When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.

though the outside of human life changes much, the inside changes little, and the lesson-book we cannot graduate from is human experience.

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.

The 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.

Ages of faith and of unbelief are always said to mark the course of history.

Convention, so often a mask for injustice.

Old ideas are continually being slain by new facts. There is nothing stable in the conclusions of the mind, and it is impossible that there ever should be unless we hold that the universe is made to the measure of the human mind, an assumption for which nothing in the past gives any warrant.