Edith Hamilton Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Edith Hamilton's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Author Edith Hamilton's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 76 quotes on this page collected since August 12, 1867! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
  • Love and the Soul (for that is what Psyche means) had sought and, after sore trials, found each other; and that union could never be broken. (Cupid and Psyche)

    Edith Hamilton (1969). “Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes”
  • 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 (1987). “The Greek way ; The Roman way”, Random House Value Pub
  • When faith is supported by facts or by logic it ceases to be faith.

  • Faith is not belief. Belief is passive. Faith is active.

  • The fundamental facts about the Greek was that he had to use his mind. The ancient priest had said, "Thus far and no farther. We set the limits of thought." The Greeks said, All things are to be examined and called into question. There are no limits set on thought.

  • All things are at odds when God sets a thinker loose on the planet

  • Freedom was born in Greece because there men limited their own freedom. ... The limits to action established by law were a mere nothing compared to the limits established by a man's free choice.

  • The Old Testament is the record of men's conviction that God speaks directly to men.

  • Theories that go counter to the facts of human nature are foredoomed.

    The Roman Way Comedy's Mirror
  • No facts, however indubitably detected, no effort of reason, however magnificently maintained, can prove that Bach's music is beautiful.

  • ...a chasm opened in the earth and out of it coal-black horses sprang, drawing a chariot and driven by one who had a look of dark splendor, majestic and beautiful and terrible. He caught her to him and held her close. The next moment she was being borne away from the radiance of earth in springtime to the world of the dead by the king who rules it.

    Edith Hamilton (2017). “Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, 75th Anniversary Illustrated Edition”, p.124, Hachette UK
  • Uncertainty is the prerequisite to gaining knowledge and frequently the result as well.

    Edith Hamilton (1936). “The prophets of Israel”, W. W. Norton & Company
  • The mind knows only what lies near the heart.

    Heart  
    Edith Hamilton (2017). “Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, 75th Anniversary Illustrated Edition”, p.433, Hachette UK
  • 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 (1987). “The Greek way ; The Roman way”, Random House Value Pub
  • 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 (1987). “The Greek way ; The Roman way”, Random House Value Pub
  • ... clear thinking is not the characteristic which distinguishes our literature today. We are more and more caught up by the unintelligible. People like it. This argues an inability to think, or, almost as bad, a disinclination to think.

    Edith Hamilton (1964). “The Ever-Present Past”
  • So far, we do not seem appalled at the prospect of exactly the same kind of education being applied to all the school children from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but there is an uneasiness in the air, a realization that the individual is growing less easy to find; an idea, perhaps, of what standardization might become when the units are not machines, but human beings.

    Edith Hamilton (1964). “The Ever-Present Past”
  • In every civilization, life grows easier. Men grow lazier in consequence. We have a picture of what happened to the individual Greek. (I cannot look at history, or at any human action, except as I look at the individual.) The Greeks had good food, good witty talk, pleasant dinner parties; and they were content. When the individual man had reached that condition in Athens, when the thought not of giving to the state but of what the state could give to him, Athens' freedom was doomed.

  • 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 (1987). “The Greek way ; The Roman way”, Random House Value Pub
  • There are few efforts more conducive to humility than that of the translator trying to communicate an incommunicable beauty. Yet, unless we do try, something unique and never surpassed will cease to exist except in the libraries of a few inquisitive book lovers.

    "Three Greek Plays". Book by Edith Hamilton, 1937.
  • A tendency to exaggeration was a Roman trait.

    Edith Hamilton (2017). “Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, 75th Anniversary Illustrated Edition”, p.302, Hachette UK
  • We must not contradict, but instruct him that contradicts us; for a madman is not cured by another running mad also. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought -- that is being educated.

  • When I read educational articles it often seems to me that this important side of the matter, the purely personal side, is not emphasized enough; the fact that it is so much more agreeable and interesting to be an educated person than not. The sheer pleasure of being educated does not seem to be stressed.

  • It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought-that is to be educated.

    Quoted in the Saturday Evening Post, 27 Sep 1958.
  • I came to the Greeks early, and I found answers in them. Greece's great men let all their acts turn on the immortality of the soul. We don't really act as if we believed in the soul's immortality and that's why we are where we are today.

  • To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful ... was a mark of the Greek spirit.

    Edith Hamilton (1987). “The Greek way ; The Roman way”, Random House Value Pub
  • Pain is the most individualized thing on earth. It is true that it is the great common bond as well, but that realization only comes 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 (1958). “THE GREEK WAY”
  • In theology the conservative temper tends to formalism.

    Edith Hamilton (1987). “The Greek way ; The Roman way”, Random House Value Pub
  • When the world is storm-driven and bad things happen, then we need to know all the strong fortresses of the spirit which men have built through the ages.

    Edith Hamilton (1987). “The Greek way ; The Roman way”, Random House Value Pub
  • Moderately wise each one should be, Not overwise, for a wise man's heart Is seldom glad (Norse Wisdom)

    Heart  
    Edith Hamilton (1969). “Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes”
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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 76 quotes from the Author Edith Hamilton, starting from August 12, 1867! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!