10 Quotes by Jane Ellen Harrison

There was an odd rule throughout the College that no girl might buy a book.

Then Ruskin came. I showed him our small library. He looked at it with disapproving eyes. “ Each book ”, he said gravely, “ that a young girl touches should be bound in white vellum.” I thought with horror of the red moroccos and Spanish leather that had been my choice. A few weeks later the old humbug sent us his own works bound in dark blue calf!

Paganism is the worship of life itself in its supreme mysteries of ecstasy and love.

Old age, believe me, is a good and pleasant time. It is true that you are quietly shouldered off the stage, but then you are given such a comfortable front seat as spectator, and if you have really played your part you are more content to sit down and watch.

To be a heretic to-day is almost a human obligation.

An agon, or contest, or wrangling, there will probably be, because Summer contends with Winter, Life with Death, the New Year with the Old. A tragedy must be tragic, must have its pathos, because the Winter, the Old Year, must die.

A heroic society is almost a contradiction in terms.

We seem to have come to a sort of impasse, the spirit of the dromenon is dead or dying, the spectators will not stay long to watch a doing doomed to monotony.

When we say art is unpractical, we mean that art is cut loose from immediate action.