Quotes by Greek Authors - Page 13

We don't think. We think we think.
Natasha Tsakos
There is much that is strange, but nothing that surpasses man in strangeness
Sophocles
I shall try to persuade first the Rulers and soldiers, and then the rest of the community, that the upbringing and education we have given them was all something that happened to them only in a dream. In reality they were fashioned and reared, and their arms and equipment manufactured, in the depths of the earth, and Earth herself, their mother, brought them up, when they were complete, into the light of day; so now they must think of the land in which they live as their mother and protect her if she is attacked, while their fellow citizens they must regard as brothers born of the same mother earth…. That is the story. Do you know of any way of making them believe it?”t“Not in the first generation,” he said, “but you might succeed with the second, and later generations.
Plato
Always be kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle.
Plato
Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm; great good fortune comes to failure in the end. All is change; all yields its place and goes; to persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man. The coward despairs.
Euripides
There are no problems.Just strange situations we have to deal with, as adults we are.
Dionisis Agelakis
No bow can be strung indefinitely, for it will surely break
Nicholas C. Rossis
Death means nothing to us
Epicurus
Such as thy words are such will thine affections be esteemed and such as thine affections will be thy deeds and such as thy deeds will be thy life ...
Socrates
Persons in whom a crisis takes place pass the night preceding the paroxysm uncomfortably, but the succeeding night generally more comfortably.
Hippocrates
Everything flows and nothing stays.
Heraclitus
... toxic derivatives were underpinned by toxic economics, which, in turn, were no more than motivated delusions in search of theoretical justification; fundamentalist tracts that acknowledged facts only when they could be accommodated to the demands of the lucrative faith. Despite their highly impressive labels and technical appearance, economic models were merely mathematized versions of the touching superstition that markets know best, both at times of tranquility and in periods of tumult.
Yanis Varoufakis
If you want to understand language, spend less time in the library with Plato and more time on the buses with people.
Plato
To think things out properly and fairly, a fellow's got to be calm and old and toothless: When you're an old gaffer with no teeth, it's easy to say: 'Damn it, boys, you mustn't bite!' But, when you've got all thirty-two teeth...
Nikos Kazantzakis
Rather I think that a man who ... is willing ... to value learning as long as he lives, not supposing that old age brings him wisdom of itself, will necessarily pay more attention to the rest of his life.
Plato
Every king springs from a race of slaves, and every slave had kings among his ancestors.
Plato
The rule of the people has the fairest name of all, equality (isonomia), and does none of the things that a monarch does. The lot determines offices, power is held accountable, and deliberation is conducted in public.
Herodotus
to Vaneigem and the Situationists who by shrewd use of collage and juxtaposition exposed both the poverty and richness of slogans, and the thinly veiled hypocrisy of a "spectacular" society which by not respecting words abuses people, and by insulting the intelligence creates a state of political cretinisation in which the many and various forms of authoritarian control dominate.
Alexis Lykiard
Greed runs in all men...
Angelo Tsanatelis
Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds? … It is certainly not lions and wolves that we eat out of self-defense; on the contrary, we ignore these and slaughter harmless, tame creatures without stings or teeth to harm us, creatures that, I swear, Nature appears to have produced for the sake of their beauty and grace. But nothing abashed us, not the flower-like tinting of the flesh, not the persuasiveness of the harmonious voice, not the cleanliness of their habits or the unusual intelligence that may be found in the poor wretches. No, for the sake of a little flesh we deprive them of sun, of light, of the duration of life to which they are entitled by birth and being.
