Mary Renault Quotes - Page 2

What keeps the democracy alive at all but the hatred of excellence; the desire of the base to see no head higher than their own?

Do not believe that others will die, not you.... I have wrestled with Thanatos knee to knee and I know how death is vanquished. Man's immortality is not to live forever; for that wish is born of fear. Each moment free from fear makes a man immortal.

Money buys many things... The best of which is freedom.

It is better to learn war early from friends, than late from enemies.

Alexander, of whom men tell many legends, lived by his own. Achilles must have Patroklos. He might love his Briseis; but Patroklos was the friend till death. At their tombs in Troy, Alexander and Hephaistion had sacrificed together. Wound Patroklos, and Achilles will have your blood.

Longing performs all things

It is something, I thought, when a king can put a courtesan to the blush.

death was the price of life.

Change is the sum of the universe, and what is of nature ought not to be feared. But one gives it hostages, and lays one's grief upon the gods. Sokrates is free, and would have taught me freedom. But I have yoked the immortal horse that draws the chariot with a horse of earth; and when the one falls, both are entangled in the traces.

When we serve the great, they are our destiny.

Miss Searle had always considered boredom an intellectual defeat.

True friends share everything, except the past before they met.

There is madness in youth, but sometimes a god inspires it.

I was a king and a king's heir and now I am a slave.

But it is not for the perfect vase or the polished gem to choose their owners.

Tell a man what he may not sing and he is still half free; even all free, if he never wanted to sing it. But tell him what he must sing, take up his time with it so that his true voice cannot sound even in secret -- there, I have seen is slavery.

An audience of twenty thousand, sitting on its hands, could not have produced such an echoing silence.

It gives me no joy to be praised at the expense of a better artist, by someone who does not know the difference or who thinks me too vain to be aware of it myself.

To hate excellence is to hate the gods.

Love is a boaster at heart, who cannot hide the stolen horse without giving a glimpse of the bridle.

At the stair-foot Hephaistion was waiting. He happened to be there, as he happened to have a ball handy if Alexander wanted a game, or water if he was thirsty; not by calculation, but in a constant awareness by which no smallest trifle was missed. Now, when he came down the stairs with a shut mouth and blue lines under his eyes, Hephaistion received some mute signal he understood, and fell into step beside him.

Each man in his life honors, and imitates as well as he can, that god to whose choir he belonged, while he is uncorrupted in his first incarnation here; and in the fashion he has thus learned, he bears himself to his beloved as well as to the rest. So, then, each chooses from among the beautiful a love conforming to his kind, and then, as if his chosen were his god, he sets him up and robes him for worship.

I thought, There goes my lord, whom I was born to follow. I have found a King. And, I said to myself, looking after him as he walked away, I will have him, if I die for it.

By her shining and her power he knew her.