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.

It 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.

The Old Testament is the record of men's conviction that God speaks directly to men.

The power of good is shown not by triumphantly conquering evil, but by continuing to resist evil while facing certain defeat.

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.

A word is no light matter. Words have with truth been called fossil poetry, each, that is, a symbol of a creative thought.

In theology the conservative temper tends to formalism.