People From Greece

"4. The state of the mind is an intelligible height resembling the colour of heaven, to which the light of the Holy Trinity comes in the time of prayer."

"6. The pure mind is an incense burner at the time of prayer when it touches upon no sensible object. According to virtue we will be one on the eighth day; according to knowledge, on the last day."

"23. The mind cannot see the place of God within itself, unless it has transcended all the mental representations associated with objects. Nor will it transcend them, if it has not put off the passions that bind it to sensible objects through mental representations. And it will lay aside the passions through the virtues, and simple thoughts through spiritual contemplation; and this in turn it will lay aside when there appears to it the light."

"26. Prayer is a state of the mind destructive of every earthly mental representation."

"27. Prayer is a state of the mind that arises under the influence of the unique light of the Holy Trinity."

"34. The mind is the temple of the Holy Trinity."

"The main contemplations are five, under which all contemplation is comprised. And they say that the first is the contemplation of the adorable and holy Trinity, and that the second and the third are the contemplation of the incorporeal and the corporeal realities, and that the fourth and the fifth are the contemplation of the Judgment and of Providence."

"There was a time when evilness did not exist, and there will be a time when it will no more exist, whereas there was no time when virtue did not exist, and there will be no time when it will not exist. For the germs of virtue are impossible to destroy."

"Once there was a meeting at The Cells about some matter and Abba Evagrius spoke. The priest said to him: “Abba Evagrius, we know that if you were in your homeland you would probably have been a bishop and the head of many [clergy]; but now you are living here as an alien.” He was pricked in his conscience but not disturbed. Nodding his head, he said to him: “It is true, father; nevertheless, ‘I have spoken once; I will add nothing the second time’” (Job 40:5)."

"Überschauen wir diese Ausführungen, so kann kein Zweifel bestehen, daß die Mystik des Evagrius in ihrer völlig konsequenten Geschlossenheit dem Buddhismus wesentlich näher steht als dem Christentum."

"Diogenes received an invitation to dine with one whose house was splendidly furnished, in the highest order and taste, and nothing therein wanting. Diogenes, hawking, and as if about to spit, looked in all directions, and finding nothing adapted thereto, spat right in the face of the master. He, indignant, asked why he did so? "Because," Diogenes, "I saw nothing so dirty and filthy in all your house. For the walls were covered with pictures, the floors of the most precious tessellated character — and ranged with the various images of gods, and other ornamental figures.""

"The Roman physician Galen claimed that women could not conceive in rape—could not, in fact, conceive without an orgasm based in pleasure and consent."

"The laws of nature, as analyzed mathematically and descriptively by Ptolemy and Galen, bore an interesting, and perhaps not entirely accidental similarity to the law of nations and of nature, as discerned by a long succession of Roman jurists. ...The concept of an objective law applicable to human affairs, yet operating in accord with Nature and Reason and apart both from divine revelation and from human whim or passion, was peculiar to Rome and societies descended from Rome."

"Galen, in the third section of his book, "The Use of the Limbs," says correctly that it would be in vain to expect to see living beings formed of the blood of menstruous women and the semen virile, who will not die, will never feel pain, or will move perpetually, or shine like the sun. This dictum of Galen is part of the following more general proposition:—Whatever is formed of matter receives the most perfect form possible in that species of matter; in each individual case the defects are in accordance with that individual matter."

"Galen himself, who was not unacquainted with Moses's writings, and with christianity, fancy'd the earth had a certain soul or mind imparted to it by the superior bodies."

"This misplacing hath caused a deficience, or at least a great improficience in the sciences themselves. For the handling of final causes, mixed with the rest in physical inquiries, hath intercepted the severe and diligent inquiry of all real and physical causes, and given men the occasion to stay upon these satisfactory and specious causes, to the great arrest and prejudice of further discovery. For this I find done not only by Plato, who ever anchoreth upon that shore, but by Aristotle, Galen, and others which do usually likewise fall upon these flats of discoursing causes."

"Quod optimus medicus sit quoque philosophus."

"Triste est omne animale post coitum, praeter mulierem gallumque"

"Employment is Nature's physician, and is essential to human happiness."

"He who has two cakes of bread, let him dispose of one of them for some flowers of the narcissus; for bread is the food of the body, and the narcissus is the food of the soul."

"Much music marreth men's manners."

"Diogenes compared them to fig-trees growing over precipices; for their fruit was devoured by daws and crows, not by men."

