Edith Hamilton Quotes

68 Sourced Quotes

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

Edith Hamilton
None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.

Edith Hamilton
A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people, as no historical reconstruction can.

Edith Hamilton
None so good that he has no faults, None so wicked that he is worth naught.

Edith Hamilton
Uncertainty is the prerequisite to gaining knowledge and frequently the result as well.

Edith Hamilton
Love, however, cannot be forbidden. The more that flame is covered up, the hotter it burns. Also love can always find a way. It was impossible that these two whose hearts were on fire should be kept apart.

Edith Hamilton
They [the Greeks] were the first Westerners; the spirit of the West, the modern spirtit, is a Greek discovery.

Edith Hamilton
The modern minds in each generation are the critics who preserve us from a petrifying world, who will not leave us to walk undisturbed in the ways of our fathers.

Edith Hamilton
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.

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

Edith Hamilton
He was, first and last, the born fighter, to whom the consciousness of being matched against a great adversary suffices, and who can dispense with success. Life for him was an adventure, perilous indeed, but men are not made for safe havens. The fullness of life is in the hazards of life. And, at the worst, there is that in us which can turn defeat into victory.

Edith Hamilton
The heterodoxy of one generation is the orthodoxy of the next.

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.

Edith Hamilton
No facts however indubitably detected, no effort of reason however magnificently maintained, can prove that Bach's music is beautiful.

Edith Hamilton
Mind 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 Hamilton
Civilization, a much abused word, stands for a high matter quite apart from telephones and electric lights. It is a matter of imponderables, of delight in the things of the mind, of love of beauty, of honor, grace, courtesy, delicate feeling.

Edith Hamilton
Fundamental to everything the [ancient] Greeks achieved was their conviction that good for humanity was possible only if men were free, body, mind, and spirit, and if each man limited his own freedom. A good state or work of art or piece of thinking was possible only through the self-mastery of the free individual, self-government.

Edith Hamilton
When faith is supported by facts or by logic it ceases to be faith.

Edith Hamilton
[Happiness is] The exercise of vital powers, along lines of excellence, in a life affording them scope.

Edith Hamilton
When the mind withdraws into itself and dispenses with facts it makes only chaos.

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 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
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
Myths are early science, the result of men's first trying to explain what they saw around them.

Edith Hamilton
Theories that go counter to the facts of human nature are foredoomed.

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
It 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 Hamilton
Faith is not belief. Belief is passive. Faith is active.

Edith Hamilton
We are so made that when we have achieved a system of thought which explains everything beautifully, we have reached the point where we must begin to give it up. We are contented with it only as long as it is incomplete and we are trying to fit things into it.

Edith Hamilton
The comedy of each age holds up a mirror to the people of that age, a mirror that is unique.

Edith Hamilton