Mary Renault Quotes

Alexander offered him (Aristotle)a hand to mount the gangplank, and
tried the effect of a smile. When the man returned it, it could be seen that
smiling was what he would do best; he would not often be caught with
his head back laughing. But he did look like a man who would answer
questions.

I wanted someone to follow, I wanted him to be brave. But he wants to be brave for me; and no one can do that.

You mustn't get so upset about what you feel, Spud. No one's a hundred per cent consistent all the time. We might like to be. We can plan our lives along certain lines. But you know, there's no future in screwing down all the pressure valves and smashing in the gauge. You can do it for a bit and then something goes. Sometimes it gets so that the only thing is just to say, 'That's what I'd like to feel twenty-four hours a day; but, the hell with it, this is how I feel now.'<nowiki></nowiki>

In seven years, thought Laurie, every cell in one's body has been replaced, even our memories live in a new brain. That is not the face I saw, and these are not the eyes I saw with. Even our selves are not the same, but only a consequence of the selves we had then. Yet I was there and I am here; and this man, who is sometimes what I remember and sometimes a stranger I met at a party the other day, is also to himself the I who was there: his mind in its different skull has travelled back to a place his living feet never visited; and the pain he felt then he can feel again.

When I rode on to meet the army, I learned a thing one never forgets after: how much easier it is to move the many than the few.

grief more than in joy, man longs to know that the universe turns around him.

"Speak for me, Nikeratos. Someone's soul is always listening." Someone's always is, I suppose, if one only knew. Plato never forgot it.

Men are better watching the seasons, and putting good into the earth, than running together in cities, where they listen all day to each other's noises and forgot the gods. Acharnai is quite far enough.

One must live as if it would be forever, and as if one might die each moment. Always both at once.

"Don't talk so, Lysis. I'm sure you kept your head much better than I did." He smiled, and quoted a certain phrase, recalling a personal matter between us. Then he said, "Am I getting old, to find myself always thinking, 'Last year was better'?"-"Sometimes it seems to me, Lysis, that nothing has been the same since the Games."-"We think so, my dear, because that was our concern. If you asked that potter over there, or that old soldier, or Kallippides the actor, each would name his own Isthmia, I daresay... It has been a long war, Alexias. Twenty-four years now. Even Troy was only ten."

That,” I said, “is the business of the gods, who made us.”

“Yes, but for what? We ought to be good for it, whatever it is. How can we live, until we know?”

I gazed at him; such desperate words, yet he looked all lit from within. He saw I was paying attention; that was enough to draw him on.

With new friendships had come visits to the philosophers and teachers of rhetoric; and, presently, the chance to learn from experts the art of war. He had longed for home and had returned with gladness; but by then he had been received into the mystery of Hellas, forever her initiate.

Athens was her altar, almost her self. All he asked of Athens was to restore her glories; her present leaders seemed to him like the Phokians at Delphi, unworthy men who had seized a holy shrine. Deep in his mind moved a knowledge that for Athenians freedom and glory went together; but he was like a man in love, who thinks the strongest trait of the loved one’s nature will be easily changed, as soon as they are married.

There is truth and truth,’ said the priest of Delos. ‘It is true after its kind.

He sees himself in his lover as if in a mirror, not knowing whom he sees, And when they are together, he too is released from pain, and when apart, he longs as he himself is longed for; for reflected in his heart is love's image, which is love's answer. But he calls it, and believes it, not love but friendship…

That there are fashions in admiration and denigration is inevitable; they should not however be followed at the expense of truth.