Greece

“ We passed two or three hours wandering about among the broken columns, and gazing away to the main and the distant isles, confessing the surpassing beauty of Greece. Yet have its mountains scarce a green spot, and its vales are treeless and uninhabited, and all that constitutes desolation is there, and strange as it may seem, you neither miss the verdure, nor the people, nor find it desolate. The outline of Greece, in the first place, is the finest in the world. ”

“ Every educated man loves Greece, owes gratitude to Greece. Greece was the lifter-up to the nations of the banner of art and science, as Israel was the lifter-up of the banner of righteousness. Now, the world cannot do without art and science. And the lifter-up of the banner of art and science was naturally much occupied with them, and conduct was a homely plain matter. ”

“ I suppose, in this tamed England of ours, we should feel it artificial; we should fear to let ourselves go. But in Greece—if we could fancy ourselves there, shorn of our little local personalities—in some classic grove, on sunlit slopes, all bubbling with the re-birth of flowers and alive with the light, the broad all-flooding light of Greece that her children dreaded to leave more than any other earthly thing, when death threatened—could one not imagine the loveliness of some garlanded dance, and fancy the naïads, and the dryads, and all the hosts of Pan gambolling at one’s heels? ”

“ Greece as we know it in the infant stages of its development, with a totally different state of society, a totally different organization and culture; and in the interval no one could say how many generations, concerning which, and their conditions and developments, there was nothing but blank ignorance. So that it seemed as though the marvellous fabric of Greek civilization as we know it were indeed something unexampled, rising almost at once out of nothing to its height of splendour, as the walls of Ilium were fabled to have risen beneath the hands of their divine builders. ”

“ No doubt, the fancy of imaginative men, thirsting for a degree of simplicity and happiness greater than they find around them in cities or villages, is apt to kindle and shed too glorious a light on approaching the tranquil solitudes, the pine forests, the mountain glens, the hidden lakes, the umbrageous streams that leap and frolic down the wild rocks of a country so rife with beauty as Greece. ”

“ Yet Greece, old Greece, the seat of early civilization and freedom, stretches out her hands, imploringly, to a land which sprung into being, as it were, ages after her own lustre had been extinguished! and ventures to hope that the youngest and most vigorous sons of liberty, will regard, with no common sympathy, the efforts of the descendants of the heir and the elder born, whose precepts and whose example have served—though insufficient, hitherto, for our complete regeneration—to regenerate half a world. ”

“ We bow in spirit when Greece is named, not alone because she was the mother of heroes and lawgivers, but because her hand rocked the cradle of a literature as enduring as it is beautiful and brilliant, and cherished in their infancy those arts which eventually repaid her nursing care in a rich harvest of immortal renown. ”

“ The bard's lone haunts, the warrior's combat-plains,
And the wild-rose yet lives to breathe and bloom,
Round Doric Pæstum's solitary fanes.1 [1]
But most, fair Greece! on thy majestic shore,
He feels the fervors of his spirit rise;
Thou birth-place of the Muse! whose voice, of yore,
Breathed in thy groves immortal harmonies;
And lingers still around the well-known coast,
Murmuring a wild farewell to fame and freedom lost. ”

“ As to those things which are attained not by study, but nature, neither Greece, nor any nation, is comparable to us; for what people has displayed such gravity, such steadiness, such greatness of soul, probity, faith—such distinguished virtue of every kind, as to be equal to our ancestors. In learning, indeed, and all kinds of literature, Greece did excel us, and it was easy to do so where there was no competition ”

“ In every province, morals, intellect, imagination, Greece was striking out, to the right and the left. And in the century after the Persian wars, she reaped the full harvest of her splendid sowing, and produced the masterpieces which have remained ever since memorable, to the study of which each generation recurs, and whence it learns of what human nature is capable. ”

“ It is not anything fixed and stationary that constitutes Greece: what constitutes Greece is the movement which leads from all these to the Stoic or fifth-century ‘sophist’ who condemns and denies slavery, who has abolished all cruel superstitions and preaches some religion based on philosophy and humanity, who claims for women the same spiritual rights as for man, who looks on all human creatures as his brethren, and the world as ‘one great City of gods and men’. ”

“ Greece with her imaginative mythology, her poetry, her history, and her philosophy, has already passed in review before your eyes—her radiant shrines, garlanded and with flowers by the hands of the officiating graces, at a time when our northern altars were from reeking with human blood. ”

“ Speaker, more than 2,500 years ago the people of Greece began to formulate the ideas that now serve as the foundation for our system of government, science, philosophy, law, literature, and art. The gift of Greek culture to the world, and the special debt this nation owes to Greece, is priceless. The Greek tradition that began in the mists of time with Homer led to the Golden Age and later to the intellectual and aesthetic enrichment of the Roman Republic and Empire, the European Renaissance, and our own nation's founding principles. ”

“ Nor can we omit from the causes of the teeming, vivid, and universal superstition of Greece, the accidents of earthquake and inundation, to which the land appears early and often to have been exposed. To the activity and caprice of nature—to the frequent operation of causes, unrecognised, unforeseen, unguessed, the Greeks owed much of their disposition to recur to mysterious and superior agencies—and that wonderful poetry of faith which delighted to associate the visible with the unseen. ”

“ Every idea, every image, every maxim, every reflection seems to emanate from one source. Nothing is foreign. Neither the inspiration, nor the spirit which regulated it and moulded it into beauty, borrowed a single impulse from anything existing beyond the circle of Hellenic thought. Greece supplied at once the matrix and the materials, the active power and that delicate sense of beauty and perfection which presided over its organisation and rendered it the delight of mankind.
In characterising this literature many singular notions have been broached. ”

