Quote

A people's literature is the great text-book for real knowledge of them.

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
People
Text
Literature
Knowledge
Book
Real
Great

More quotes by Edith Hamilton

Image
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
Image
Our word 'idiot' comes from the Greek name for the man who took no share in public matters.
Edith Hamilton
Image
Faith is not belief. Belief is passive. Faith is active.
Edith Hamilton
Image
sooner or later, if the activity of the mind is restricted anywhere it will cease to function even where it is allowed to be free.
Edith Hamilton
Image
Great art is the expression of a solution of the conflict between the demands of the world without and that within.
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
Theories that go counter to the facts of human nature are foredoomed.
Edith Hamilton
Image
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
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
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
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
Moderately wise each one should be, Not overwise, for a wise man's heart Is seldom glad (Norse Wisdom)
Edith Hamilton
Image
The greater the suffering depicted, the more terrible the events, the more intense our pleasure.
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
Myths are early science, the result of men's first trying to explain what they saw around them.
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
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
The suffering of a soul that can suffer greatly -- that and only that, is tragedy.
Edith Hamilton
Image
Christ must be rediscovered perpetually.
Edith Hamilton
Image
It is not hard work that is dreary it is superficial work.
Edith Hamilton