"A god, as I have said, commanded me to tell the first use also, and he himself knows that I have shrunk from its obscurity. He knows too that not only here but also in many other places in these commentaries, if it depended on me, I would omit demonstrations requiring astronomy, geometry, music, or any other logical discipline, lest my books should be held in utter detestation by physicians. For truly on countless occasions throughout my life I have had this experience; persons for a time talk pleasantly with me because of my work among the sick, in which they think me very well trained, but when they learn later on that I am also trained in mathematics, they avoid me for the most part and are no longer at all glad to be with me. Accordingly, I am always wary of touching on such subjects, and in this case it is only in obedience to the command of a divinity, as I have said, that I have used the theorems of geometry"

"That which is, grows, while that which is not, becomes."

"The fact is that those who are enslaved to their sects are not merely devoid of all sound knowledge, but they will not even stop to learn!"

"But it is best of all to look at the human skeleton with your own eyes."

"It would be better, I think, for the man who really seeks the truth not to ask what the poets say; rather, he should first learn the method of finding the scientific premises that I discussed in the second book; then he should train and exercise himself in this method; and when his training is sufficiently advanced, then, as he approaches each particular problem, he should enquire into the premise needed for proving it, which premise he should take from simple sense-perception, which from experience, whether drawn from life or from the arts, which from the truths clearly apprehended by the mind, in order to draw out from them the desired conclusion."

"Diogenes the Cynic, it is related, was mighty of all people in regard to everything from self-control to endurance. He indulged in sexual lusts, not associating it with pleasure, an attractive good thing to some, but because of the harm that the retention of semen would cause if he avoided the habit of releasing it. When a prostitute who promised to visit him was delayed for some time, he rubbed his genitals with his hand, ejecting semen. After the whore arrived, he sent her away, saying: "my hand celebrated the wedding-hymn first." But it is clearly correct that, likewise, the disciplined man does not on account of pleasure indulge in lusts, but in order to relieve the hindrance acting as if this was not associated with pleasure."

"Most of us have grown so blase about computer developments and capabilities — even some that are spectacular — that it is difficult to believe or imagine there was a time when we suffered the noisy, painstakingly slow, electromechanical devices that chomped away on punched cards."

"Yes, the words, the land of my birth, they console me and compensate, but they would not bring me my mother back."

"Brothers, my human brothers, force me to believe in eternal life."

"Only with her I was not alone, now I am alone with everyone."

"With her alone I could be far away from everyone."

"She does not talk anymore, the one who used to talk so pleasantly."

"She answers no more, the one who used to answer always."

"In my sleep, which is the song of the tombs, I have just seen her again, as beautiful as in her youth."

"My true single consolation is that she is not present to see me in my agony of her death."

"Human friends, friends in hardship and in life, this is our pure love, love of mother and son."

"Never again I would know her slow kisses which are hardly felt. Never again the ringing mourning bells, songs of the dead that we loved."

"I say to myself that her small hands are no more worm, and that I would never again carry them soft to my front."

"In my solitude I sing to myself a sweet lullaby, as sweet as my mother used to sing to me."

"Go away, image of my living mother, full of life, as I saw her in France for the last time. Go away! My mother's ghost."

"Alone dwells every man and everyone mocks everyone else, and a deserted island is our pain."

"Nothing is truly great which it is great to despise; wealth, honor, reputation, absolute power—anything in short which has a lot of external trappings—can never seem supremely good to the wise man because it is no small good to despise them. People who could have these advantages if they chose but disdain them out of magnanimity are admired much more than those who actually possess them."

"οὐκ ἐν τῷ μεγάλῳ τὸ εὖ κείμενον εἶναι, ἀλλὰ ἐν τῷ εὖ τὸ μέγα."

"On one occasion some one put a very little wine into a wine-cooler, and said that it was sixteen years old. "It is very small for its age," said Gnathæna."

"Dorion, ridiculing the description of a tempest in the "Nautilus" of Timotheus, said that he had seen a more formidable storm in a boiling saucepan."

"Every investigation which is guided by principles of Nature fixes its ultimate aim entirely on gratifying the stomach."

"It was a saying of Demetrius Phalereus, that "Men having often abandoned what was visible for the sake of what was uncertain, have not got what they expected, and have lost what they had,—being unfortunate by an enigmatical sort of calamity.""

"For it would be unbecoming, says Aristotle, to come to banquet covered in sweat and dust; for the true gentleman should neither be dirty nor be unwashed nor [Rejoice in mire], as Heraclitus says."