“ In its poets and orators, its historians and philosophers, Greece cannot be conceived from a central point, unless one brings, as a key to the understanding of it, an insight into the ideal forms of sculpture, and regards the images of statesmen and philosophers, as well as epic and dramatic heroes, from the artistic point of view. For those who act, as well as those who create and think, have, in those beautiful days of Greece, this plastic character. ”

“ Ancient Greece, with her indented coast, inviting to maritime adventures, from her earliest period was the mother of heroes in war, of poets in song, of sculptors and artists, and stands up after the lapse of centuries the educator of mankind, living in the grandeur of her works and in the immortal productions of minds which modern civilization with all its cultivation and refinement and science never surpassed and scarcely equalled. ”

“ Shall we now leave the domain of historic events, of which the land of Greece presents so large and varied a store, and consider that other feature of national life and development which has made Greece the most notable of lands—the intellectual growth of its people, the splendor of art and literature which gave it a glory that glows unfading still? ”

“ Why should we follow ancient Greece? As long as the Athenian was stalwart, patriotic, full of rugged simplicity, the influence of Greece was all powerful in shaping the thought of the world and in moulding its history. ”

“ The Greek people were lovers of freedom, truth, self-control and beauty. It is in their political history, their literature and their architecture that we shall see some of the outward and visible signs of the spirit that inspired them, and the land of Greece is the setting in which they played their part in the history of civilization. ”

“ As Alexander passed conquering through Asia, he restored to the East, as garnered grain, that Greek civilisation whose seeds had long ago been received from the East. Each conqueror in turn, the Macedonian and the Roman, bowed before conquered Greece and learnt lessons at her feet. To the modern world too Greece has been the great civiliser, the oecumenical teacher, the disturber and regenerator of slumbering societies. She is the source of most of the quickening ideas which re-make nations and renovate literature and art. ”

“ The best of what made Greece, still lives in the people of the world. Greece was the garden of modern civilization and will remain its inspiration until three elements of character—the religious, the intellectual and the social—shall join their powers to construct the future government of the world. ”

“ Greece developed with phenomenal rapidity as soon as her galleys sprinkled the blue waters of the Mediterranean, for with every incoming freight came a whisper of rudimentary art or culture which she forthwith clothed in beautiful form and language. ”

“ Greece, the modern kingdom, is one of the countries that for centuries were politically included within the limits of the Turkish Empire. In its present form it represents but a portion of that country, famous in history, as the Greece of the Ancients—that classic land which holds the most conspicuous place in the pages of ancient history—but still it is inclusive of the greatest names belonging to the glorious past. ”

“ The classic land of Greece, once foremost in all things which make nations great, particularly in the valour and victorious deeds of her military heroes, has almost forgotten her ancient glory—she might perhaps be forgotten by other nations altogether in the constant springing up of new countries and peoples if it were not for Homer! ”

“ Such is the aspect of his shore;
'T is Greece, but living Greece no more!
So coldly sweet, so deadly fair,
We start, for Soul is wanting there. ”

“ Every factor is new, even the area, the nationality of the actors, the whole idea in its origin and every stage of growth is new. Or let the area be the same; what has modern Greece in continuity with ancient Greece, but the soil and sky and the, to it, unintelligible wreck of ancient magnificence, from which it fails apparently to draw even the ordinary lessons of civilisation: what period and region of the whole history of the world conveys a less important lesson than Greece during the Middle Ages of European History? ”

“ Greek history is the pride of all the civilized world, and in the opinion of a most distinguished sociologist, the United States is the Greece of this age, and he thinks that it is the irresistible law of gravitation and sympathy that the tide of emigration draws the Greeks from the ancient Greece into this new and glorious Greece. ”

“ She turned, as she spoke, towards the western waters, where the sea-line of the Ægean lay, while in her eyes came the look of a royal pride and of a deathless love.
"Greece cannot die! No matter what the land be now, Greece—our Greece—must live for ever. Her language lives; the children of Europe learn it, even if they halt it in imperfect numbers. The greater the scholar the humbler he still bends to learn the words of wisdom from her schools. The poet comes to her for all his fairest myths, his noblest mysteries, his greatest masters. ”

“ We are in a world which their history touches only by fits and starts; we have sailed into the Greece of Polybios. We have made our way from the world of city-commonwealths into the world of federations; as we pass along, the lands of the two great Leagues lie on either side of us. ”

“ Greece, for example. We may know very little —you and I may know very little—of the details of Greek history. We cannot, perhaps, remember the date of Aegospotami, or what happened at Plataea: we may have the vaguest notion of the import of Aeschylus, or Sophocles, or Plato. But still there is a certain color in our conscious perceptions which comes from Greece: the 'glory that was Greece' means something, is a certain light within the consciousness, to everyone of us. The Greeks added something to the wealth of the human spirit, which we all may share in, and do. ”

“ At every turn, turns as unnumbered this day as the woes of Greece, the landscape changed its face. No sooner had one’s appreciation become oriented, than it had to give way to the necessity of a fresh orientation. ”

“ Thus died the first and one of the greatest of ethical philosophers, and a man without a parallel, in his peculiar field, in all the history of mankind. Greece produced none like him, and this homely and humble personage, who wrote not a line, has been unsurpassed in fame and influence upon mankind by any of the host of illustrious writers who have made famous the Hellenic lands. ”

“ Great Ajax eyes them with incessant care,
And in an orb contracts the crowded war,
Close in their ranks commands to fight or fall,
And stands the centre and the soul of all:
Fix’d on the spot they war, and wounded, wound;
A sanguine torrent steeps the reeking ground:
On heaps the Greeks, on heaps the Trojans bled,
And, thickening round them, rise the hills of dead.
Greece, in close order, and collected might,
Yet suffers least, and sways the wavering fight;
Fierce as conflicting fires the combat burns,
And now it rises, now it sinks by turns. ”