top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Reading quotes
"Just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read. If one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost."
"Those who are incapable of committing great crimes do not readily suspect them in others."
"A book is as dangerous as any journey you might take. The person who closes the back cover may not be the same one that opened the front one. Treat them with respect."
"Back at the Chateau Windsor there was a rat-like scratching at the door of my room. Vinod, the youngest servant, came in with a soda water. He placed it next to the bag of toffees. Then he watched me read. I was used to being observed reading. Sometimes the room would fill like a railway station at rush hour and I would be expected to cure widespread boredom."
"Someday I must read this scholar Everyone. He seems to have written so much--all of it wrong."
"The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemly or gravely. For he will read 'in the same spirit that the author writ.'... He will never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison."
"Reading for enjoyment won't die altogether, but this Ereader device has the potential to repel those less imaginative from fiction. And that could have an undesirable domino effect."
"She'd obviously read the book many times before, and so she read flawlessly and confidently, and I could hear her smile in the reading of it, and the sound of that smile made me think that maybe I would like novels better if Alaska Young read them to me."
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 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."
"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 higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths."
"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."
"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 fact is that much misunderstanding is often caused by our modern attempts to limit too strictly the meaning of a Greek word."
"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."
bottom of page