#greek

If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama. ↗

— Lillian Hellman

#believe #did #end #gods #greeks

The capacity for people to kid themselves is huge. Living on illusions or delusions, and the re-establishing of these illusions or delusions requires a big effort to keep them from being seen through. But a very old idea is at work behind our current state of affairs: enantiodromia, or the Greek notion of things turning into their opposite. ↗

— James Hillman

#behind #being #big #capacity #current

We, to some degree, are like what we are because we inherited certain things from the Greeks and the Romans. One of them that's so striking is the whole area of politics. ↗

— Donald Kagan

#because #certain #certain things #degree #greeks

Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: 'War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.' ↗

— Immanuel Kant

#begets #ennobling #even #evil #forgetting

A lot of names in America and Europe have their roots in Latin and Greek words. A lot of them go back to archetypes and their stories. ↗

— Maynard James Keenan

#archetypes #back #europe #go #greek

Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied. It's not a coincidence that Omar Khayyam, rebuking and ridiculing the stone-faced Iranian mullahs of his time, pointed to the value of the grape as a mockery of their joyless and sterile regime. Visiting today's Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn't particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great brio and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#ancient-greeks #atheism #boredom #brotherhood #cana

Style is a fraud. I always felt the Greeks were hiding behind their columns. ↗

— Willem de Kooning

#behind #columns #felt #fraud #greeks

The Greek sculptor - I don't think he was very different from any of us. ↗

— Michael Tippett

#different #greek #i #sculptor #think

Those who have a lot of money in Greece invest in housing abroad. It's all immoral. The Greek crisis is structural, but also political. ↗

— Evangelos Venizelos

#also #crisis #greece #greek #housing

Quality in a classical Greek sense is how to live with grace and intelligence, with bravery and mercy. ↗

— Theodore White

#classical #grace #greek #how #intelligence