Greeks Quotes

I think that the Greeks were extremely ambivalent about the stories of Amazons: they found them both thrilling and rather daunting at the same time.

We Greeks are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes, and we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness.

Today I want to send a message of optismism to all Greeks. Our road, our path, will be more stabilised. Our country will be in a better situation. We will be stronger.

If you decide to tell a kid that looks don’t matter, she can prove you wrong every day. Because they see it everywhere. That is age-old, going back to the Greeks, but now we’re bombarded nonstop.

Dying, we tell ourselves, is like going to sleep. This figure of speech occurs very commonly in everyday thought and language, as well as in the literature of many cultures and many ages. It was apparently quite common even in the time of the ancient Greeks.

The real Amazons were long believed to be purely imaginary. They were the mythical warrior women who were the archenemies of the ancient Greeks. Every Greek hero or champion, from Hercules to Theseus and Achilles, had to prove his mettle by fighting a powerful warrior queen.

By giving material expression to force-forms in space, the Greeks gave divine spiritual beings the opportunity of using these material forms. It is no figure of speech but a fact when we say that gods came down at that time into the Greek temples in order to be among human beings on the physical plane.

The best teachers, one hopes, don’t shout at their students – because they are skilled at wooing as well as demanding the best efforts of others. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, this wooing was a sufficiently fine art in itself to be the central focus of education.

I am thrilled to return as Honorary Captain of the GREEKs for HBCUs Team. I reflect fondly on my days at Florida A&M University, and how visible and active all of the sororities and fraternities were. Membership in Black Greek letter organizations on college campuses is preparation for a lifetime of service.

Artificial creatures date back to the ancient Chinese and Greeks. Renaissance automata were designed primarily to entertain, reflecting the value placed on leisure.

In many traditions, hawks are sacred: Apollo’s messengers for the Greeks, sun symbols for the ancient Egyptians and, in the case of the Lakota Sioux, embodiments of clear vision, speed and single-minded dedication.

Greece isn’t a democracy now it’s run through a troika – three foreign officials that fly into Athens airport and tell the Greeks what they can and can’t do.

Well, I’m trained as a classicist, so I like to read the Greeks and Romans.

The Greeks were the first boxers. Pugilism appears to have been one of the earliest distinctions in play and exercise that appeared between the Hellenes and their Asiatic fathers. The unarmed personal encounter was indicative of a sturdier manhood.

The nomads’ egalitarian lifestyle astonished the Greeks, who kept their own women indoors weaving and minding children. The exotic Scythian lifestyle fueled the Greek imagination and led to an outpouring of myths about fierce Amazons, ‘the equals of men.’

The Germans form one of the most important branches of the Indo-Germanic or Aryan race – a division of the human family which also includes the Hindoos, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Celts, and the Slavonic tribes.

Before the Greeks were the Tamils. The Tamils are one of the oldest civilizations that’s still surviving.

You know, it is said that we Greeks are a fervent and warm blooded breed. Well, let me tell you something – it is true.

The ancient Greeks noticed that a man with arms and legs extended described a circle, with his navel as the center.

There are proofs that date back to the Greeks that are still valid today.

To make America the greatest is my goal, so I beat the Russian and I beat the Pole. And for the U.S.A. won the medal of gold. The Greeks said, ‘You’re better than the Cassius of old.’

The Greeks, those originators of the intellectual life, fixed for us the idea of the poet. He was a divine man; more sacred than the priest, who was at best an intermediary between men and the gods, but in the poet the god was present and spoke.

I work in an old tradition that goes back to the ancient Greeks. You hold a mirror to crime to see what’s happening in society. I could never write a crime story just for the sake of it, because I always want to talk about certain things in society.

Hollywood grew to be the most flourishing factory of popular mythology since the Greeks.

The question of the composition of perceptible objects is one which already occupied the mind of the ancient Greeks.

The great universal literature has always had a tragic relation with freedom. The Greeks renounced absolute freedom and imposed order on chaotic mythology, like a tyrant.

I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.

The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such.

The Greeks said grandly in their tragic phrase, ‘Let no one be called happy till his death;’ to which I would add, ‘Let no one, till his death, be called unhappy.’

The Amazons were notorious for their freedom: their sexual freedom, their freedom to hunt, to be outdoors, to go to war; and the Greeks, both men and women alike, were fascinated by these stories. Maybe it was a safe way to explore the idea of women who could be equals of men.

