Quote

They were the first Westerners. The spirit of the West, the modern spirit, is a Greek discovery and the place of the Greeks is in the modern world.

Edith Hamilton

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Edith Hamilton
Age: 95 †
Born: 1867
Born: August 12
Died: 1963
Died: May 31
Author
Classical Scholar
Historian
Mythographer
Teacher
Writer
Elbflorenz
Hamilton
Edith
West
Modern
Spirit
Place
Firsts
Westerners
First
Greeks
World
Greek
Discovery

More quotes by Edith Hamilton

Image
Theories that go counter to the facts of human nature are foredoomed.
Edith Hamilton
Image
Faith is not belief. Belief is passive. Faith is active.
Edith Hamilton
Image
Ages of faith and of unbelief are always said to mark the course of history.
Edith Hamilton
Image
Love and the Soul (for that is what Psyche means) had sought and, after sore trials, found each other and that union could never be broken. (Cupid and Psyche)
Edith Hamilton
Image
He was there beside her, yet she was far away from him, aone with her outraged love and her ruined life.
Edith Hamilton
Image
All things are at odds when God sets a thinker loose on the planet
Edith Hamilton
Image
A tendency to exaggeration was a Roman trait.
Edith Hamilton
Image
... clear thinking is not the characteristic which distinguishes our literature today. We are more and more caught up by the unintelligible. People like it. This argues an inability to think, or, almost as bad, a disinclination to think.
Edith Hamilton
Image
..,No love cannot leave where there is no trust..,~cupid and psyche..,Greek mythology of Edith Hamilton
Edith Hamilton
Image
...a chasm opened in the earth and out of it coal-black horses sprang, drawing a chariot and driven by one who had a look of dark splendor, majestic and beautiful and terrible. He caught her to him and held her close. The next moment she was being borne away from the radiance of earth in springtime to the world of the dead by the king who rules it.
Edith Hamilton
Image
When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.
Edith Hamilton
Image
Love, however, cannot be forbidden. The more that flame is covered up, the hotter it burns. Also love can always find a way. It was impossible that these two whose hearts were on fire should be kept apart. (Pyramus and Thisbe)
Edith Hamilton
Image
Tell one your thoughts, but beware of two. All know what is known to three
Edith Hamilton
Image
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.
Edith Hamilton
Image
There are few efforts more conducive to humility than that of the translator trying to communicate an incommunicable beauty. Yet, unless we do try, something unique and never surpassed will cease to exist except in the libraries of a few inquisitive book lovers.
Edith Hamilton
Image
Christ must be rediscovered perpetually.
Edith Hamilton
Image
Pain is the most individualized thing on earth. It is true that it is the great common bond as well, but that realization only comes when it is over. To suffer is to be alone. To watch another suffer is to know the barrier that shuts each of us away by himself Only individuals can suffer.
Edith Hamilton
Image
The comedy of each age holds up a mirror to the people of that age, a mirror that is unique.
Edith Hamilton
Image
There is a field where all wonderful perfections of microscope and telescope fail, all exquisite niceties of weights and measures, as well as that which is behind them, the keen and driving power of the mind. No facts however indubitably detected, no effort of reason however magnificently maintained, can prove that Bach's music is beautiful.
Edith Hamilton
Image
Myths are early science, the result of men's first trying to explain what they saw around them.
Edith Hamilton