#greek

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

When health is absent, wisdom cannot reveal itself, art cannot manifest, strength cannot fight, wealth becomes useless, and intelligence cannot be applied. ↗

— Herophilus

#gardens #greek #health #hugs #organic

Those myths about Zeus and Hercules were always so real to me; I was crushed to discover that Mt. Olympus has been overshadowed by global warming. ↗

— Bauvard

#funny #greek-gods #humor #myths #funny

Επιθυμίες Σαν σώματα ωραία νεκρών που δεν εγέρασαν και τάκλεισαν, με δάκρυα, σε μαυσωλείο λαμπρό, με ρόδα στο κεφάλι και στα πόδια γιασεμιά -- έτσ' η επιθυμίες μοιάζουν που επέρασαν χωρίς να εκπληρωθούν· χωρίς ν' αξιωθεί καμιά της ηδονής μια νύχτα, ή ένα πρωϊ της φεγγερό." Desires "Like beautiful bodies of the dead who had not grown old and they shut them, with tears, in a brilliant mausoleum, with roses at the head and jasmine at the feet -- this is what desires resemble that have passed without fulfillment; without any of them having achieved a night of sensual delight, or a morning of brightness. ↗

— C.P. Cavafy

#modern-greece #poetry #beauty