Poets From Greece

"I will never reveal my dreadful secrets, or rather, yours."

"How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be When there's no help in truth!"

"θεοῖς τέθνηκεν οὗτος, οὐ κείνοισιν, οὔ."

"Men of ill judgement oft ignore the good That lies within their hands, till they have lost it."

"ἐχθρῶν ἄδωρα δώρα κοὐκ ὀνήσιμα."

"χάρις χάριν γάρ ἐστιν ἡ τίκτουσ᾽ ἀεί ὅτου δ᾽ ἀπορρεῖ μνῆστις εὖ πεπονθότος, οὐκ ἂν γένοιτ᾽ ἔθ᾽ οὗτος εὐγενὴς ἀνήρ."

"Ὦ παῖ, γένοιο πατρὸς εὐτυχέστερος, τὰ δ᾽ ἄλλ᾽ ὅμοιος: καὶ γένοι᾽ ἂν οὐ κακός"

"Of all human ills, greatest is fortune's wayward tyranny."

"ἀλλ᾽ ἢ καλῶς ζῆν ἢ καλῶς τεθνηκέναι τὸν εὐγενῆ χρή"

"Γύναι, γυναιξὶ κόσμον ἡ σιγὴ φέρει."

"στέργειν δέ τάκπεσόντα καί θέσθαι πρέπει σοφόν κυβευτήν, ’αλλά μη στένειν τύχην."

"Thoughts are mightier than strength of hand."

"No oath can be too binding for a lover."

"Fortune is not on the side of the faint-hearted."

"The dice of Zeus fall ever luckily."

"The truth is always the strongest argument."

"Children are the anchors of a mother's life."

"If I am Sophocles, I am not mad; and if I am mad, I am not Sophocles."

"If ills you do, ills also you must bear."

"πῶς," ἔφη, "ὦ Σοφόκλεις, ἔχεις πρὸς τἀφροδίσια; ἔτι οἷός τε εἶ γυναικὶ συγγίγνεσθαι"; καὶ ὅς, "εὐφήμει," ἔφη, "ὦ ἄνθρωπε: ἁσμενέστατα μέντοι αὐτὸ ἀπέφυγον, ὥσπερ λυττῶντά τινα καὶ ἄγριον δεσπότην ἀποδράς."

"Heaven ne'er helps the men who will not act."

"If it were possible to heal sorrow by weeping and to raise the dead with tears, gold were less prized than grief."

"War loves to seek its victims in the young."

"It is better not to live at all than to live disgraced."

"Do nothing secretly; for Time sees and hears all things, and discloses all."

"Truly, to tell lies is not honorable; But when the truth entails tremendous ruin, To speak dishonorably is pardonable."

"A short saying often contains much wisdom."

"No man loves life like him that's growing old."

"A lie never lives to be old."

"When ice appears out of doors, and boys seize it up while it is solid, at first they experience new pleasures. But in the end their pride will not agree to let it go, but their acquisition is not good for them if it stays in their hands. In the same way an identical desire drives lovers to act and not to act."

"Death is not the worst evil, but rather when we wish to die and cannot."

"Ō xein', angellein Lakedaimoniois hoti tē(i)de keimetha tois keinōn rhēmasi peithomenoi."

"ὦ ξεῖν', ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε κείμεθα τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι. (wrongly attributed)"

"… zographian poiesin sioposan prosagoreuei, ten de poiesin zographian lalousan."

"… ζωγραφίαν ποίησιν σιωπῶσαν προσαγορεύει [sc. ὁ Σιμωνίδης], τὴν δὲ ποίησιν ζωγραφίαν λαλοῦσαν."

"We did not flinch but gave our lives to save Greece when her fate hung on a razor's edge."

"Anankei d' oude theoi makhontai."

"ἀνάγκῃ δ᾽ οὐδὲ θεοὶ μάχονται."

"Here lies Megistias, who died When the Medes crossed Spercheius' tide. A great seer, yet he scorned to save Himself, and shared the Spartans' grave."

"[Word-for-word translation] O stranger, announce to the Lacadaemonians [Spartans] that here We lie, to their words [or laws] obedient."

"There is only one woman in the world. One woman, with many faces."

"I heard the bells from the future churches, the children playing and laughing in the schoolyards … and here was an almond tree in bloom before me: I must reach out and cut a flowering branch. For, by believing passionately in something which still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired, whatever we have not irrigated with our blood to such a degree that it becomes strong enough to stride across the somber threshold of nonexistence."

