Top 439 Greeks Quotes & Sayings

If ever the Greeks needed a Trojan horse, it is now.

We Greeks are the blacks of Europe.

The Jews had a love-hate relationship with the Greek culture. They craved its civilization but resented its dominance. Josephus says they regarded Greeks as feckless, promiscuous, modernizing lightweights, yet many Jerusalemites were already living the fashionable lifestyle using Greek and Jewish names to show they could be both. Jewish conservatives disagreed; for them, the Greeks were simply idolaters.

I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts.

People knew there were two ways of coming at truth. One was science, or what the Greeks called Logos, reason, logic. And that was essential that the discourse of science or logic related directed to the external world. The other was mythos, what the Greeks called myth, which didn't mean a fantasy story, but it was a narrative associated with ritual and ethical practice but it helped us to address problems for which there were no easy answers, like mortality, cruelty, the sorrow that overtakes us all that's part of the human condition. And these two were not in opposition, we needed both.

The reason the Greeks don't pay taxes is they don't trust where their taxes are going, because they know these other Greeks are taking money from the state for doing nothing. So it's - it's an essentially corrupt society.

I love the Greeks. There's no messing around - it's all do or die with them.

Hence we will not say that Greeks fight like heroes, but heroes fight like Greeks.

For the Greeks, there was no single canonical version of creation, but a number of overlapping stories.

There are proofs that date back to the Greeks that are still valid today.

The Serbs have only two friends, God and the Greeks.

We believe that the Greeks have been punished through [the Crusades] by the just judgement of God: these Greeks who have striven to rend the Seamless Robe of Jesus Christ ... Those who would not join Noah in his ark perished justly in the deluge; and these have justly suffered famine and hunger who would not receive as their shepherd the blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles.

Logic is the subject that has helped me most in picking stocks, if only because it taught me to identify the peculiar illogic of Wall Street. Actually Wall Street thinks just as the Greeks did. The early Greeks used to sit around for days and debate how many teeth a horse has. They thought they could figure it out just by sitting there, instead of checking the horse. A lot of investors sit around and debate whether a stock is going up, as if the financial muse will give them the answer, instead of checking the company.

From Architecture down to the Zodiac, every science worthy of the name was imported by the Greeks

The Muse gave the Greeks genius and the art of the well-turned phrase.

I think the Greeks first took astrology to India and took from the Hindus the science of astronomy and carried it back with them from Europe. Because in India you will find old altars made according to a certain geometrical plan, and certain things had to be done when the stars were in certain positions, therefore I think the Greeks gave the Hindus astrology, and the Hindus gave them astronomy.

Well, I'm trained as a classicist, so I like to read the Greeks and Romans.

Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks.

We Irish will never achieve anything; but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks

I shall speak only of the part I have stayed in- the districts of Lakes Ochrida and Presba. Here there are Greeks, Slavs, Albanians, and Vlahs. Of Turks, except officials and such of the army as may be quartered on the spot, there are few. The Albanians, I believe, are all Moslem. Should there be any Christians they would be officially classed as Greeks. A large part of the land near Lake Presba is owned by Moslem Albanians as ' chiftliks '(farms).

Not all Greeks are ready to do whatever is necessary to stay in the euro.

Style is a fraud. I always felt the Greeks were hiding behind their columns.

Very often, people will come out and say, 'Greeks aren't doing things, Greeks aren't making changes, there's no reform,' That is hogwash. We have made a huge effort. The Greek people have made a huge effort.

Let Greeks be Greeks, and women what they are.

The Greeks first identified the Amazons ethnographically, as a nation of men and women distinguished by something outstanding in their gender relations. Later, any ambivalence or anxiety that knowledge of this alternative gender-neutral culture evoked among Greeks was played out in their mythic narratives about martial women.

The Delphic Oracle said I was the wisest of all the Greeks. It is because that I alone, of all the Greeks, know that I know nothing.

Drink, live like the Greeks, eat, gorge.

