Top 11 Quotes by Gilbert Murray

The average beast of prey is a decent creature who merely kills for the sake of food or in a fight against an enemy. It is only man who calls killing sport and kills for the pleasure of killing; not for food, not for

The average beast of prey is a decent creature who merely kills for the sake of food or in a fight against an enemy. It is only man who calls killing "sport" and kills for the pleasure of killing; not for food, not for self-defense, but just to satisfy some primitive instinct, once necessary and now perverted.

Gilbert Murray

Sports, Fighting, Men

Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries.

Gilbert Murray

Greek, Definitions, Language

Be careful in dealing with a man who cares nothing for comfort or promotion, but is simply determined to do what he believes to be right. He is a dangerous uncomfortable enemy, because his body, which you can always conquer, gives you little purchase upon his soul.

Gilbert Murray

Believe, Men, Giving

A machine is a great moral educator. If a horse or a donkey won’t go, men lose their tempers and beat it; if a machine won’t go, there is no use beating it. You have to think and try till you find what is wrong. That is real education.

Gilbert Murray

Horse, Real, Men

The life and liberty and property and happiness of the common man throughout the world are at the absolute mercy of a few persons whom he has never seen, involved in complicated quarrels that he has never heard of.

Gilbert Murray

Men, Liberty, World

It is doubtless one of Aristotle's great services that he conceived so clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a history.

Gilbert Murray

Literature, Great Service, Grows

Aristotle, Gilbert Murray (1920). “On the Art of Poetry”, p.12, Oxford University Press on Demand

The fact is that much misunderstanding is often caused by our modern attempts to limit too strictly the meaning of a Greek word.

Gilbert Murray

Greek, Limits, Facts

Aristotle, Gilbert Murray (1920). “On the Art of Poetry”, p.10, Oxford University Press on Demand

Sometimes Aristotle analyses his terms, but very often he takes them for granted; and in the latter case, I think, he is sometimes deceived by them.

Gilbert Murray

Thinking, Analysis, Sometimes

Aristotle, Gilbert Murray (1920). “On the Art of Poetry”, p.12, Oxford University Press on Demand

The fashions of the ages vary in this direction and that, but they vary for the most part from a central road which was struck out by the imagination of Greece.

Gilbert Murray

Fashion, Imagination, Age

Aristotle, Gilbert Murray (1920). “On the Art of Poetry”, p.20, Oxford University Press on Demand

Where words can be translated into equivalent words, the style of an original can be closely followed; but no translation which aims at being written in normal English can reproduce the style of Aristotle.

Gilbert Murray

Style, Normal, Aim

Aristotle, Gilbert Murray (1920). “On the Art of Poetry”, p.6, Oxford University Press on Demand