Gilbert Murray Quotes & Sayings

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. — Gilbert Murray

Sometimes Aristotle analyses his terms, but very often he takes them for granted; and in the latter case, I think, he is sometimes deceived by them. — Gilbert Murray

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. — Gilbert Murray

Where words can be translated into equivalent words, the style of an original can be closely followed; but no translation which aims at being written in normal English can reproduce the style of Aristotle. — Gilbert Murray

The fact is that much misunderstanding is often caused by our modern attempts to limit too strictly the meaning of a Greek word. — Gilbert Murray

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. — Gilbert Murray

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. — Gilbert Murray

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

Ten thousand men possess ten thousand hopes. A few bear fruit in happiness; the others go awry. But he who garners day by day the good life, he is happiest. — Gilbert Murray

The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths. — Gilbert Murray

Be careful in dealing with a man who cares nothing for comfort or promotion, but is simply determined to do what he believes to be right. He is a dangerous uncomfortable enemy, because his body, which you can always conquer, gives you little purchase upon his soul. — Gilbert Murray

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

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

(Pindar) — Gilbert Murray

The life and liberty and property and happiness of the common man throughout the world are at the absolute mercy of a few persons whom he has never seen, involved in complicated quarrels that he has never heard of. — Gilbert Murray