Greece Quotes

200 Sourced quotes

Being asked where in Greece he saw good men, he replied, "'Good men nowhere, but good boys at Sparta."

Diogenes of Sinope

Greece is not a country of happy mediums: everything there seems to be either wonderful or horrible.

For me Greece is Maria Farantouri. This is how I imagined Goddess Hera to be: strong, pure and vigilant. I have never encountered any other artist able to give me such a strong sense of the divine.

François Mitterrand

Achilles' fatal wrath, whence discord rose,
That brought the sons of Greece unnumber'd woes,
O Goddess! sing. Full many a hero's ghost
Was driven untimely to th' infernal coast,
While in promiscuous heaps their bodies lay,
A feast for dogs and every bird of prey.
So did the sire of gods and men fulfil
His stedfast purpose and almighty will;
What time the haughty chiefs their jars begun,
Atrides, king of men, and Peleus' godlike son.

The mention of Greece fills the mind with the most exalted sentiments and arouses in our bosoms the best feelings of which our nature is capable.

A slight bore in Greece is that one is discouraged from swimming from a boat as there are sharks. This is quite new & said to be Nasser's fault, he is supposed to beckon them through the canal to eat us all up. I don't greatly fear death but it would be too ridiculous — even one's greatest friends would laugh if one were eaten I feel!

[Alvine] 'Tis one of those bright fictions that have made
The name of Greece only another word
For love and poetry ; with a green earth—
Groves of the graceful myrtle — summer skies,
Whose stars are mirror'd in ten thousand streams—
Winds that move but in perfume and in music,
And, more than all, the gift of woman's beauty.
What marvel that the earth, the sky, the sea,
Were filled with all those fine imaginings
That love creates, and that the lyre preserves !

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Enclose in your soul Greece (or something equal) and you shall feel every kind of grandeur.

Dionysios Solomos

We as a non-EU country now have to protect Europe from an EU country - that is, Greece. We already had to spend €25 million in tax money. We already declared a state of emergency. And what have we received from Europe? Nothing! Not a single cent.

Greece will not accept becoming Europe's Lebanon, a warehouse of souls.

Ioannis Mouzalas

Go to Dahomey, Ashantee, Caffraria, Malaisia, — anywhere; search out the rudest people on earth; draw a picture of its vices and cruelties, make it as black as you can, and we will parallel it by pictures of Greece under Pericles and of Rome under Cicero.

Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumbered, heavenly goddess, sing!

Because we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like political freedom: the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery. The nineteenth century and early twentieth century in the Western world stand out as striking exceptions to the general trend of historical development. Political freedom in this instance clearly came along with the free market and the development of capitalist institutions. So also did political freedom in the golden age of Greece and in the early days of the Roman era.
History suggests only that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.

Milton Friedman

The foreboding statesman who knew how Greece had fallen asunder and perished, who knew the mean tenure of European leagues, who knew the absolute necessity of union and the jarring jealousies of sections, saw in the Constitution but a shadowy bond which foretold early separation and disaster. It was not strange when the Union was scarcely ten years old, still in the gristle, he heard the serpent of State sovereignty angrily hissing in the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of '98.

George William Curtis

The Aegean sea washes Greece on two sides: first, the side that faces towards the east and stretches from Sunium, towards the north as far as the Thermaean Gulf and Thessaloniceia, a Macedonian city...; and secondly, the side that faces towards the south, I mean the Macedonian country, extending from Thessaloniceia as far as the Strymon.

Out of the Armana Age synthesis emerged the earliest traditions of Israel and Greece.

Cyrus H. Gordon

Our books have informed us that the pre-eminence in chivalry and learning once belonged to Greece. Then chivalry passed to Rome, together with that highest learning which now has come to France. God grant that it may be cherished here, and that it may be made so welcome here that the honour which has taken refuge with us may never depart from France: God had awarded it as another's share, but of Greeks and Romans no more is heard, their fame is passed, and their glowing ash is dead.

Chrétien de Troyes

Taking everything together then, I declare that our city is an education to Greece.

Of Athens

If you take Greece apart, in the end you will see remaining to you an olive tree, a vineyard and a ship. Which means: with just so much you can put her back together.

Odysseus Elytis

All that grave weight of America
Cancelled! Like Greece and Rome.
The future in ruins!

The struggle between Liberty and Authority is the most conspicuous feature in the portions of history with which we are earliest familiar; particularly in that of Greece, Rome, and England

John Stuart Mill

A match as a pen
Blood on the floor as ink
The forgotten gauze cover as paper
But what should I write?
I might just manage my address.
This ink is strange; it clots.
I write you from a prison
in Greece.

Alexandros Panagoulis

One of the loveliest daughters of that land,
Divinest Greece ! that taught the painter's hand
To give eternity to loveliness ;
One of those dark-eyed maids, to whom belong
The glory and the beauty of each Song
Thy poets breathed, for it was theirs to bless
With life the pencil and the lyre's dreams,
Giving reality to visioned gleams
Of bright divinities.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

The EU is mired in deep structural crisis. Greece, Portugal and Ireland cannot survive inside the Euro.

I cannot write anything about landscape without writing about the human figure and the human spirit inhabiting the landscape, for me, the whole art sculpture is a fusion of these two element – the balance of sensation and the evocation of man in his universe. Every work in sculpture is either a figure I see, or a sensation I have, whether in Yorkshire, Cornwall or Greece, or the Mediterranean.

Barbara Hepworth