#athens

My sisters and I were fortunate to travel through Asia and Europe at very young ages. We confronted extraordinary beauty in Athens and unspeakable poverty in India. ↗

— Mary Chapin Carpenter

#asia #athens #beauty #confronted #europe

This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became a cultural echo. ↗

— Derek Walcott

#became #been #before #citizen #city

I want to see the Parthenon by moonlight.' I had my way. They floodlight it now, to great advantage I am told, but it was not so then, and since it was late in the year there were few tourists. My companions were all intelligent men, including my own husband, and they had the sense to stay mute. I suppose, being a woman, I confuse beauty with sentiment, but, as I looked on the Parthenon for the first time in my life, I found myself crying. It had never happened to me before. Your sunset weepers I despise. It was not full moon, or anywhere near it. The half circle put me in mind of the labrys, the Cretan double axe, and the pillars were the most ghostly in consequence. What a shock for the modern aesthete, I thought when my crying was done, if he could see the ruddy glow of colour, the painted eyes, the garish lips, the orange-reds and blues that were there once, and Athene herself a giantess on her pedestal touched by the rising sun. Even in those distant times the exigencies of a state religion had brought their own traffic, the buying and selling of doves, of trinkets: to find himself, a man had to go to the woods, to the hills. "Come on," said Stephen. "It's beautiful and stark, if you like, but so is St. Pancras station at 4 A.M. It depends on your association of ideas." We crammed into Burns's small car, and went back to our hotel. ("The Chamois") ↗

— Daphne du Maurier

#greece #parthenon #beauty

As far as Athens is concerned, I also think about all those people who are trying to escape tax all the time. All these people in Greece who are trying to escape tax. ↗

— Christine Lagarde

#also #as far as #athens #concerned #escape

I think more of the little kids from a school in a little village in Niger who get teaching two hours a day, sharing one chair for three of them, and who are very keen to get an education. I have them in my mind all the time. Because I think they need even more help than the people in Athens. ↗

— Christine Lagarde

#because #chair #day #education #even

In Athens I was 17 and I didn't have any expectations. I was just swimming fast and racing everybody. I didn't have the joy after my races in 2007. I didn't want to go to Beijing. I had to for sponsors. ↗

— Laure Manaudou

#any #athens #beijing #everybody #expectations

An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise. ↗

— Robert South

#aristotle #athens #paradise #rubbish #rudiments

So, we just kind of created our own thing and that's part of the beauty of Athens: is that it's so off the map and there's no way you could ever be the East Village or an L.A. scene or a San Francisco scene, that it just became its own thing. ↗

— Michael Stipe

#beauty #became #could #created #east

At Athens, wise men propose, and fools dispose. ↗

— Alcuin

#dispose #fools #men #propose #wise

How great are the dangers I face to win a good name in Athens. ↗

— Alexander the Great

#dangers #face #good #great #how