Quotes by Greek Authors - Page 23

I have gazed so much on beautythat my eyes overflow with it.
Constantinos P. Cavafis
...gracious your form and your eyes as honey : desire is poured upon your lovely face Aphrodite has honored you exceedingly...
Sappho
All began to change in the reverse direction and grow more tender. The white hair of the elderly began to grow black; the cheeks of the bearded to grow smooth, and one and all to return to the season of bloom that they had left behind them. Young men’s bodies grew smoother and smaller day by day and night by night till they reverted alike in mind and body to the likes of a newborn infant, and then dwindled right away and were clean lost to sight.
Plato
Let’s create positive change on this planet; With either: the hyper sophisticated tools we have, or the mobile device we are
Natasha Tsakos
Innovation is the result of a process that brings radical ideas to create positive change
Natasha Tsakos
You know you are changing when you no longer have points of references. Mapping a new life.
Natasha Tsakos
It is strange a difference comes from a subtraction.
Natasha Tsakos
One of the great constants in life is change.
Heracleitus
All is flux, nothing stays still
Plato
Let him who would move the world first move himself.
Socrates
All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride.
Sophocles
The cause of every anomaly can be found in woman.
G.I. Gurdjieff
Rumours voiced by women come to nothing.
Aeschylus
Once made equal to man, woman becomes his superior.
Socrates
If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.
Plato
...[T]he right way is to give one's attention first to the highest good of the young, just as you expect a good gardener to give his attention first to the young plants, and after that to the others. - Socrates
Plato
If an important decision is to be made, they [the Persians] discuss the question when they are drunk, and the following day the master of the house where the discussion was held submits their decision for reconsideration when they are sober. If they still approve it, it is adopted; if not, it is abandoned. Conversely, any decision they make when they are sober, is reconsidered afterwards when they are drunk.
Herodotus
They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth. -Plato, philosopher (427-347 BCE)
Plato
Unanimous hatred is the greatest medicine for a human community.
Aeschylus
The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
Plato
The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.
Plato
An Ass put on a Lion's skin and wentAbout the foreset with much merriment,Scaring the foolish beasts by brooks and rocks,Till at last he tried to scare the Fox. But Reynard, hearing from beneath the mane That Raucous voice so petulant and vain,Remarked. O' Ass, I too would run away,But that I know your old familiar bray'.That's just the way with asses, just the way.
Aesop
Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of all the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.
Giorgos Seferis
She wondered what it would be like to fly, to feel the air, cold and bracing on your face, to be able to spread wings whenever you felt cornered, to have the power to distance yourself at will, weightless, and safely out of reach.
Effrosyni Moschoudi
Freedom is not archived by satisfying desire, but by eliminating it.
Epictetus
Freedom, you see, is having events go in accordance with our will, never contrary to it.
Epictetus
Man, what are you talking about? Me in chains? You may fetter my leg but my will, not even Zeus himself can overpower.
Epictetus
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought.
Euripides
What you shun enduring yourself, attempt not to impose on others. You shun slavery- beware enslaving others! If you can endure to do that, one would think you had been once upon a time a slave yourself. For vice has nothing in common with virtue, nor Freedom with slavery.
Epictetus
Freedom is to stand naked at the moment, having no expectations, nothing to lose or to gain. The empty then is fulfilled, just to be emptied again at the next moment. The Absolute Freedom is, to become every path, at any given moment.
Grigoris Deoudis
Freedom is secured not by the fulfilling of men's desires, but by the removal of desire.
Epictetus
A city which belongs to just one man is no true city
Sophocles
When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty and there is nothing to fear from them then he is always stirring up some wary or other in order that the people may require a leader.
Plato
Dreams are realities in oxygenated form
Natasha Tsakos
Whatever you are dreaming of to create wait not for other people doing it for you.Give breath in your dreams, your creations.Become the Creator in your small or greater dreams!
Katerina Kostaki
Dreams surely are difficult, confusing, and not everything in them is brought to pass for mankind. For fleeting dreams have two gates: one is fashioned of horn and one of ivory. Those which pass through the one of sawn ivory are deceptive, bringing tidings which come to nought, but those which issue from the one of polished horn bring true results when a mortal sees them.
Homer
We are more curious about the meaning of dreams than about things we see when awake.
Diogenes Laërtius
I know how men in exile feed on dreams
Aeschylus
War is father of all, and king of all. He renders some gods, others men; he makes some slaves, others free.
Heraclitus
One must realize that war is common, and justice strife, and that all things come to be through strife and are (so) ordained.