Plutarch
My route, Sior Francis—and don't be surprised when you hear it—my route when I set out to find God... was... laziness. Yes, laziness. If I wasn't lazy I would have gone the way of respectable, upstanding people. Like everyone else I would have studied a trade—cabinet-maker, weaver, mason—and opened a shop; I would have worked all day long, and where then would I have found time to search for God? I might as well be looking for a needle in a haystack: that's what I would have said to myself. All my mind and thoughts would have been occupied with how to earn my living, feed my children, how to keep the upper hand over my wife. With such worries, curse them, how could I have the time, or inclination, or the pure heart needed to think about the Almighty?But by the grace of God I was born lazy. To work, get married, have children, and make problems for myself were all too much trouble. I simply sat in the sun during winter and in the shade during summer, while at night, stretched out on my back on the roof of my house, I watched the moon and the stars. And when you watch the moon and the stars how can you expect your mind not to dwell on God? I couldn't sleep any more. Who made all that? I asked myself. And why? Who made me, and why? Where can I find God so that I may ask Him? Piety requires laziness, you know. It requires leisure—and don't listen to what others say. The laborer who lives from hand to mouth returns home each night exhausted and famished. He assaults his dinner, bolts his food, then quarrels with his wife, beats his children without rhyme or reason simply because he's tired and irritated, and afterwards he clenches his fists and sleeps. Waking up for a moment he finds his wife at his side, couples with her, clenches his fists once more, and plunges back into sleep.... Where can he find time for God? But the man who is without work, children, and wife thinks about God, at first just out of curiosity, but later with anguish.
Nikos Kazantzakis
The right to make revolution is unconditional, for it alone establishes right.
Stathis Kouvelakis
...Love Christ and put nothing before His Love. He is joy, He is life, He is light. Christ is Everything. He is the ultimate desire, He is everything. Everything beautiful is in Christ.
Elder Porphyrios
...This is the way we should see Christ. He is our friend, our brother; He is whatever is good and beautiful. He is everything. Yet, He is still a friend and He shouts it out, "You're my friends, don't you understand that? We're brothers. I'm not...I don't hold hell in my hands. I am not threatening you. I love you. I want you to enjoy life together with me.
Elder Porphyrios
There is nothing I like better than conversing with aged men. For I regard them as travelers who have gone a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to inquire whether the way is smooth and easy or rugged and difficult. Is life harder toward the end, or what report do you give it?
Plato
If it were necessary either to do wrong or to suffer it, I should choose to suffer rather than do it.
Plato
You know yourself what you are worth in your own eyes; and at what price you will sell yourself. For men sell themselves at various prices. This is why, when Florus was deliberating whether he should appear at Nero's shows, taking part in the performance himself, Agrippinus replied, 'Appear by all means.' And when Florus inquired, 'But why do not you appear?' he answered, 'Because I do not even consider the question.' For the man who has once stooped to consider such questions, and to reckon up the value of external things, is not far from forgetting what manner of man he is.
Epictetus
When one does not die for the other, then we are already dead_
Tasos Livaditis
The memoirs of call girls are much in demand these days - a millennial craze.
Dimitra Ekmektsis
It is but sorrow to be wise when wisdom profits not.
Sophocles
Question me now about all other matters, but do not ask who I am, for fear you may increase in my heart it's burden of sorrow as I think back; I am very full of grief, and I should not sit in the house of somebody else with my lamentation and wailing. It is not good to go on mourning forever.
Homer
We shall enjoy itAs for him who findsfault, may sillinessand sorrow take him!
Sappho
There's such an intimate kind of beauty in the act of listening to music being created right in front of your eyes, watching the notes fly off the performers' fingertips, the night enveloping you like a blanket. 
M.C. Frank
Somebody who is Christ's must love Christ, and when he loves Christ he is delivered from the Devil, from hell and from death.
Elder Porphyrios
To rule by fettering the mind through fear of punishment in another world, is just as base as to use force... Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.
Hypatia
To find the Father of all is hard. And when found, it is impossible to utter Him.
Socrates
We know God by cultivating a relationship, not by understanding a concept.The relation constitutes the very subjectivity of of our existence. We participate in existence consciously and rationally, with subjective self-knowledge and identity, because the erotic drive of our nature is transformed into a personal relation when there arises in the space of the Other the first signifier of desire: the maternal presence. The subject is born with love's first leap of joy.
