Time

“Now any King who wants to call himself my equal wherever I went let him go."
Sargon the Great / Enheduanna from
Heaven Earth and Time by D P BUCKLEY”
― Daniel Peter Buckley, Heaven Earth and Time

“But no city-state ever solved the problem of incorporating new territories and new populations into its existing structure, or involving really large numbers of people in its political life (p. 11)”
― Joseph Reese Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State

“The sciences were financially supported, honoured everywhere, universally pursued; they were like tall edifices supported by strong foundations. Then the Christian religion appeared in Byzantium and the centres of learning were eliminated, their vestiges effaced and the edifice of Greek learning was obliterated. Everything the ancient Greeks had brought to light vanished, and the discoveries of the ancients were altered out of recognition.”
― Al Masudi, From The Meadows of Gold

“Greek thought, as Russell states, is full of fate. It can, of course, be argued that these sentiments are the expressions of an archaic culture or world view which died two thousand years ago, prolonged through the medieval epoch because of ignorance of the natural universe, and that we know better now. In one sense this is true, but one of the more important and disturbing insights of depth psychology is the revelation that the mythic and undifferentiated consciousness of our ancestors, which animated the natural world with images of gods and daimones, does not belong to chronological history alone. It also belongs to the psyche of modern man, and represents a stratum which, although layered over by increasing consciousness and the hyper-rationality of the last two centuries, is as potent as it was two millennia or even ten millennia ago.”
― Liz Greene, The Astrology of Fate

“The recognition type-scene belonged to the storyteller's standard repertory in ancient Greco-Roman narrative and drama, especially in epic, novel, tragedy, and comedy, where motifs of hidden identities, veiling and revealing, Sein and Schein, deception and discovery often played a central role in the plot.”
― Kasper Bro Larsen, Recognizing the Stranger: Recognition Scenes in the Gospel of John

“The gods are given even greater license to lie and deceive. Apparently, they do not have the same degree of responsibility to their relatives and allies as humans do. Effective acts of lying and deception seem to be admired as tokens of one god's at least temporary ascendancy over another god.”
― Louise H. Pratt, Lying and Poetry from Homer to Pindar: Falsehood and Deception in Archaic Greek Poetics

“امروزه، هنوز هم می شود گورستانی را دید که تو و پدرت خاطره ی افتخارآمیز دموکراسی را آنجا به خاک سپردید. حقیقت این است که شما هرگز فکر نکردید خود را از پشتیبانی دولت شهرها محروم دارید، و واقعیت ناشی از این شکست سختی که به نیروهای متحد یونان وارد آوردید پیچیده تر و گویا تر از یک اعلامیه ی ساده ی فوت بود.”
― Pierre Briant, نامه‌ی سرگشاده به اسکندر کبیر

“شوش، تخت جمشید (که هر دو به دست کاوشگران- باستان شناسان ما از زیر خاک بیرون آمدند)، پاسارگاد(که آرامگاه کورش همچنان آنجا پابرجاست)، هگمتانه(که تنها نشانه هایی پراکنده از کاخ های باشکوهش بر جای مانده) یا سمرقند (که به تازگی باز هم دیوارهای کاخ هخامنشی اش که تو در آن اقامت گزیدی کشف شده). من بارها و بارها در محل با همکارانم صحبت کرده ام که، با احتیاط و روشمند، زمین را به جستجوی امپراتوری ها و شهرها و لشکرکشی ها و مردمان گذشته می کاوند. باید به تو بگویم که نشانه های ملموس و روشنی از عبور تو ندیده اند مگر خاکسترهای کاخ های شاهنشاهان در صحن تخت جمشید- چیزی که اصلا به نفع تو نیست.”
― Pierre Briant, نامه‌ی سرگشاده به اسکندر کبیر

“چقدر دوست داشتیم برای تو هم همان اتفاقی می افتاد که برای پیشینیان پارسی ات افتاد، یا بهتر است بگوییم برای تاریخ نویسان امپراتوری شان، یعنی این اتفاق که بخشی از بایگانی آن در تخت جمشید پیدا شد- ده ها هزار لوح گلی. در نتیجه، امروز می توان تاریخ پارسیان (دست کم بخشی از آن) را بازساخت بی آنکه در مقدمه نیازی به نام بردن از هزاران تفسیر بسیار زیرکانه ای باشد که از زمان پدرانت درباره ی کتاب های هرودوتوس نوشته شده است، و بی آنکه حس گناهی به انسان دست دهد.”
― Pierre Briant, نامه‌ی سرگشاده به اسکندر کبیر

“اگر مشاورانت قادر بودند نوشته های شاهی حک شده بر دیوار جنوبی ایوان تخت جمشید را که جلو چشم بود بخوانند و برایت تفسیر کنند، می فهمیدی که سرزمین پارس و ملت پارسی، در همه ی دوران ها، روابط ممتازی با سلسله ی شاهی داشته اند. دفاع از (( سرزمین پارس)) در برابر ((لشکر دشمن و خشکسالی و دروغ)) رسالتی بود که داریوش بزرگ برای کسی تعیین می کرد که پیش از آنکه (( شاه بزرگ)) و (( شاه شاهان)) باشد، (( پارسی بود و فرزند پارسی و شاه در سرزمین پارس)) و این بود دعایی که در پیشگاه خدای بزرگ اهورامزدا می کرد.”
― Pierre Briant, نامه‌ی سرگشاده به اسکندر کبیر

“کورش و جانشینانش نخستین و تنها کسانی بودند که ان همه سرزمین های گونه گون و آن همه فرهنگ های متعدد را در درون مرزهای یک دولت یکپارچه گرد آورده بودند، ((از سکاها در آن سوی سغد تا سرزمین کوش و از هند تا سارد)). تو توانسته بودی میراث آنان را به دست بگیری اما چون آن را به زور به چنگ آوردی بی آنکه آینده را به قدر کافی آماده سازی، آن امپراتوری را آسیب پذیر کردی و آن را به خطر انداختی. تقسیم ناپذیری ای را که در زمان مرگت اعلام شده بود همان کسانی فسخ کردند که آن را به اجرا درآورده بودند. جانشینانت بی هیچ ملاحظه و تاسفی می خواستند امپراتوری ات را تجزیه کنند، زیرا هر یک مایل بود برای خود به تنهایی سهمی داشته باشد چون نمی توانست همه را در اختیار بگیرد.”
― Pierre Briant, نامه‌ی سرگشاده به اسکندر کبیر

“and lovely laughing—oh it puts the heart in my chest on wings”
― Anne Carson, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho