Edith Hamilton - The Greek way (1930)

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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
To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful and delightful to live in, was a mark of the Greek spirit, which distinguished it from all that had gone before. It is a vital distinction.

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

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

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
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
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.

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
Sooner or later, if the activity of the mind is restricted anywhere it will cease to function even where it is allowed to be free.

Edith Hamilton
The temper of mind that sees tragedy in life has not for its opposite the temper that sees joy. The opposite pole to the tragic view of life is the sordid view.

Edith Hamilton
In theology the conservative temper tends to formalism.

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

Edith Hamilton
They were the first Westerners. The spirit of the West, the modern spirit, is a Greek discovery; and the place of the Greeks is in the modern world.

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

Edith Hamilton
The anthropologists are busy, indeed, and ready to transport us back into the savage forest, where all human things... have their beginnings; but the seed never explains the flower.

Edith Hamilton
One form of religion perpetually gives way to another; if religion did not change it would be dead.... Each time the new ideas appear they are seen at first as a deadly foe threatening to make religion perish from the earth; but in the end there is a deeper insight and a better life with ancient follies and prejudices gone.

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

Edith Hamilton
Great literature, past or present, is the expression of great knowledge of the human heart; great art is the expression of a solution of the conflict between the demands of the world without and that within...

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

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

Edith Hamilton
Pain is the most individualizing thing on earth. It is true that it is the great common bond as well, but that realization comes only when it is over. To suffer is to be alone. To watch another suffer is to know the barrier that shuts each of us away by himself. Only individuals can suffer.

Edith Hamilton