Heraclitus
—so as the great Achilles rampaged on, his sharp-hoofed stallions trampled shields and corpses, axle under his chariot splashed with blood, blood on the handrails sweeping round the car, sprays of blood shooting up from the stallions' hoofs and churning, whirling rims—and the son of Peleus charioteering on to seize his glory, bloody filth splattering both strong arms, Achilles' invincible arms—
Homer
You know and we know, as practical men that the question of justice arises only between parties equal in strength and that the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.
Thucydides
Another such victory over the Romans, and we are undone.
Pyrrhus
Iron has powers to draw a man to ruin
Homer
And there they ring the walls, the young, the lithe. The handsome hold the graves they won in Troy; the enemy earth rides over those who conquered.
Aeschylus
* Pindar, a Thebian Greek wrote (circa 350 B.C.E.) War is sweet to those who have no experience of it. But the experienced man trembles exceedingly in his heart at its approach.
Pindar
The words we choose to use when we communicate with each other, carry vibrations. The word ‘war’ carries a whole different vibration than the word ‘peace’. The words we use are showing how we think and how we feel. The careful selection of words, helps to elevate our consciousness and resonate in higher frequencies.
Grigoris Deoudis
In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.
Herodotus
For Ares, lord of strife,tWho doth the swaying scales of battle hold,t War’s money-changer, giving dust for gold,t Sends back, to hearts that held them dear,tScant ash of warriors, wept with many a tear,tLight to the hand, but heavy to the soul;t Yea, fills the light urn fullt With what survived the flame—tDeath’s dusty measure of a hero’s frame!
Aeschylus
ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred with out a head
Euripides
For the whole earth is the tomb of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men. Make them your examples, and, esteeming courage to be freedom and freedom to be happiness, do not weigh too nicely the perils of war."[Funeral Oration of Pericles]
Thucydides
good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws
Plato
Just as we can’t fully explain what is beautiful, so we can’t fully explain why we are friends with someone in a way that will make the grounds of our attraction obvious to another — and even to ourselves. Our efforts always leave something out. And it is what is always left out that we try to gesture toward when we say that it is not something ABOUT our friends that we love but our friends THEMSELVES. But the self that we love is always just one one step behind whatever we can actually articulate. And so we are faced with a choice between saying something that seems informative but is never enough of an explanation ('loyal, practical, unworldly and so on') and saying something else that seems like an explanation but is completely uninformative ('the individual, in the uniqueness and integrity of his or her individuality').
Alexander Nehamas
Get not your friends by bare compliments, but by giving them sensible tokens of your love.
Socrates
I would disapprove of another hospitable man who was excessive in friendship, as of one excessive in hate. In all things balance is better.
Homer
After this manner conceive that a flatterer differs from a friend: for it often happens to both that they engage in the same employments and the same associations; but the one differs from the other in use, in the end, and in the disposition of the soul: for the friend considers that which appears to him to be good to belong also in common to his friend; and, whether this proves to be painful or pleasant, he partakes equally of it with him; but the flatterer, following his own desires, conducts the association to his own advantage. The friend desires an equality of good, the flatterer his own private good. The one aspires after equal honour in virtue, the other after superiority in pleasure. The one in conversation desires an equal freedom of speech, the other servile submission. The one loves truth in association, the other deception; and the one looks to future emolument, but the other to present delight. The one requires to be reminded of his good actions, the other wishes them to be involved in oblivion. The one takes care of the possessions of his friend, as of things common, the other destroys them, as being the property of another. The company of a friend in prosperity is most opportune, and in calamity is most equal; but a flatterer can never be satiated with prosperity, and in adversity he is never to be seen. Friendship is laudable, flattery detestable; for friendship attends to equality of retribution, but this flattery mutilates: for he who pays servile attention to another through indigence, that his wants may be supplied, so far as he does not receive an equal submission in return, will reprobate the inequality. A friend, when his friendship is concealed, is unhappy; on the contrary, a flatterer is miserable when is flattery is not concealed. Friendship when tried is strengthened, flattery is confuted, by time. Friendship requires not to be corroborated by advantage, but flattery cannot subsist without profit; and if men have any communion with the divinities, the pious man is a friend to divinity, but the superstitious is a flatterer of divinity; and the pious man is blessed, but the superstitious is miserable.
Maximus Tyrius
A friend is more to be longed for than the light; I speak of a genuine one. And wonder not: for it were better for us that the sun should be extinguished, than that we should be deprived of friends; better to live in darkness, than to be without friends
John Chrysostom
It is not so much our friends' help that helps us as the confident knowledge that they will help us.
Epicurus
A doubtful friend is worse than a certain enemy. Let a man be one thing or the other, and we then know how to meet him.
Aesop
One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives.
Euripides