In 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.

In theology the conservative temper tends to formalism.

Poetry and preaching do not go well together; when the preacher mounts the pulpit the poet usually goes away.

The Greek temple is the creation, par excellence, of mind and spirit in equilibrium.

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.

The greater the suffering depicted, the more terrible the events, the more intense our pleasure.

Our word 'idiot' comes from the Greek name for the man who took no share in public matters.