Mary Renault Quotes
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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.
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Half the world's troubles come from men not being trained to resent a fallacy as much as an insult.
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Everything is change; and you cannot step twice into the same river.
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But courage without conduct is the virtue of a robber, or a tyrant.
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But it is not for the perfect vase or the polished gem to choose their owners.
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All men seek esteem; the best by lifting themselves, which is hard to do, the rest by shoving others down, which is much easier.
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When we serve the great, they are our destiny.
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True friends share everything, except the past before they met.
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There is nothing like despair to make one throw oneself upon the gods.
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How can people trust the harvest, unless they see it sown?
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It is bitter to lose a friend to evil before one loses him to death.
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I thought, There goes my lord, whom I was born to follow. I have found a King. And, I said to myself, looking after him as he walked away, I will have him, if I die for it.
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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.
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Often beauty grows dull or common when speech breaks the mask.
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One must live as if it would be forever, and as if one might die each moment. Always both at once.
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It is better to learn war early from friends, than late from enemies.
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There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare.
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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?
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An audience of twenty thousand, sitting on its hands, could not have produced such an echoing silence.
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Love is a boaster at heart, who cannot hide the stolen horse without giving a glimpse of the bridle.
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death was the price of life.
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You can make an audience see nearly anything, if you yourself believe in it.
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Longing performs all things
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Never destroy without thought your enemy's pretences; they are usually your best weapon against him.
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In hatred as in love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul.
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We Persians have a saying that one should deliberate serious matters first drunk, then sober.
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It is something, I thought, when a king can put a courtesan to the blush.
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To hate excellence is to hate the gods.
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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.
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The rightness of a thing isn't determined by the amount of courage it takes.
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