Edith Hamilton Quotes

Love cannot live where there is no trust.

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.

When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.

Faith is not belief. Belief is passive. Faith is active.

To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful ... was a mark of the Greek spirit.

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.

The power of good is shown not by triumphantly conquering evil, but by continuing to resist evil while facing certain defeat.

..,No love cannot leave where there is no trust..,~cupid and psyche..,"Greek mythology of Edith Hamilton

Responsibility is the price every man must pay for freedom.

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.

To be able to be caught up into the world of thought-that is educated.

It is not hard work that is dreary; it is superficial work.

There are few efforts more conducive to humility than that of the translator trying to communicate an incommunicable beauty. Yet, unless we do try, something unique and never surpassed will cease to exist except in the libraries of a few inquisitive book lovers.

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.

Uncertainty is the prerequisite to gaining knowledge and frequently the result as well.

When faith is supported by facts or by logic it ceases to be faith.

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.

When I read educational articles it often seems to me that this important side of the matter, the purely personal side, is not emphasized enough; the fact that it is so much more agreeable and interesting to be an educated person than not. The sheer pleasure of being educated does not seem to be stressed.

The fullness of life is in the hazards of life.

Myths are early science, the result of men's first trying to explain what they saw around them.

The heterodoxy of one generation is the orthodoxy of the next.

A word is no light matter. Words have with truth been called fossil poetry, each, that is, a symbol of a creative thought.

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.

When the mind withdraws into itself and dispenses with facts it makes only chaos.

A tendency to exaggeration was a Roman trait.

None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.

A people's literature is the great text-book for real knowledge of them.

Mind and spirit together make up that which separates us from the rest of the animal world, that which enables a man to know the truth and that which enables him to die for the truth.

The mind knows only what lies near the heart.

Great art is the expression of a solution of the conflict between the demands of the world without and that within.

Tell one your thoughts, but beware of two. All know what is known to three

Our word 'idiot' comes from the Greek name for the man who took no share in public matters.

None so good that he has no faults, None so wicked that he is worth naught.

though the outside of human life changes much, the inside changes little, and the lesson-book we cannot graduate from is human experience.

The modern minds in each generation are the critics who preserve us from a petrifying world, who will not leave us to walk undisturbed in the ways of our fathers.

The comedy of each age holds up a mirror to the people of that age, a mirror that is unique.

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.

...a chasm opened in the earth and out of it coal-black horses sprang, drawing a chariot and driven by one who had a look of dark splendor, majestic and beautiful and terrible. He caught her to him and held her close. The next moment she was being borne away from the radiance of earth in springtime to the world of the dead by the king who rules it.

To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful and delightful to live in, was a mark of the Greek spirit which distinguished it from all that had gone before. It is a vital distinction.

The suffering of a soul that can suffer greatly -- that and only that, is tragedy.

The greater the suffering depicted, the more terrible the events, the more intense our pleasure.

All things are at odds when God sets a thinker loose on the planet

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.

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.

The Old Testament is the record of men's conviction that God speaks directly to men.

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.

In theology the conservative temper tends to formalism.

Reality has actually very little to do with truth; there is no necessary connection between the two.

Love, however, cannot be forbidden. The more that flame is covered up, the hotter it burns. Also love can always find a way. It was impossible that these two whose hearts were on fire should be kept apart. (Pyramus and Thisbe)

Poetry and preaching do not go well together; when the preacher mounts the pulpit the poet usually goes away.