Mary Renault Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

Miss Searle had always considered boredom an intellectual defeat.

Mary Renault
Don't you understand even seedtime and reaping? How can people trust the harvest, unless they see it sown?

Mary Renault
You can make an audience see nearly anything, if you yourself believe in it.

Mary Renault
It is bitter to lose a friend to evil, before one loses him to death.

Mary Renault
Go with your fate, but not beyond. Beyond leads to dark places.

Mary Renault
In hatred as in love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul.

Mary Renault
Her smile was as open as a small boy's, a personal enjoyment rather than a social gesture.

Mary Renault
All men seek esteem; the best by lifting themselves, which is hard to do, the rest by shoving others down, which is much easier.

Mary Renault
Often beauty grows dull or common when speech breaks the mask.

Mary Renault
He sees himself in his lover as if in a mirror, not knowing whom he sees, And when they are together, he too is released from pain, and when apart, he longs as he himself is longed for; for reflected in his heart is love's image, which is love's answer. But he calls it, and believes it, not love but friendship…

Mary Renault
There is nothing like despair to make one throw oneself upon the gods.

Mary Renault
It is better to learn war early from friends, than late from enemies.

Mary Renault
Change is the sum of the universe, and what is of nature ought not to be feared. But one gives it hostages, and lays one's grief upon the gods. Sokrates is free, and would have taught me freedom. But I have yoked the immortal horse that draws the chariot with a horse of earth; and when the one falls, both are entangled in the traces.

Mary Renault
Men who hover over their opponents have no cause to evolve a science of wrestling; and Theseus is conventionally shown in combat with hulking of monstrous enemies, living by his wits. The tradition that he emulated the feats of Herakles may well embalm some ancient sneer at the over-compensation of a small assertive man. Napoleon comes to mind.
If one examines the legend in this light, a well-defined personality emerges. It is that of a light-weight; brave and aggressive, physically tough and quick; highly sexed and rather promiscuous; touchily proud, but with a feeling for the underdog; resembling Alexander in his precocious competence, gift of leadership, and romantic sense of destiny.

Mary Renault
He thought, like all other fathers, that I was younger and sillier than himself at the same age.

Mary Renault
Never destroy without thought your enemy's pretences; they are usually your best weapon against him.

Mary Renault
But he had all an artist needs, except the spark from the god.

Mary Renault
Do not believe that others will die, not you.... I have wrestled with Thanatos knee to knee and I know how death is vanquished. Man's immortality is not to live forever; for that wish is born of fear. Each moment free from fear makes a man immortal.
Herakles speaking

Mary Renault
It is something, I thought, when a king can put a courtesan to the blush.

Mary Renault
Christianity and Islam have changed irrevocably the moral reflexes of the world. The philosopher Herakleitos said with profound truth that you cannot step twice into the same river. The perpetual stream of human nature is formed into ever-changing shallows, eddies, falls and pools by the land over which it passes. Perhaps the only real value of history lies in considering this endlessly varied play between the essence and the accidents.

Mary Renault
What keeps the democracy alive at all but the hatred of excellence; the desire of the base to see no head higher than their own?

Mary Renault
A man is at his youngest when he thinks he is a man, not yet realizing that his actions must show it.

Mary Renault
He looked just like any other disreputable old demagogue, one who lives by denouncing and exposing while he is in credit, and, when he is out, by sycophancy and informations, with a little perjury thrown in.

Mary Renault
You mustn't get so upset about what you feel, Spud. No one's a hundred per cent consistent all the time. We might like to be. We can plan our lives along certain lines. But you know, there's no future in screwing down all the pressure valves and smashing in the gauge. You can do it for a bit and then something goes. Sometimes it gets so that the only thing is just to say, 'That's what I'd like to feel twenty-four hours a day; but, the hell with it, this is how I feel now.'

Mary Renault
It is better to believe in men too rashly, and regret, than believe too meanly. Men could be more than they are, if they would try for it. He has shown them that. How many have tried, because of him? Not only those I have seen; there will be men to come. Those who look in mankind only for their own littleness, and make them believe in that, kill more than he ever will in all his wars.

Mary Renault