24 quotes found
“It is not the bloodletting that calls down power. It is the consenting.”
“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 scholars...”
“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 an...”
“Don't you remember what your grandfather used to say? That thing about pots and people?""That pots were like people," Alex replied flatly, thinking back to his grandfather carrying a tray of wet fr...”
“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.”
“...like that star of the waning summer who beyond all stars rises bathed in the ocean stream to glitter in brilliance.”
“The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of Greece and Romenot by favour of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachin...”
“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 f...”
“And besides, we lovers fear everything”
“The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every centur...”
“The separation of sexuality from procreation in Greek culture helps explain the terrible demographic decay that Greece would suffer during the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E.”
“...Feel no fear before the multitude of men, do not run in panic,but let each man bear his shield straight toward the fore-fighters,regarding his own life as hateful and holding the dark spirits of...”
“TEIRESIAS: Alas, how terrible is wisdom whenit brings no profit to the man that's wise!This I knew well, but had forgotten it,else I would not have come here.”
“TEIRESIAS:You have your eyes but see not where you arein sin, nor where you live, nor whom you live with.Do you know who your parents are? Unknowingyou are enemy to kith and kinin death, beneath th...”
“JOCASTA:So clear in this case were the oracles,so clear and false. Give them no heed, I say;what God discovers need of, easilyhe shows to us himself.”
“OEDIPUS:O, O, O, they will all come,all come out clearly! Light of the sun, let melook upon you no more after today!I who first saw the light bred of a matchaccursed, and accursed in my livingwith ...”
“CHORUS:You that live in my ancestral Thebes, behold this Oedipus,- him who knew the famous riddles and was a man most masterful; not a citizen who did not look with envy on his lot- see him now and...”
“TEIRESIAS:I tell you, king, this man, this murderer(whom you have long declared you are in search of,indicting him in threatening proclamationas murderer of Laius)- he is here.In name he is a stran...”
“OEDIPUS: Upon the murderer I invoke this curse-whether he is one man and all unknown, or one of many- may he wear out his life in misery to miserable doom! If with my knowledge he lives at my heart...”
“I do not admire the excess of a virtue like courage unless I see at the same time an excess of the opposite virtue, as in Epaminondas, who possessed extreme courage and extreme kindness. We show gr...”