#greeks

I've got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans. ↗

— Martin C. Smith

#bed #big #book #collections #goes

The ingenious method of expressing every possible number using a set of ten symbols (each symbol having a place value and an absolute value) emerged in India. The idea seems so simple nowadays that its significance and profound importance is no longer appreciated ... The importance of this invention is more readily appreciated when one considers that it was beyod the two greatest men of antiquity, Archimedes and Apollonius. ↗

— Pierre Simon De Laplace

#mathematicians #mathematics #nullity #numbers #zero

The Greeks already understood that there was more interest in portraying an unusual character than a usual character - that is the purpose of films and theatre. ↗

— Isabelle Huppert

#character #films #greeks #interest #more

And it's a crime because the great plays of history, going all the way back to the Greeks, are part of everybody's heritage. It's just like in music, Beethoven or Mozart, that's everybody's heritage. ↗

— Tony Randall

#because #beethoven #crime #everybody #going

The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation. ↗

— Stella Adler

#come #comes #greeks #life #means

I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks. ↗

— Jorge Luis Borges

#i #known #state #uncertainty #unknown

And regardless of the fact that in this country, certainly in the arts, we treat comedy as a second-class citizen, I've never thought of it that way. I've always thought it to be important. The last time I looked, the Greeks were holding up two masks. I've always thought of it not only as having equal value, but as the craft of it, being funny. ↗

— Jeff Daniels

#arts #being #being funny #certainly #citizen

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

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

The ancient Greeks have a knack of wrapping truths in myths. ↗

— George Lloyd

#ancient greeks #greeks #knack #myths #truths