Greek Quotes - Page 14

• The Greek word for box is kouti which also means stupid.

  Lucas Samaras

  Stupid, Mean, Boxes

  Lucas Samaras, Robert M. Doty (1972). “Lucas Samaras”

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• I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence.

  Harold Bloom

  Successful, Thinking, Influence

  "Divine (mis)readings". Interview with Harvey Blume, archive.boston.com. November 13, 2005.

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• Greek architecture taught me that the column is where the light is not, and the space between is where the light is. It is a matter of no-light, light, no-light, light. A column and a column brings light between them. To make a column which grows out of the wall and which makes its own rhythm of no-light, light, no-light, light: that is the marvel of the artist.

  Louis Kahn

  Wall, Artist, Light

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• That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied the Boiling Spring with his foot, and he it is that has browsed off all the woods on Walden shore, that Trojan horse, with a thousand men in his belly, introduced by mercenary Greeks! Where is the country's champion, the Moore of Moore Hall, to meet him at the Deep Cut and thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated pest?

  Henry David Thoreau

  Country, Horse, Spring

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “Walden”, p.139, Xist Publishing

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• They tell us sometimes that if we had only kept quiet, all these desirable things would have come about of themselves. I am reminded of the Greek clown who, having seen an archer bring down a flying bird, remarked, sagely: 'You might have saved your arrow, for the bird would anyway have been killed by the fall.'

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Fall, Archer, Arrows

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• One might suppose that reality must be held to at all costs. However, though that may be the moral thing to do, it is not necessarily the most useful thing to do. The Greeks themselves chose the ideal over the real in their geometry and demonstrated very well that far more could be achieved by consideration of abstract line and form than by a study of the real lines and forms of the world; the greater understanding achieved through abstraction could be applied most usefully to the very reality that was ignored in the process of gaining knowledge.

  Isaac Asimov

  Real, Math, Understanding

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• I sometimes wonder if the hand is not more sensitive to the beauties of sculpture than the eye. I should think the wonderful rhythmical flow of lines and curves could be more subtly felt than seen. Be this as it may, I know that I can feel the heart-throbs of the ancient Greeks in their marble gods and goddesses.

  Helen Keller

  God, Heart, Eye

  Helen Keller (2012). “The Story of My Life”, p.81, Courier Corporation

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• There are some arts which to those that possess them are painful, but to those that use them are helpful, a common good to laymen, but to those that practise them grievous. Of such arts there is one which the Greeks call medicine. For the medical man sees terrible sights, touches unpleasant things, and the misfortunes of others bring a harvest of sorrows that are peculiarly his; but the sick by means of the art rid themselves of the worst of evils, disease, suffering, pain and death.

  Hippocrates

  Art, Pain, Mean

  Hippocrates, Paul Potter (1984). “Hippocrates”

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• Well, to be clear, I am a scholar of religions with four degrees, including one in the New Testament and fluency in Biblical Greek who has been studying the origins of Christianity for two decades who also happens to be Muslim.

  Reza Aslan

  Biblical, Two, Degrees

  "Fox News must apologize to Reza Aslan". www.washingtonpost.com. July 29, 2013.

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• It's a curious thing, this thing we call civilization...we think it is an affair of epochs, and nations. It's really an affair of individuals. One brother will be civilized and the other a barbarian...All civilization comes through literature now, especially in our country. A Greek got his civilization by talking and looking, and in some measure a Parisian may still do it. But we, who live remote from history and monuments, we must read or we must barbarise.

  William Dean Howells

  Country, Brother, Thinking

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• 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

  Communication, Special, Taste

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.69, Simon and Schuster

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• The most interesting acquaintanceship I have struck up here is that of Colonel Lapinski. He is without doubt the cleverest Pole - besides being an homme d'action [man of action] - that I have ever met. His sympathies are all on the German side, though in manners and speech he is also a Frenchman. He cares nothing for the struggle of nationalities and only knows the racial struggle. He hates all Orientals, among whom he numbers Russians Turks, Greeks, Armenians, etc., with equal impartiality.... His aim now is to raise a German legion in London.

