{"quotes":[{"text":"Greek customs such as wine drinking were regarded as worthy of imitation by other cultures. So the ships that carried Greek wine were carrying Greek civilization, distributing it around the Mediterranean and beyond, one amphora at a time. Wine displaced beer to become the most civilized and sophisticated of drinks—a status it has maintained ever since, thanks to its association with the intellectual achievements of Ancient Greece.","author":"Tom Standage","tags":["civilization","greece","mediterranean","wine"],"id":2114,"author_id":"Tom+Standage"},{"text":"Men are not born equal in themselves, so I think it beneath a man to postulate that they are. If I thought myself as good as Sokrates I should be a fool; and if, not really believing it, I asked you to make me happy by assuring me of it, you would rightly despise me. So why should I insult my fellow-citizens by treating them as fools and cowards? A man who thinks himself as good as everyone else will be at no pains to grow better. On the other hand, I might think myself as good as Sokrates, and even persuade other fools to agree with me; but under a democracy, Sokrates is there in the Agora to prove me wrong. I want a city where I can find my equals and respect my betters, whoever they are; and where no one can tell me to swallow a lie because it is expedient, or some other man's will.","author":"Mary Renault","tags":["alcibiades","athens","classical","democracy","fifth-century","greece","historical-fiction","philosophy","plato","socrates","sparta"],"id":27623,"author_id":"Mary+Renault"},{"text":"For thousands of years humans were oppressed— as some of us still are— by the notion that the universe is a marionette whose strings are pulled by a god or gods, unseen and inscrutable. Then, 2,500 years ago, there was a glorious awakening in Ionia: on Samos and the other nearby Greek colonies that grew up among the islands and inlets of the busy eastern Aegean Sea. Suddenly there were people who believed that everything was made of atoms; that human beings and other animals had sprung from simpler forms; that diseases were not caused by demons or the gods; that the Earth was only a planet going around the Sun. And that the stars were very far away.","author":"Carl Sagan","tags":["enlightenment","greece","ionia","knowledge","learning","reality","truth","wisdom"],"id":36475,"author_id":"Carl+Sagan"},{"text":"Sergeant Pietro Oliva was a good Catholic. He liked to go into a church and cross himself, genuflect to the alter, and then settle down to a little prayer and contemplation, savouring the coolness, the heavy odours, the darkness, and the sensation of being soaked in the atmosphere of centuries’ worth of devotion that hung in the tenebrous and golden air of churches.","author":"Louis de Bernières","tags":["church","devotion","greece","greek-orthodox","prayer"],"id":41702,"author_id":"Louis+de+Berni%C3%A8res"},{"text":"Out in the stone-pile the toad squatted with its glowing jewel-eyes and, maybe, its memories. I don't know if you'll admit a toad could have memories. But I don't know, either, if you'll admit there was once witchcraft in America. Witchcraft doesn't sound sensible when you think of Pittsburgh and subways and movie houses, but the dark lore didn't start in Pittsburgh or Salem either; it goes away back to dark olive groves in Greece and dim, ancient forests in Brittany and the stone dolmens of Wales. All I'm saying, you understand, is that the toad was there, under its rocks, and inside the shack Pete was stretching on his hard bed like a cat and composing himself to sleep.('Before I Wake...').","author":"Henry Kuttner","tags":["america","brittany","greece","pittsburgh","salem","toad","wales","witch","witchcraft","witches"],"id":59706,"author_id":"Henry+Kuttner"},{"text":"In your Curled petals what ghosts Of blue headlands and seas, What perfumed immortal breath sighing Of Greece.","author":"Adelaide Crapsey","tags":["flowers","greece","hyacinth","smell"],"id":65077,"author_id":"Adelaide+Crapsey"},{"text":"Like a girl, a baby running after her mother, begging to be picked up, and she tugs on her skirts, holding her back as she tries to hurry off—all tears, fawning up at her, till she takes her in her arms… That’s how you look, Patroclus, streaming live tears.","author":"Homer","tags":["baby","classics","greece","insult","tears"],"id":65196,"author_id":"Homer"},{"text":"Bible is a window into the life and practices of the people who lived in Israel and bordering nations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, and Judea.","author":"Sudhir Ahluwalia","tags":["bible","greece","herbs","holy","israel","judea","life-lessons","rome"],"id":69911,"author_id":"Sudhir+Ahluwalia"},{"text":"I had allowed my body to take whatever path it wished. The fact that it was guiding me and not I it gave me great pleasure. I had confidence. The body is not blind unwrought material when bathed in Greek light; it is suffused with abundant soul which makes it phosphoresce, and it left free, it is able to arrive at its own decision and find the correct road without the mind's intervention. Conversely, the soul is not an invisible airy phantom; it has taken on some body's sureness and warmth in its own right, and it savors the world with what you might call carnal pleasure, as though it had a mouth and nostrils and hands with which to caress this world. Man often lacks the persistence to maintain all of his humanity. He mutilates himself. Sometimes he wishes to be released from his soul sometimes from his body. To enjoy both together seems a heavy sentence. But here in Greece these two graceful, deathless elements are able to commingle like hot water with cold, the soul to take something from the body, the body from the soul. They become friends, and thus man, here on Greece's divine threshing floor, is able to live and journey unmutilated, intact. (Report to Greco).","author":"N. Kazantzakis","tags":["air","crete","greece","mind","path","soul"],"id":81495,"author_id":"N.+Kazantzakis"},{"text":"I came to the Greeks early, and I found answers in them. Greece's great men let all their acts turn on the immortality of the soul. We don't really act as if we believed in the soul's immortality and that's why we are where we are today.","author":"Edith Hamilton","tags":["antiquity","classicism","courage","greatness","greece","soul"],"id":84164,"author_id":"Edith+Hamilton"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":70,"pages":7,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}