Edith Hamilton

“A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.”

“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 educ”

“The Greeks were realists. They saw the beauty of common things and were content with it.”

“Noble self-restraint must have something to restrain.”

“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.”

“Love cannot live where there is no trust.”

“The mind knows only what lies near the heart.”

“Very few great artists feel the giant agony of the world.”

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

“None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.”

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

“Great art is the expression of a solution of the conflict between the demands of the world without and that within.”

“Theories that go counter to the facts of human nature are foredoomed.”

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

“Genius moves to creation, not to destruction. Only a very few have combined both.”

“Euripides "questioned everything. He was a misanthrope who preferred books to men.”

“The modern minds in each generation are the critics who preserve us from a petrifying world, who will not leave us to walk undisturbed in the ways of our fathers.”

“She was brave from excess of grief”

“Tell one your thoughts, but beware of two. All know what is known to three”

“When the mind withdraws into itself and dispenses with facts it makes only chaos.”