Christos Yannaras
How ought we to love God, Father?" he asked in a whisper."By loving men, my son""And how ought we to love men?" "By trying to guide them along the right path""And what is the right path?""The one that rises"- Nikos Kazanzakis, Christ Recrucified
Nikos Kazantzakis
In the Eucharist we can find all the dimensions of communion: God communicates himself to us, we enter into communion with him, the participants of the sacrament enter into communion with one another, and creation as a whole enters through man into communion with God. All this takes place in Christ and the Spirit, who brings the last days into history and offers to the world a foretaste of the Kingdom.
John D. Zizioulas
Most people, if they know they have done wrong, foolishly suppose they can conceal their error by defending it, and finding a justification for it; but in my belief there is only one medicine for an evil deed, and that is for the guilty man to admit his guilt and show that he is sorry for it. Such an admission will make the consequences easier for the victim to bear, and the guilty man himself, by plainly showing his distress at former transgressions, will find good grounds of hope for avoiding similar transgressions in the future.
Arrian
Some mistakes are too much fun to only make once!
Barrycles
The sooner you make your first five thousand mistakes the sooner you will beable to correct them.
Kimon Nicolaides
The man who finds that in the course of his life he has done a lot of wrong often wakes up at night in terror, like a child with a nightmare, and his life is full of foreboding: but the man who is conscious of no wrongdoing is filled with cheerfulness and with the comfort of old age.
Plato
Had history been democratic in its ways, there would have been no farming and no industrial revolution. Both leaps into the future were occasioned by unbearably painful crises that made most people wish they could recoil into the past.
Yanis Varoufakis
In a democracy, someone who fails to get elected to office can always console himself with the thought that there was something not quite fair about it.
Thucydides
He knew how to say many false things that were like true sayings.
Homer
Laws are partly formed for the sake of good men, in order to instruct them how they may live on friendly terms with one another, and partly for the sake of those who refuse to be instructed, whose spirit cannot be subdued, or softened, or hindered from plunging into evil.
Plato
Creation, like love, is a seductive pursuit filled with uncertainty and fluttering heartbeats. (Report to Greco)
N. Kazantzakis
There are 2 types of artist:those who create for others in mindthose who create for themselveseither way, none are truly independent.
Natasha Tsakos
Creation and destruction are one, to the eyes who can see beauty.And the greatest praise to India is this: not only are her people beautiful; not only are her daily life and cult beautiful; but, in the midst of the utilitarian, humanitarian, dogmatic world of the present day, she keeps on proclaiming the outstanding value of Beauty for the sake of Beauty, through her very conception of Godhead, of religion and of life.
Savitri Devi
Love, not balance, brings enlightenment
Nicholas C. Rossis
...an irresistible sleep fell deeply on his eyes, the sweetest, soundest oblivion, still as the sleep of death itself...
Homer
By helping us keep the world in perspective, sleep gives us a chance to refocus on the essence of who we are. And in that place of connection, it is easier for the fears and concerns of the world to drop away.
Arianna Huffington
When we shrink our whole reality down to pending projects, when our life becomes our endless to-do list, it's difficult to put them aside each night and let ourselves fall asleep and connect with something deeper.
Arianna Huffington
There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep.
Homer
Roses and thorns are parts of the same plant. Somehow though, some people are concerned mainly about the roses. The rose is not on the plant for more than a week, but the thorns are there forever.Roses are teaching that the beauty of life will bloom, once you have taught yourself the lessons given by living with the thorns.
Grigoris Deoudis
These things sensibly affected Theseus, who, thinking it but just not to disregard, but rather partake of, the sufferings of his fellow citizens, offered himself for one without any lot. All else were struck with admiration for the nobleness and with love for the goodness of the act.
Plutarch
People don't say what they mean very often. You have to read between the lines of their behavior, of what they say, to get to what they truly feel. That's what good literature is all about-- what Austen did better than anyone.
M.C. Frank
It is part of a good man to do great and noble deeds, though he risk everything.
Plutarch
Time is the moving image of eternity.
Plato