Gilbert Murray famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

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

#Sports #Fighting #Men
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

#Greek #Definitions #Language
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

#Believe #Men #Giving
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

#Thinking #Analysis #Sometimes
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

#Literature #Great Service #Grows
A machine is a great moral educator. If a horse or a donkey wonâ€™t go, men lose their tempers and beat it; if a machine wonâ€™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

#Horse #Real #Thinking
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

#Fashion #Imagination #Age
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

#Men #Liberty #World
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

#Style #Normal #Aim
Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading.
-- Gilbert Murray

#Reading #Greek #Literature

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