Edith Hamilton Quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Responsibility is the price every man must pay for freedom.

Love cannot live where there is no trust.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.