The vast majority of Greeks accept the need for reform and want to keep our country inside the euro zone.

We reach a secondary road and – here comes the bonus – we pass the Temple of Neptune and Cerene, at Paestum, both looking beautiful in the sunlight. Strung from the Doric columns are lines of soldiers’ washing. At last they had been put to practical use. If only the ancient Greeks had known.

Politics also means educating people. It’s important to speak openly with our fellow Greeks, to tell them what our problems are and that we have to change something.

The sense of this word among the Greeks affords the noblest definition of it; enthusiasm signifies God in us.

Archaeologists have been digging up thousands of graves of people called Scythians by the Greeks. They turn out to be people whose women fought, hunted, rode horses, used bows and arrows, just like the men.

The first glimpse that we have of the notions which the Greeks possessed of the shape and the inhabitants of the earth is afforded by the poems passing under the name of Homer.

Human beings have kicked around the concept of what individual happiness means for centuries, from the Bible to the ancient Greeks to the 1859 bestseller ‘Self-Help.’

The ancient Greeks and Romans were comfortable with any number of deities and were quite open to allowing conquered nations to continue to worship in whatever ways they saw fit, as long as they didn’t mind having an emperor who required taxes and tributes.

In the ancient world and, above all, among the Greeks, human nature was held in high esteem.

For the Greeks, there was no single canonical version of creation, but a number of overlapping stories.

But Paul, in his preaching of the Gospel, is a debtor to deliver the word not to Barbarians only, but also to Greeks, and not only to the unwise, who would easily agree with him, but also to the wise.

In world mythology, there are countless examples of tragic characters whose greatest strength is also the source of their undoing. But the ancient Greeks and Romans also held the view that acceptance is the beginning of wisdom.

I think the Greeks were the only people ever to nail character. Their heroes are deeply flawed.

Art is exalted above religion and race. Not a single solitary soul these days believes in the religions of the Assyrians, the Egyptians and the Greeks… Only their art, whenever it was beautiful, stands proud and exalted, rising above all time.

We Greeks want change. We know there are problems in our system. We have great potential but we need to manage our country well. Now that hasn’t been done over the last decades. And that is, of course, what we are paying for.

The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation.

Greeks are notorious for their potions. I wouldn’t say I’ve used Windex, but there are so many tricks that have been handed down to me.

We Greeks are the blacks of Europe.

There was a time when all dark-skinned people were called Ethiopians, for the Greeks referred to Africa as, ‘The Land Of The Burnt-Face People.’

Any time the character is in a moral quandary is interesting. That’s been true from the Greeks on down.

Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state.

Why do Greeks always open restaurants that fail?

The fate of the Celt in the British Empire bids fair to resemble that of the Greeks among the Romans.

Where I live, there are a lot of businesses owned by Ethiopians and Eritreans. They’re the new immigrants, the new Greeks – what my people did. The next generation of these people will probably be college graduates. That’s how it works, right there in front of your eyes.

The Greeks already understood that there was more interest in portraying an unusual character than a usual character – that is the purpose of films and theatre.

I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts.

I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.

There are more myths about Black Wednesday than the Greeks ever created.

From about 700 B.C. to A.D. 500, the vast territory of Scythia, stretching from the Black Sea to China, was home to diverse but culturally related nomads. Known as Scythians to Greeks, Saka to the Persians, and Xiongnu to the Chinese, the steppe tribes were masters of horses and archery.

It’s only very recently that women have succeeded in entering those professions which, as Muses, they typified for the Greeks.

Many people have been pontificating, and patronizing, and moralizing, and scapegoating, saying you Greeks, you are the problem. I would say we Greeks have a problem. We are not the problem.

The theatre, our theatre, comes from the Greeks.

We, to some degree, are like what we are because we inherited certain things from the Greeks and the Romans. One of them that’s so striking is the whole area of politics.

The Greeks, the Italians, and the Indians, from whom we get our ideas, erect monuments to ideas; we erect ours to men, and of such monuments we have an oversupply.

Ever since the Greeks, we have been drunk with language! We have made a cage with words and shoved our God inside!

Australia is an extraordinary country full of people who eat extraordinary food. There are Greeks, Italians, Vietnamese, Koreans, Chinese, Brits. It’s so varied.

The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.

