17 Quotes by Gilbert Murray

Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading.

Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries.

The fashions of the ages vary in this direction and that, but they vary for the most part from a central road which was struck out by the imagination of Greece.

Depression, gloom, pessimism, despair, discouragement, these slay ten human beings to every one murdered by typhoid, influenza, diabetes or pneumonia. If tuberculosis is the great white plague, then fear is the great black plague.

A machine is a great moral educator. If a horse or a donkey won’t go, men lose their tempers and beat it; if a machine won’t go, there is no use beating it. You have to think and try till you find what is wrong. That is real education.

The average beast of prey is a decent creature who merely kills for the sake of food or in a fight against an enemy. It is only man who calls killing "sport" and kills for the pleasure of killing; not for food, not for self-defense, but just to satisfy some primitive instinct, once necessary and now perverted.

It is doubtless one of Aristotle’s great services that he conceived so clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a history.

Things of a day! what are we and what not? A dream of a shaddow is man; yet when some god-given splendor falls, a glory of light comes over him and his life is sweet.