Gilbert Murray Quotes

• The average beast of prey is a decent creature who merely kills for the sake of food or in a fight against an enemy. It is only man who calls killing "sport" and kills for the pleasure of killing; not for food, not for self-defense, but just to satisfy some primitive instinct, once necessary and now perverted.

  Gilbert Murray

  Sports, Fighting, Men

  46 Copy quote

• 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

  Greek, Definitions, Language

  25 Copy quote

• Be careful in dealing with a man who cares nothing for comfort or promotion, but is simply determined to do what he believes to be right. He is a dangerous uncomfortable enemy, because his body, which you can always conquer, gives you little purchase upon his soul.

  Gilbert Murray

  Believe, Men, Giving

  16 Copy quote

• A machine is a great moral educator. If a horse or a donkey won’t go, men lose their tempers and beat it; if a machine won’t go, there is no use beating it. You have to think and try till you find what is wrong. That is real education.

  Gilbert Murray

  Horse, Real, Men

  9 Copy quote

• The life and liberty and property and happiness of the common man throughout the world are at the absolute mercy of a few persons whom he has never seen, involved in complicated quarrels that he has never heard of.

  Gilbert Murray

  Men, Liberty, World

  4 Copy quote

• It is doubtless one of Aristotle's great services that he conceived so clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a history.

  Gilbert Murray

  Literature, Great Service, Grows

  Aristotle, Gilbert Murray (1920). “On the Art of Poetry”, p.12, Oxford University Press on Demand

  6 Copy quote

• The fact is that much misunderstanding is often caused by our modern attempts to limit too strictly the meaning of a Greek word.

  Gilbert Murray

  Greek, Limits, Facts

  Aristotle, Gilbert Murray (1920). “On the Art of Poetry”, p.10, Oxford University Press on Demand

  4 Copy quote

• Sometimes Aristotle analyses his terms, but very often he takes them for granted; and in the latter case, I think, he is sometimes deceived by them.

  Gilbert Murray

  Thinking, Analysis, Sometimes

  Aristotle, Gilbert Murray (1920). “On the Art of Poetry”, p.12, Oxford University Press on Demand

  9 Copy quote

• The fashions of the ages vary in this direction and that, but they vary for the most part from a central road which was struck out by the imagination of Greece.

  Gilbert Murray

  Fashion, Imagination, Age

  Aristotle, Gilbert Murray (1920). “On the Art of Poetry”, p.20, Oxford University Press on Demand

  4 Copy quote

• Where words can be translated into equivalent words, the style of an original can be closely followed; but no translation which aims at being written in normal English can reproduce the style of Aristotle.

  Gilbert Murray

  Style, Normal, Aim

  Aristotle, Gilbert Murray (1920). “On the Art of Poetry”, p.6, Oxford University Press on Demand

  4 Copy quote

• Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading.

  Gilbert Murray

  Reading, Greek, Literature

  Aristotle, Gilbert Murray (1920). “On the Art of Poetry”, p.3, Oxford University Press on Demand

  19 Copy quote

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