Gilbert Murray

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading.”

“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.”

“The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths.”

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

“They are all dead now, Diocletian and Ignatius, Cyril and Hypatia, Julian and Basil, Athanasius and Arîus: every party has yielded up its persecutors and its martyrs, its hates and slanders and aspirations and heroisms, to the arms of that great Silence whose secrets they all claimed so loudly to have read. Even the dogmas for which they fought might seem to be dead too. For if Julian and Sallustius, Gregory and John Chrysostom, were to rise again and see the world as it now is, they would probably feel their personal differences melt away in comparison with the vast difference between their world and this. They fought to the death about this credo and that, but the same spirit was in all of them.”