""Tomorrow, go forth and stand before the Lord. A great and strong wind will blow over you and rend the mountains and break in pieces the rocks, but the Lord will not be in the wind. And after the wind and earthquake, but the Lord will not be in the earthquake. And after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord will not be in the fire. And after the fire a gentle, cooling breeze. That is where the Lord will be." This is how the spirit comes. After the gale, the earthquake, and fire: a gentle, cooling breeze. This is how it will come in our own day as well. We are passing through the period of earthquake, the fire is approaching, and eventually (when? after how many generations?) the gentle, cool breeze will blow."

"Whoever climbed the Lord's mountain had to possess clean hands and an innocent heart; otherwise the Summit would kill him. Today the doorway is deserted. Soiled hands and sinful hearts are able to pass by without fear, for the Summit kills no longer."

"How can anyone have a true sense of the Hebrew race without crossing this terrifying desert, without experiencing it? For three interminable days we crossed it on our camels. Your throat sizzles from thirst, your head reels, your mind spins about as serpent-like you follow the sleek tortuous ravine. When a race is forged for two score years in this kiln, how can such a race die? I rejoiced at seeing the terrible stones where the Hebrews' virtues were born: their perseverance, will power, obstinacy, endurance, and above all, a God flesh of their flesh, flame of their flame, to whom they cried, "Feed us! Kill our enemies! Lead us to the Promised Land!" To this desert the Jews owe their continued survival and the fact that by means of their virtues and vices they dominate the world. Today, in the unstable period of wrath, vengeance, and violence through which we are passing, the Jews are of necessity once again the chosen people of the terrible God of Exodus from the land of bondage."

"Inhuman solitude made of sand and God. Surely only two kinds of people can bear to live in such desert: lunatics and prophets. The mind topples here not from fright but from sacred awe; sometimes it collapses downward, losing human stability, sometimes it springs upward, enters heaven, sees God face to face, touches the hem of His blazing garment without being burned, hears what He says, and taking this, slings it into men's consciousness. Only in the desert do we see the birth of these fierce, indomitable souls who rise up in rebellion even against God himself and stand before Him fearlessly, their minds in resplendent consubstantiality with the skirts of the Lord. God sees them and is proud, because in them his breath has not vented its force; in them, God has not stooped to becoming a man."

"In contrast to Hesse, I think about Kazantzakis, who is not as deep as Hesse, but has some human warmth, some Greek sunshine, in his prose. To me he speaks with a Jewish heart. I approve of Hesse; I love Kazantzakis."

"The focal point of Greek-American cultural interest has definitely shifted in recent decades. Where formerly there was a somewhat affected and strained focus on classical Hellas, the contemporary awareness is much more in tune with the literature of modern Greece. This shift has almost been entirely due to the increasing availability of English translations of modern Greek writings, for not many American-born Greeks comfortably read novels or poetry in the original Greek. The beginnings of the new mood can be traced to the translations of the novels of Nikos Kazantzakis in the 1950s. These also stimulated interest in other Greek writers, notably the poets Constantine P. Cavafy, a product of the Greek diaspora in Alexandria, Egypt, and George Seferis, who won the Nobel literature prize in 1963."

"...as Nikos Kazantzakis once wrote, 'Art is the representation not of the body but of the forces which created the body.'"

"I am suggesting that, for Kazantzakis, it is God who is "Immortal." What this means is that Kazantzakis is searching neither for heaven nor Nirvana nor ataraxia. Kazantzakis believes in matter, or better, in the transformation of matter into spirit and in the attachment of an embodied human being to spirit as if fastened by a nail. The (nonanthropocentric) "God" of Kazantzakis is a name given to a dark force at work in the world that in many ways is more like an agitated Yahweh or God the Father than like an anesthetic or passive receiver of human woes. In any event, Kazantzakis's theism is Buddhist if what you mean by Buddhism includes a consideration of the aforementioned Unborn or Undying, and it is in the Abrahamic tradition if what one means by Judaism, Christianity, or Islam is an an embracing of mysticism… Bien puts Kazantzakis's mysticism into focus when he says that human knowing (gnosis) — "You and I are one, Lord" — is necessarily followed by unknowing (agnosis) — "Even this one does not exist." The former element is reminiscent of the kataphatic tradition of Christian mysticism, otherwise known as the via positiva. But the latter element does not necessarily lead to nihilism, as some scholars allege, in that it is part of traditional apophatic theology or the via negativa. This negativity is not absolute, but rather indicative of the psychic renewal consistent with Buddhism and Christianity (including Greek Orthodoxy). It is a "rest in the life force's evolution toward ever-increasing value.""