Mary Renault Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

In all men is evil sleeping; the good man is he who will not awaken it, in himself or in other men.

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

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

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
But courage without conduct is the virtue of a robber, or a tyrant.

Mary Renault
Power is the test. Some, once they have it, are content to buy the show of liking, and punish those who withhold it; then you have a despot. But some keep a true eye for how they seem to others, and care about it, which holds them back from much mischief.

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

Mary Renault
It gives me no joy to be praised at the expense of a better artist, by someone who does not know the difference or who thinks me too vain to be aware of it myself.

Mary Renault
Each man in his life honors, and imitates as well as he can, that god to whose choir he belonged, while he is uncorrupted in his first incarnation here; and in the fashion he has thus learned, he bears himself to his beloved as well as to the rest. So, then, each chooses from among the beautiful a love conforming to his kind, and then, as if his chosen were his god, he sets him up and robes him for worship.

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

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
Illegibility, she maintained, was a form of bad manners.

Mary Renault
Tell a man what he may not sing and he is still half free; even all free, if he never wanted to sing it. But tell him what he must sing, take up his time with it so that his true voice cannot sound even in secret — there, I have seen is slavery.

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

Mary Renault
Kit was not blind to the fact that his habitual honesty was an unfailing passport for his lies, and it did nothing to increase his pleasure in telling them.

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