Edith Hamilton Quotes

68 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Edith Hamilton
It is by our power to suffer, above all, that we are of more value than the sparrows.

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
Responsibility was the price every man must pay for freedom. It was to be had on no other terms.

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
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
All things are at odds when God lets a thinker loose on this planet.

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

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
For all men serve him of their own free will. And he whom Love touches not walks in darkness.

Edith Hamilton
All things are to be examined and called into question. There are no limits set to thought.

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

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

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

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

Edith Hamilton
The easy way has never in the long run commanded the allegiance of mankind.

Edith Hamilton
When we speak of beauty, we're speaking of something we're more or less indifferent to.

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's not hard work which is dreary; it is superficial work.

Edith Hamilton
He drew iron tears down Pluto's cheek and make Hell grant what Love did seek.

Edith Hamilton
Through 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 Hamilton