Mary renault Quotes

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

“In hatred as in love we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe we graft into our very soul.”

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

“You mustn't get so upset about what you feel, Spud. No one's a hundred per cent consistent all the time. We might like to be. We can plan our lives along certain lines. But you know, there's no future in screwing down all the pressure valves and smashing in the gauge. You can do it for a bit and then something goes. Sometimes it gets that the only thing is just to say, 'That's what I'd like to feel twenty-four hours a day; but, the hell with it, this is how I feel now.”

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

“What is honour? In Athens it is one thing, in Sparta another; and among the Medes it is something else again. But go where you will, there is no land where the dead return across the river.”

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

“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.”

“Alexander could transmit imagination as some other could transmit lust.”