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Our word 'idiot' comes from the Greek name for the man who took no share in public matters.
Edith Hamilton
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Edith Hamilton
Age: 95 †
Born: 1867
Born: August 12
Died: 1963
Died: May 31
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Elbflorenz
Hamilton
Edith
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More quotes by Edith Hamilton
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
A people's literature is the great text-book for real knowledge of them.
Edith Hamilton
Faith is not belief. Belief is passive. Faith is active.
Edith Hamilton
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
Reality has actually very little to do with truth there is no necessary connection between the two.
Edith Hamilton
The fundamental facts about the Greek was that he had to use his mind. The ancient priest had said, Thus far and no farther. We set the limits of thought. The Greeks said, All things are to be examined and called into question. There are no limits set on thought.
Edith Hamilton
Myths are early science, the result of men's first trying to explain what they saw around them.
Edith Hamilton
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
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
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
To be able to be caught up into the world of thought-that is educated.
Edith Hamilton
He was there beside her, yet she was far away from him, aone with her outraged love and her ruined life.
Edith Hamilton
Christ must be rediscovered perpetually.
Edith Hamilton
The comedy of each age holds up a mirror to the people of that age, a mirror that is unique.
Edith Hamilton
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
The Old Testament is the record of men's conviction that God speaks directly to men.
Edith Hamilton
The greater the suffering depicted, the more terrible the events, the more intense our pleasure.
Edith Hamilton
...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
The suffering of a soul that can suffer greatly -- that and only that, is tragedy.
Edith Hamilton
A tendency to exaggeration was a Roman trait.
Edith Hamilton
