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"Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading."
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"As a reader you recognise that feeling when you're lost in a book? You know the one - when whatever's going on around you seems less real than what you're reading and all you want to do is keep going deeper into the story whether it's about being halfway up a mountain in Brazil in 1823 of in love with a man you aren't sure you can trust or fighting a war in the last human outpost, somewhere beyond the moon. Well, if you're writing that book it's real for you too."
"We encounter great souls by reading great books."
"There is no other enjoyment like reading."
"Readers may be divided into four classes: I. Sponges, who absorb all they read, and return it nearly in the same state, only a little dirtied. II. Sand-glasses, who retain nothing, and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time. III. Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read. IV. Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also."
"If you're not ready for everything, you're not ready for anything."
"What's the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water?"
Explore more quotes by 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."
"The fact is that much misunderstanding is often caused by our modern attempts to limit too strictly the meaning of a Greek word."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths."
"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."
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