When I first started studying Greek, one of my absolute favorite parts was realizing that so many English words had these old, secret roots. Learning Greek was like being given a super-power: linguistic x-ray vision.
Negativland through rose colored glasses. If 'mice are from Mars,' Greek Buck is from Venus.
American culture is kind of a universal culture, I guess. It's things Greeks grew up with, common references you can use. It's very interesting.
It is no accident that banks resemble temples, preferably Greek, and that the supplicants who come to perform the rites of deposit and withdrawal instinctively lower their voices into the registers of awe. Even the most junior tellers acquire within weeks of their employment the officiousness of hierophants tending an eternal flame.
We Irish will never achieve anything; but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks
The Greeks said very, very extreme things in their tragedies.
Philosophy is at its most engaged when it is impure. What is being recovered from the Ancient Greek model is not some lost idea of philosophy's pure essence, but the idea that philosophy is mixed up with everything else.
Well, to be clear, I am a scholar of religions with four degrees, including one in the New Testament and fluency in Biblical Greek who has been studying the origins of Christianity for two decades who also happens to be Muslim.
. . ,No love cannot leave where there is no trust. . ,~cupid and psyche. . ,"Greek mythology of Edith Hamilton
Everyone would tell me they couldn't identify with sexual abuse. No one says they can't identify with the tales of the Greek gods and goddesses because they don't live on Mt. Olympus.
One meets the cat in nearly all forms of art. . . curiously enough she is not a conspicuous figure in Roman or Greek art.
The original Greek word for enthusiasm meant "to be filled with God. " When we are "filled with God" we tend to lead on purpose.
English has been this vacuum cleaner of a language, because of its history meeting up with the Romans and then the Danes, the Vikings and then the French and then the Renaissance with all the Latin and Greek and Hebrew in the background.
Over the years, I have become convinced that Hellenism as a culture represents not a static condition of uniform sublimity mysteriously achieved and maintained as an effect of some racial advantage. Rather it should be understood as an evolving process, governed by a dynamic of change, as both language and thought underwent transformational alteration caused by a transition from orality to literacy. The instrument of change is discerned to be the invention of the Greek alphabet, at a quite late stage in the history of developing cultures.
Elegance is reduction, simplification, condensation. It is spare, stark, sleek. Elegance is cultivated abstraction. The source of Greek and Roman classicism - clarity, order, proportion, balance - is in Egypt.
'Politics' is made up of two words, 'poli,' which is Greek for 'many,' and 'tics,' which are blood-sucking insects.
You can learn technological things, you can learn about specific things, but the real problems that people deal with in any subject, existential subjects or romantic subjects, you never learn anything. So you make a fool of yourself when you're 20, you make a fool of yourself at 40, at 60 at 80. The ancient Greeks were dealing with these problems. They screwed up all the time. People do now.
It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.
Youths of the Pellaians and of the Macedonians and of the Hellenic Amphictiony and of the Lakedaimonians and of the Corinthians. . . and of all the Hellenic peoples, join your fellow-soldiers and entrust yourselves to me, so that we can move against the barbarians and liberate ourselves from the Persian bondage, for as Greeks we should not be slaves to barbarians.
I thought I was attractive when I shot 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding. ' Studio executives and movie reviewers let me know I had a confidence in my looks that was not shared by them.