Mary Renault Quotes

One must live as if it would be forever, and as if one might die each moment. Always both at once.

You can make an audience see nearly anything, if you yourself believe in it.

Half the world's troubles come from men not being trained to resent a fallacy as much as an insult.

It is better to believe in men too rashly, and regret, than believe too meanly. Men could be more than they are, if they would try for it. He has shown them that.

All men seek esteem; the best by lifting themselves, which is hard to do, the rest by shoving others down, which is much easier.

It is bitter to lose a friend to evil before one loses him to death.

Everything is change; and you cannot step twice into the same river.

We Persians have a saying that one should deliberate serious matters first drunk, then sober.

The rightness of a thing isn't determined by the amount of courage it takes.

All tragedies deal with fated meetings; how else could there be a play? Fate deals its stroke; sorrow is purged, or turned to rejoicing; there is death, or triumph; there has been a meeting, and a change. No one will ever make a tragedy - and that is as well, for one could not bear it - whose grief is that the principals never met.

How can people trust the harvest, unless they see it sown?

In hatred as in love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul.

Never destroy without thought your enemy's pretences; they are usually your best weapon against him.

There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare.

In all men is evil sleeping; the good man is he who will not awaken it, in himself or in other men.

One might have supposed that the true act of love was to lie together and talk.

Go with your fate, but not beyond. Beyond leads to dark places.

He sees himself in his lover as if in a mirror, not knowing whom he sees, And when they are together, he too is released from pain, and when apart, he longs as he himself is longed for; for reflected in his heart is love's image, which is love's answer. But he calls it, and believes it, not love but friendship.

There is nothing like despair to make one throw oneself upon the gods.

The perpetual stream of human nature is formed into ever-changing shallows, eddies, falls and pools by the land over which it passes. Perhaps the only real value of history lies in considering this endlessly varied play between the essence and the accidents.

Often beauty grows dull or common when speech breaks the mask.

Clouds of black birds rose up wailing and screaming, like the thoughts of my heart.

But courage without conduct is the virtue of a robber, or a tyrant.

A man is at his youngest when he thinks he is a man, not yet realizing that his actions must show it.

Power is the test. Some, once they have it, are content to buy the show of liking, and punish those who withhold it; then you have a despot. But some keep a true eye for how they seem to others, and care about it, which holds them back from much mischief.