  Karl Marx

  Hate, Struggle, Men

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• We are wont to see friendship solely as a phenomenon of intimacy in which the friends open their hearts to each other unmolested by the world and its demands...Thus it is hard for us to understand the political relevance of friendship...But for the Greeks the essence of friendship consisted in discourse...The converse (in contrast to the intimate talk in which individuals speak about themselves), permeated though it may be by pleasure in the friend’s presence, is concerned with the common world.

  Hannah Arendt

  Heart, Essence, Political

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• 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

  Religious, Art, Mere

  Isadora Duncan (1909). “The Dance”

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• And, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini's armies in Albania, on the Greek frontier, one wasn't sure what came next. So, don't trust the telephone. Or the newspapers. Or the radio. Or tomorrow.

  Alan Furst

  Army, Europe, Germany

  Alan Furst (2010). “Spies of the Balkans: A Novel”, p.4, Random House

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• I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets

  Heraclitus

  Education, Book, Reading

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• The only way for us to become great, or even inimitable if possible, is to imitate the Greeks.

  Johann Joachim Winckelmann

  Way, Ifs

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• The sea with an end can be Greek or Roman: the endless sea is Portuguese.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Sea, Portuguese, Ends

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• The Greeks had had vast experience in this world, their imagination had been fertile and they had created much...that, in these circumstances, they should fall in with a people imbued with a calm and sometimes stolid and bucolic certainty where its spiritual possessions were concerned, barbarians with no sculpture or breeding, necessarily tinged their contempt with impotent wrath. The inevitably logical result of this attitude on the part of the Greeks was the growth of anti-Semitism, of hatred of the Jews.

  Joseph Kastein

  Spiritual, Attitude, Fall

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• It was a Roman who said it was sweet to die for one's country. The Greeks never said it was sweet to die for anything. They had no vital lies.

  Edith Hamilton

  Country, Sweet, Peace

  Edith Hamilton (1987). “The Greek way ; The Roman way”, Random House Value Pub

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• Enthusiasm is not an emotional state. It is a spiritual commitment, a loving surrender to our creative process. Enthusiasm - from the Greek, filled with God - is an ongoing energy supply tapped into the flow of life itself.

  Julia Cameron

  Spiritual, Commitment, Emotional

  Julia Cameron (2002). “The Artist's Way: 25th Anniversary Edition”, p.156, Penguin

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• We are for aiding our allies by sharing of our material blessings with those nations which share in our fundamental beliefs, but we're against doling out money government to government, creating bureaucracy, if not socialism, all over the world. We set out to help 19 countries. We're helping 107. We've spent 146 billion dollars. With that money, we bought a 2 million dollar yacht for Haile Selassie. We bought dress suits for Greek undertakers, extra wives for Kenya[n] government officials. We bought a thousand TV sets for a place where they have no electricity.

  Ronald Reagan

  Country, Money, Blessing

  Ronald Reagan's "A Time for Choosing" Speech, www.reaganlibrary.gov. October 27, 1964.

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• The Greek word for sinning means to ‘miss the point;’ The point is eternal life which is here and now.

  Alan Watts

  Mean, Missing, Here And Now

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• There is something about the way that Greek poets, say Aeschylus, use metaphor that really attracts me. I don't think I can imitate it, but there's a density to it that I think I'm always trying to push towards in English.

  Anne Carson

  Thinking, Always Trying, Density

  "Magical thinking" by Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. December 30, 2006.

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• I have been photographing our toilet, that glossy enameled receptacle of extraordinary beauty. Here was every sensuous curve of the human figure divine but minus the imperfections. Never did the Greeks reach a more significant consummation to their culture, and it somehow reminded me, in the glory of its chaste convulsions and in its swelling, sweeping, forward movement of finely progressing contours, of the Victory of Samothrace.

  Edward Weston

  Home, Extraordinary Beauty, Curves

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