Edith Hamilton Quotes
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Faith is not belief. Belief is passive. Faith is active.
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Happiness is The exercise of vital powers, along lines of excellence, in a life affording them scope.
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A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.
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To be able to be caught up into the world of thought - that is being educated.
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Great art is the expression of a solution of the conflict between the demands of the world without and that within.
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The fullness of life is in the hazards of life.
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When the mind withdraws into itself and dispenses with facts it makes only chaos.
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Through Plato, Aristotle came to believe in God; but Plato never attempted to prove His reality. Aristotle had to do so. Plato contemplated Him; Aristotle produced arguments to demonstrate Him. Plato never defined Him; but Aristotle thought God through logically, and concluded with entire satisfaction to himself that He was the Unmoved Mover.
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None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.
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Theories that go counter to the facts of human nature are foredoomed.
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When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.
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To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful and delightful to live in, was a mark of the Greek spirit, which distinguished it from all that had gone before. It is a vital distinction.
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All things are at odds when God lets a thinker loose on this planet.
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Mind and spirit together make up that which separates us from the rest of the animal world, that which enables a man to know the truth and that which enables him to die for the truth.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Fundamental to everything the ancient Greeks achieved was their conviction that good for humanity was possible only if men were free, body, mind, and spirit, and if each man limited his own freedom. A good state or work of art or piece of thinking was possible only through the self-mastery of the free individual, self-government.
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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.
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All things are to be examined and called into question. There are no limits set to thought.