The power of good is shown not by triumphantly conquering evil, but by continuing to resist evil while facing certain defeat.
Faith is not belief. Belief is passive. Faith is active.
When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.
To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful ... was a mark of the Greek spirit.
It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought-that is to be educated.
Our word 'idiot' comes from the Greek name for the man who took no share in public matters.
Responsibility is the price every man must pay for freedom.
Love cannot live where there is no trust.
Myths are early science, the result of men's first trying to explain what they saw around them.
Uncertainty is the prerequisite to gaining knowledge and frequently the result as well.
In every civilization, life grows easier. Men grow lazier in consequence. We have a picture of what happened to the individual Greek. (I cannot look at history, or at any human action, except as I look at the individual.) The Greeks had good food, good witty talk, pleasant dinner parties; and they were content. When the individual man had reached that condition in Athens, when the thought not of giving to the state but of what the state could give to him, Athens' freedom was doomed.
Pain is the most individualized thing on earth. It is true that it is the great common bond as well, but that realization only comes when it is over. To suffer is to be alone. To watch another suffer is to know the barrier that shuts each of us away by himself Only individuals can suffer.
None so good that he has no faults, None so wicked that he is worth naught.
Civilization...is a matter of imponderables, of delight in the thins of the mind, of love of beauty, of honor, grace, courtesy, delicate feeling. Where imponderables, are things of first importance, there is the height of civilization, and, if at the same time, the power of art exists unimpaired, human life has reached a level seldom attained and very seldom surpassed.
I came to the Greeks early, and I found answers in them. Greece's great men let all their acts turn on the immortality of the soul. We don't really act as if we believed in the soul's immortality and that's why we are where we are today.
It is not hard work that is dreary; it is superficial work.
though the outside of human life changes much, the inside changes little, and the lesson-book we cannot graduate from is human experience.
A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.
When the world is storm-driven and bad things happen, then we need to know all the strong fortresses of the spirit which men have built through the ages.
The fullness of life is in the hazards of life. And, at the worst, there is that in us which can turn defeat into victory.
When faith is supported by facts or by logic it ceases to be faith.
Theories that go counter to the facts of human nature are foredoomed.
The heterodoxy of one generation is the orthodoxy of the next.
Old ideas are continually being slain by new facts. There is nothing stable in the conclusions of the mind, and it is impossible that there ever should be unless we hold that the universe is made to the measure of the human mind, an assumption for which nothing in the past gives any warrant.
They were the first Westerners. The spirit of the West, the modern spirit, is a Greek discovery; and the place of the Greeks is in the modern world.
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