When we speak of beauty, we're speaking of something we're more or less indifferent to.
Edith HamiltonOne 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...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 HamiltonThe Greeks were the first intellectualists. In a world where the irrational had played the chief role, they came forward as the protagonists of the mind.
Edith HamiltonPoetry and preaching do not go well together; when the preacher mounts the pulpit the poet usually goes away.
Edith HamiltonModerately wise each one should be, Not overwise, for a wise man's heart Is seldom glad (Norse Wisdom)
Edith HamiltonIt has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought-that is to be educated.
Edith HamiltonOur word 'idiot' comes from the Greek name for the man who took no share in public matters.
Edith HamiltonWhen I read educational articles it often seems to me that this important side of the matter, the purely personal side, is not emphasized enough; the fact that it is so much more agreeable and interesting to be an educated person than not. The sheer pleasure of being educated does not seem to be stressed.
Edith HamiltonA word is no light matter. Words have with truth been called fossil poetry, each, that is, a symbol of a creative thought.
Edith HamiltonTo rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful and delightful to live in, was a mark of the Greek spirit which distinguished it from all that had gone before. It is a vital distinction.
Edith HamiltonPain 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 HamiltonThe 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 HamiltonThrough Plato, Aristotle came to believe in God; but Plato never attempted to prove His reality. Aristotle had to do so. Plato contemplated Him; Aristotle produced arguments to demonstrate Him. Plato never defined Him; but Aristotle thought God through logically, and concluded with entire satisfaction to himself that He was the Unmoved Mover.
Edith HamiltonIt was a Roman who said it was sweet to die for one's country. The Greeks never said it was sweet to die for anything. They had no vital lies.
Edith HamiltonHe was there beside her, yet she was far away from him, aone with her outraged love and her ruined life.
Edith Hamilton... 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 HamiltonReality has actually very little to do with truth; there is no necessary connection between the two.
Edith HamiltonWhen the world is storm-driven and bad things happen, then we need to know all the strong fortresses of the spirit which men have built through the ages.
Edith HamiltonLove 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 HamiltonMind and spirit together make up that which separates us from the rest of the animal world, that which enables a man to know the truth and that which enables him to die for the truth.
Edith HamiltonMyths are early science, the result of men's first trying to explain what they saw around them.
Edith Hamilton..,No love cannot leave where there is no trust..,~cupid and psyche..,"Greek mythology of Edith Hamilton
Edith HamiltonThe greater the suffering depicted, the more terrible the events, the more intense our pleasure.
Edith Hamiltonthough the outside of human life changes much, the inside changes little, and the lesson-book we cannot graduate from is human experience.
Edith HamiltonThere 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 HamiltonI 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 HamiltonThe anthropologists are busy, indeed, and ready to transport us back into the savage forest where all human things ... have their beginnings; but the seed never explains the flower.
Edith HamiltonSo far, we do not seem appalled at the prospect of exactly the same kind of education being applied to all the school children from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but there is an uneasiness in the air, a realization that the individual is growing less easy to find; an idea, perhaps, of what standardization might become when the units are not machines, but human beings.
Edith HamiltonGreat art is the expression of a solution of the conflict between the demands of the world without and that within.
Edith HamiltonIn every civilization, life grows easier. Men grow lazier in consequence. We have a picture of what happened to the individual Greek. (I cannot look at history, or at any human action, except as I look at the individual.) The Greeks had good food, good witty talk, pleasant dinner parties; and they were content. When the individual man had reached that condition in Athens, when the thought not of giving to the state but of what the state could give to him, Athens' freedom was doomed.
Edith HamiltonWhen the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.
Edith Hamilton