Thomas Cahill Short Quotes

19 Sourced Quotes

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They [the Greeks] had become an essentially secular people.

Thomas Cahill
If we are to be saved, it will not be by Romans but by saints.

Thomas Cahill
For me, the historian's principal task should be to raise the dead to life.

Thomas Cahill
Beowulf grappling with the monstors was a type of Christ grappling with Satan.

Thomas Cahill
More than half of all our biblical commentaries between 650 and 850 were written by Irishmen.

Thomas Cahill
Only when we step back can we see that we have been reassembling something that can stand in the wind.

Thomas Cahill
The [Greek] myths were... attempting—at a deeper level—to feel the intangible and say the unsayable.

Thomas Cahill
To be without music was, for the ancient Greeks, to be already dead... Ancient Greece was a culture of song.

Thomas Cahill
How real is history? Is it just an enormous soup so full of disparate ingredients that it is uncharacterizable?

Thomas Cahill
Human beings never know more than a part, as "through a glass darkly"; and all knowledge comes to us in pieces.

Thomas Cahill
The Irish believed that gods, druids, poets, and others in touch with the magical world could be literal shape-shifters

Thomas Cahill
Ireland is unique in religious history for being the only land into which Christianity was introduced without bloodshed.

Thomas Cahill
Patrick... understood that, though Christianity was not inextricably wedded to Roman custom, it could not survive without Roman literacy.

Thomas Cahill
The high abbesses... had the power to heal,... almost certainly heard confessions, probably ordained clergy, and may even have celebrated Mass.

Thomas Cahill
It is... ironic that, given its subsequent history of Jew-hatred, Christianity should become the vehicle by which Jewish values entered the mainstream.

Thomas Cahill
Of the many people's of the earth, the Romans may have had the most boring religion of all.... basically a businessman's religion of contractual obligations.

Thomas Cahill
This swaggering behavior has confounded historians, prompting them to wonder if Columbanus was a little off his rocker. But I think we may chalk up this attitude to his Irishness.

Thomas Cahill
Just as the Judeo-Christian world had learned the Greek language and internalized Greek categories, the Greco-Roman world gradually abandoned its dying gods and became monotheistic.

Thomas Cahill
More than a billion people in our world today survive on less than $370 a year, while Americans, who constitute five percent of the world's population, purchase fifty percent of its cocaine.

Thomas Cahill