Edith Hamilton quotes

None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry. (Edith Hamilton)
Theories that go counter to the facts of human nature are foredoomed.
Edith Hamilton
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.
Edith Hamilton
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.
Edith Hamilton
Faith is not belief. Belief is passive. Faith is active.
Edith Hamilton
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.
Edith Hamilton
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.
Edith Hamilton
The mind knows only what lies near the heart.
Edith Hamilton
All things are at odds when God lets a thinker loose on this planet.
Edith Hamilton
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.
Edith Hamilton
When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again. (Edith Hamilton)
The power of good is shown not by triumphantly conquering evil, but by continuing to resist evil while facing certain defeat.
Edith Hamilton
Love cannot live where there is no trust.
Edith Hamilton
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.
Edith Hamilton
Great art is the expression of a solution of the conflict between the demands of the world without and that within.
Edith Hamilton
The greater the suffering depicted, the more terrible the events, the more intense our pleasure.
Edith Hamilton
There is no dignity like the dignity of a soul in agony.
Edith Hamilton
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.
Edith Hamilton
When the mind withdraws into itself and dispenses with facts it makes only chaos.
Edith Hamilton
To be able to be caught up into the world of thought - that is being educated.
Edith Hamilton
I came to the Greeks early, and I found answers in them. Greece's great men let all their acts turn on the immortality of the soul. We don't really act as if we believed in the soul's immortality and that's why we are where we are today. (Edith Hamilton)
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.
Edith Hamilton
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 educated.
Edith Hamilton
To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful ... was a mark of the Greek spirit.
Edith Hamilton
Our word 'idiot' comes from the Greek name for the man who took no share in public matters.
Edith Hamilton