Three classes inhabited the city (Alexandria in Egypt): first the Aegyptian or native stock of people, who were quick-tempered and not inclined to civil life; and secondly the mercenary class, who were severe and numerous and intractable...; and, third, the tribe of the Alexandrians, who also were not distinctly inclined to civil life, and for the same reasons, but still they were better than those others, for even though they were a mixed people, still they were Greeks by origin and mindful of the customs common to the Greeks.

Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn't see their thoughts as belonging to them. When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love. Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy, but now they call this free will. At least the ancient Greeks were being honest.

Hollywood grew to be the most flourishing factory of popular mythology since the Greeks.

The Greeks believed that once there were no male and female, that all souls were one. Then the souls were torn apart, male and female. The Greeks thought that when you found the other half of your soul, your soul mate, that it would be your perfect lover But I think if you find your other half, you would be too much alike to be lovers, but you would still be soul mates.

I consider Greeks the Jews of the sea.

Separation of mind and body, that's been around since the Greeks.

The Greeks invented logic but were not fooled by it.

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.

There are more myths about Black Wednesday than the Greeks ever created.

Why do Greeks always open restaurants that fail?

I think the Greeks invented sports as an antidote to philosophy.

If you want to talk about cultural appropriation, we have to go back to the Greeks.

The Greeks have needlessly been maneuvered towards the abyss.

The question of the composition of perceptible objects is one which already occupied the mind of the ancient Greeks.

What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.

The squabbles of philandering Zeus and shrewish Hera are the Greeks' comment on married life.

Many people have been pontificating, and patronizing, and moralizing, and scapegoating, saying you Greeks, you are the problem. I would say we Greeks have a problem. We are not the problem.

We look at the ancient Greeks with their gods on a mountain top throwing lightning bolts and say, 'Those ancient Greeks. They were so silly. So primitive and naive. Not like our religions. We have burning bushes talking to people and guys walking on water. We're ...sophisticated.'

Germany is Europe's heart. But bitterness is widespread. Currently the Germans hate the Greeks and the Greeks hate the Germans. The demonization of the country has to stop if we want a strong Europe. So I am setting a positive example.

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

The Olympics have just started and the Greeks are already 14 medals in debt.

The Greeks had invented democracy, built the Acropolis and called it a day.

Could truth perhaps be a woman who has reasons for not permitting her reasons to be seen? Could her name perhaps be--to speak Greek--Baubo?... Oh, those Greeks! They understood how to live: to do that it is necessary to stop bravely at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore the appearance, to believe in forms, in tones, in words, in the whole Olympus of appearance! Those Greeks were superficial--out of profundity!

The games of the ancient Greeks were, in their original institutions, religious solemnities.

Of all peoples the Greeks have dreamt the dream of life best.

The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place.

I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks.

I can play lots of nationalities: Greeks, South Americans, Arabs, all sorts.

Eratosthenes was the director of the great library of Alexandria, the Centre of science and learning in the ancient world. Aristotle had argued that humanity was divided into Greeks and everybody else, whom he called barbarians and that the Greeks should keep themselves racially pure. He thought it was fitting for the Greeks to enslave other peoples. But Erathosthenes criticized Aristotle for his blind chauvinism, he believed there was good and bad in every nation.

The Greeks had had vast experience in this world, their imagination had been fertile and they had created much...that, in these circumstances, they should fall in with a people imbued with a calm and sometimes stolid and bucolic certainty where its spiritual possessions were concerned, barbarians with no sculpture or breeding, necessarily tinged their contempt with impotent wrath. The inevitably logical result of this attitude on the part of the Greeks was the growth of anti-Semitism, of hatred of the Jews.

I love Shakespeare and the Greeks - learned a lot studying them at one time.

Science only means knowledge; and for [Greek] ancients it did only mean knowledge. Thus the favorite science of the Greeks was Astronomy, because it was as abstract as Algebra. ... We may say that the great Greek ideal was to have no use for useful things. The Slave was he who learned useful things; the Freeman was he who learned useless things. This still remains the ideal of many noble men of science, in the sense they do desire truth as the great Greeks desired it; and their attitude is an external protest against vulgarity of utilitarianism.

What can we expect from nations still less advanced in civilization than the Greeks?