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A word is no light matter. Words have with truth been called fossil poetry, each, that is, a symbol of a creative thought.

Edith Hamilton

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Edith Hamilton
Age: 95 †
Born: 1867
Born: August 12
Died: 1963
Died: May 31
Author
Classical Scholar
Historian
Mythographer
Teacher
Writer
Elbflorenz
Hamilton
Edith
Matter
Called
Creative
Word
Words
Fossil
Language
Fossils
Light
Symbol
Thought
Symbols
Truth
Poetry

More quotes by Edith Hamilton

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The easy way has never in the long run commanded the allegiance of mankind.
Edith Hamilton
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All things are at odds when God sets a thinker loose on the planet
Edith Hamilton
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...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
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Freedom was born in Greece because there men limited their own freedom. ... The limits to action established by law were a mere nothing compared to the limits established by a man's free choice.
Edith Hamilton
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Christ must be rediscovered perpetually.
Edith Hamilton
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The suffering of a soul that can suffer greatly -- that and only that, is tragedy.
Edith Hamilton
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Moderately wise each one should be, Not overwise, for a wise man's heart Is seldom glad (Norse Wisdom)
Edith Hamilton
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One form of religion perpetually gives way to another if religion did not change it would be dead. ... Each time the new ideas appear they are seen at first as a deadly foe threatening to make religion perish from the earth but in the end there is a deeper insight and a better life with ancient follies and prejudices gone.
Edith Hamilton
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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
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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
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Great art is the expression of a solution of the conflict between the demands of the world without and that within.
Edith Hamilton
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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
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To be able to be caught up into the world of thought-that is educated.
Edith Hamilton
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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
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A people's literature is the great text-book for real knowledge of them.
Edith Hamilton
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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
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Ages of faith and of unbelief are always said to mark the course of history.
Edith Hamilton
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Theories that go counter to the facts of human nature are foredoomed.
Edith Hamilton
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Faith is not belief. Belief is passive. Faith is active.
Edith Hamilton
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The comedy of each age holds up a mirror to the people of that age, a mirror that is unique.
Edith Hamilton