So many able historians have worked over seventeenth-century New England that one would think there was little left to be learned from the people who lived there – fewer than 100,000 at the end of the century. Seldom, apart perhaps from the Greeks and Romans, have so few been studied by so many.

No amount of debt restructuring, even debt forgiveness, will help the Greeks achieve real prosperity. What they need is not short-term relief but, rather, a long-term cure.

If you want to talk about cultural appropriation, we have to go back to the Greeks.

Conflicting views and contrasting ideas are the essence of all great debates throughout history, from the Greeks to the Oxford Union Debating Society. Today, we turn to television for the creative clash of ideas on matters that touch our lives.

The ancient Greeks were the first ones to say an unexamined life is not worth living. They don’t tell you of course what we found out, an examined life not that fascinating either.

What the Greeks and Romans considered myths, we consider fairy tales. We can see how very clearly the myths, which emanated from all cultures, had a huge influence on the development of the modern fairy tale.

How can a parliamentarian or a leader in a country say, on the one hand, that we’re going to support Greece but at the same time say that Greeks are lazy?

You don’t have to go to the kings and queens of the earth – I think the Greeks and Elizabethans did this because it was a logical concept – but every human being is in enormous conflict about something, even if it’s how to get to work in the morning and all of that.

You see, O Greeks! The enemy already acknowledge the country to be ours; for when they made peace with us, they stipulated that we should not burn the country belonging to the king, and now they set fire to it themselves, as if they looked upon it no longer as their own.

I think the history of the world suggests if one studies the Romans, and one studies the early Greeks, and one studies the history of the world, they all eventually falter if they don’t come back to the basic aspect of integrity and honor and feelings of love one for another.

Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet.

Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.

Theatricality – that’s where you get catharsis. The Greeks went to see drama because they felt like this wasn’t happening to them.

What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.

I’ve met and sketched most of the great athletes from the past five decades and their movement, grace and energy have kept me captivated over the years. That’s what the ancient Greeks first saw and that’s what caught my interest.

Our society is the product of several great religious and philosophical traditions. The ideas of the Greeks and Romans, Christianity, Judaism, humanism and the Enlightenment have made us who we are.

Well, love is insanity. The ancient Greeks knew that. It is the taking over of a rational and lucid mind by delusion and self-destruction. You lose yourself, you have no power over yourself, you can’t even think straight.

While the willingness of the ancient Greeks to sacrifice their lives for glory brings tears to my eyes, I cannot ultimately condone the choice of Achilles.

My father loved democracy. He loved the ancient Greeks because they invented democracy, and he shared their contempt for those who refused to participate in the political process.

We were discussing civilization and the fact that young men among the Greeks at that time were idiots and uneducated, so the men had emotional and friendly relationships with members of their own sex.

Pergamon, a prosperous city in western Anatolia, was fabled to have been founded by Hercules’ son. Like many Hellenistic cities populated by Greeks who intermarried with indigenous people, Pergamon after Alexander the Great’s death (323 B.C.) had evolved a hybrid of democracy and Persian-influenced monarchy.

I have never felt any ethnic connection between the Greeks and me other than how hairy I am.

Strangers used to gather together at the cinema and sit together in the dark, like Ancient Greeks participating in the mysteries, dreaming the same dream in unison.

Style is a fraud. I always felt the Greeks were hiding behind their columns.

Nothing has done more to bring people of different races and different backgrounds together than athletics, certainly more than politicians have done. It’s why the Greeks invented the Olympics.

I love Shakespeare and the Greeks – learned a lot studying them at one time.

The Greeks said very, very extreme things in their tragedies.

I love the Greeks. There’s no messing around – it’s all do or die with them.

England and Greece are friends. English blood was shed on Greek soil in the war against fascism, and Greeks gave their lives to protect English pilots.

I’ve never studied the classics, but I’d like to. My teacher offered to show me how the Greeks were able to sculpt someone perfectly. From there, you can go off and experiment – sort of like jazz. Once you learn to play anything, you can break the form and go and do something even bigger.

I discovered that there is Indian blood in my ancestry on my father’s side – a fact that had not been talked about in my family. No wonder I’ve often been cast in exotic roles – Indian princesses, Russian revolutionaries, Algerians, Gypsies and Greeks.

The oldest theory of art belongs to the Greeks, who regarded art as an imitation (mimesis) of reality. The strength of that theory is that it explains the way in which art takes its materials from real life.