Top 88 Greeks Quotes

I think it is incumbent on the rest of us – and I would suggest that includes other European leaders – to pause in what has become a very popular game of telling the Greeks how to run their lives.

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

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.

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.

And it’s a crime because the great plays of history, going all the way back to the Greeks, are part of everybody’s heritage. It’s just like in music, Beethoven or Mozart, that’s everybody’s heritage.

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.

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.

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.’

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.

The old Greeks dwelt on the tendency of human affairs to drift downwards irresistibly to unhappiness. Guilt – that is, untoward and often involuntary actions – pulls generation after generation heavily as lead down, down, down.

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

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.

History is how we have learnt to think about ourselves. It’s not as though the Greeks and Romans are static entities out there to be discovered and translated. We make them speak, we talk to them, and they inform what we say.

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.

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

In the Bronx, you have the southern Italians; in Queens, the Greeks, Koreans and Chinese; in Brooklyn, the Jewish community; and in Harlem, the Hispanics – all with their own markets.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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?

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

The Greeks said the artist doesn’t actually have to travel and look around. You stay where God has put you, and you dig as deep as you can. This is what I’ve done.

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.

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.

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

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.

Very few societies on Earth developed science as we know it today. On the other hand, the number is not zero – the Greeks, the Chinese, and the Maya did, among others. Once invented, science proved so useful that it spread like mold on a petri dish.

We Greeks are the blacks of Europe.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Very often, people will come out and say, ‘Greeks aren’t doing things, Greeks aren’t making changes, there’s no reform,’ That is hogwash. We have made a huge effort. The Greek people have made a huge effort.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.