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.
The adoration of human nature by the Greeks appeared in Greek plastic art and was the cause of its excellence.
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.
I can play lots of nationalities: Greeks, South Americans, Arabs, all sorts.
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.
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 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.
The technological revolution is itself a direct descendant of the Ancient Greeks’ historia, and the web is populated by young people who want to dive into the past.
We cry. The Greeks cry because we have not an objective today. Yesterday we have objective to put off the dictatorship. Today the objective is to find ourselves.
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.
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.
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.
I suppose I walk that line between comedy and cruelty because I think one illuminates the other. We’re all cruel, aren’t we? We are all extreme in one way or another at times and that’s what drama, since the Greeks, has dealt with.
I love the Greeks. There’s no messing around – it’s all do or die with them.
One of the reasons I admire David Lindsay-Abaire’s work is that he, like the Greeks I’ve spent so much of my professional life contemplating, is not afraid of taking on the big stuff – huge, human, moral issues – what do we owe to those we love?
Why do Greeks always open restaurants that fail?
If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody’s mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.
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.
Our modern world, though infinitely more complex than that of ancient Greece, is also far more superficial. Where the Greeks offered simple psychological training, we live in an age of style and spin in which perceptions of good and evil slither and shift with the political view of the moment.
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.
Style is a fraud. I always felt the Greeks were hiding behind their columns.
I have never felt any ethnic connection between the Greeks and me other than how hairy I am.
Brands are essentially forbidden from saying or associating themselves with the Olympics – something that has been commonly owned by Western Civilization since the Greeks – unless they hand over piles of cash to the Games.
Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state.
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.
We thus see that the Greeks of the early ages knew little of any real people except those to the east and south of their own country, or near the coast of the Mediterranean.
Blaming speculators as a response to financial crisis goes back at least to the Greeks. It’s almost always the wrong response.
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.
Australia is an extraordinary country full of people who eat extraordinary food. There are Greeks, Italians, Vietnamese, Koreans, Chinese, Brits. It’s so varied.
There are so many fantastic stories and I want to bring Thor and Odin and the other gods into the modern world, just like I did with the Greeks and ‘Percy Jackson.’ I’ll give the books an urban setting and have young people interacting with the Norse gods.
I’ve got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.
I think the Greeks were the only people ever to nail character. Their heroes are deeply flawed.
The theatre, our theatre, comes from the Greeks.
The fate of the Celt in the British Empire bids fair to resemble that of the Greeks among the Romans.
Not all Greeks are ready to do whatever is necessary to stay in the euro.
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.
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.’
Art is a way of penetrating and going deep into our unconscious and creating amazing worlds – as the Greeks did, if you like, as did Ovid with his stories and his fantasies.
Theatricality – that’s where you get catharsis. The Greeks went to see drama because they felt like this wasn’t happening to them.
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