Quotes by Edith Hamilton

“Faith is not belief. Belief is passive. Faith is active.”

“A peoples 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.”

“Civilization...is a matter of imponderables, of delight in the thins of the mind, of love of beauty, of honor, grace, courtesy, delicate feeling. Where imponderables, are things of first importance, there is the height of civilization, and, if at the same time, the power of art exists unimpaired, human life has reached a level seldom attained and very seldom surpassed.”

“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.”

“To be able to be caught up into the world of thought-that is educated.”

“Theories that go counter to the facts of human nature are foredoomed.”

“When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.”

“When the mind withdraws into itself and dispenses with facts it makes only chaos.”

“None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.”

“Great art is the expression of a solution of the conflict between the demands of the world without and that within.”

Love cannot live where there is no trust.

It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought—that is to be educ

I came to the Greeks early, and I found answers in them. Greeces great men let all their acts turn on the immortality of the soul. We dont really act as if we believed in the souls immortality and thats why we are where we are today.

The power of good is shown not by triumphantly conquering evil, but by continuing to resist evil while facing certain defeat.

The mind knows only what lies near the heart.

Noble self-restraint must have something to restrain.

Genius moves to creation, not to destruction. Only a very few have combined both.

Very few great artists feel the giant agony of the world.

Euripides questioned everything. He was a misanthrope who preferred books to men.

She was brave from excess of grief