Mary Renault quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Mary Renault

Mary Renault Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Mary Renault on Wise Famous Quotes.

and Alexander was nothing if not resourceful. He had had the legs of her chair cut down.

I was a king and a king's heir and now I am a slave.

What is democracy? It is what it says, the rule of the people. It is as good as the people are, or as bad.

An audience of twenty thousand, sitting on its hands, could not have produced such an echoing silence.

By her shining and her power he knew her.

One must live as if it would be forever, and as if one might die each moment. Always both at once.

In all men is evil sleeping; the good man is he who will not awaken it, in himself or in other men.

There is madness in youth, but sometimes a god inspires it.

It is something, I thought, when a king can put a courtesan to the blush.

If you know about yourself, presumably you know about at least one other person.

It is not the bloodletting that calls down power. It is the consenting.

A starving man won't notice a dirty plate.

For I had felt too much and reasoned too little, hearing what I was ready to hear, not what had been said. There

In hatred is love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul.

That there are fashions in admiration and denigration is inevitable; they should not however be followed at the expense of truth.

Never destroy without thought your enemy's pretences; they are usually your best weapon against him.

How can people trust the harvest, unless they see it sown?

The maxim of the famous Spartan nurses: never expose a small child to fear, let him enter confidently on boyhood.

We Persians have a saying that one should deliberate serious matters first drunk, then sober.

Friendship is perfect when virtuous men love the good in one another; for virtue gives more delight than beauty, and is untouched by time.

Never mind, mother, you weren't far out; he is Alexander too.

It is the mark of little men to like only what they know; one step beyond, and they
feel the black cold of chaos.

There is nothing like despair to make one throw oneself upon the gods.

Clouds of black birds rose up wailing and screaming, like the thoughts of my heart.

It is bitter to lose a friend to evil, before one loses him to death.

Money buys many things ... The best of which is freedom.

Speak for me, Nikeratos. Someone's soul is always listening. Someone's always is, I suppose, if one only knew. Plato never forgot it.

If anyone has the right to be measured by the standards of his own time, it is Alexander. Hermann Bengston, The Greeks and the Persians

Great anguish lies in wait for those who long too greatly.

Longing performs all things

All men seek esteem; the best by lifting themselves, which is hard to do, the rest by shoving others down, which is much easier.

Alexander could transmit imagination as some other could transmit lust.

Am I beautiful? It is for you alone. Say that you love me, for without you I cannot live.

The tenet of the philosopher that for each man there was only one perfect friend;

The rightness of a thing isn't determined by the amount of courage it takes.

I saw death come for you, and I had no philosophy.

There is truth and truth,' said the priest of Delos. 'It is true after its kind.

But it is not for the perfect vase or the polished gem to choose their owners.

There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare.

What keeps the democracy alive at all but the hatred of excellence; the desire of the base to see no head higher than their own?

I could not tell what I should fill even this one day with; and there were years ahead. She

Miss Searle had always considered boredom an intellectual defeat.

Certainly, I thought, Dion means to have his way. But I suppose that's what makes a king.

But courage without conduct is the virtue of a robber, or a tyrant.

It can be good to be given what you want; it can be better, in the end, never to have it proved to you that this is what you wanted

In grief more than in joy, man longs to know that the universe turns around him.

Do I grudge my lord the herb that will heal him, because another gathers it? No, let him be healed.

WITHOUT LAUGHTER, WHAT MAN of sense could endure either politics or war?

You can make an audience see nearly anything, if you yourself believe in it.

I wanted someone to follow, I wanted him to be brave. But he wants to be brave for me; and no one can do that.

I should think more crimes have probably been committed by chaps with inferiority complexes trying to demonstrate their virility, than even for money.

One might have supposed that the true act of love was to lie together and talk.

It is better to learn war early from friends, than late from enemies

It's not what one is, it's what one does with it.

He stood between death and life as between night and morning, and thought with a soaring rapture, 'I am not afraid.

The lovers of the innocent must protect them above all from the knowledge of their own cruelty.

Half the world's troubles come from men not being trained to resent a fallacy as much as an insult.

When we serve the great, they are our destiny.

True friends share everything, except the past before they met.

Love is a boaster at heart, who cannot hide the stolen horse without giving a glimpse of the bridle.

Often beauty grows dull or common when speech breaks the mask ...

A man is at his youngest when he thinks he is a man, not yet realizing that his actions must show it.

He looked as if he were anxiously balancing a large handful of tact, without quite knowing where to put it down.

War's such a boomerang it's impossible to guarantee anyone's protection in the long run.

To hate excellence is to hate the gods.

Go with your fate, but not beyond. Beyond leads to dark places.

Men would be as gods, if they had foreknowledge.

Everything is change; and you cannot step twice into the same river.

Death was the price of life.

Plato, in his opinion, had committed too much to love.