Quotes by Gilbert Murray

• Sometimes Aristotle analyses his terms, but very often he takes them for granted; and in the latter case, I think, he is sometimes deceived by them.
• The fact is that much misunderstanding is often caused by our modern attempts to limit too strictly the meaning of a Greek word.
• The fashions of the ages vary in this direction and that, but they vary for the most part from a central road which was struck out by the imagination of Greece.
• The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths.
• The life and liberty and property and happiness of the common man throughout the world are at the absolute mercy of a few persons whom he has never seen, involved in complicated quarrels that he has never heard of.
• Where words can be translated into equivalent words, the style of an original can be closely followed; but no translation which aims at being written in normal English can reproduce the style of Aristotle.
• It is doubtless one of Aristotle's great services that he conceived so clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a history.
• Be careful in dealing with a man who cares nothing for comfort or promotion, but is simply determined to do what he believes to be right. He is a dangerous uncomfortable enemy, because his body, which you can always conquer, gives you little purchase upon his soul.
• Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading.
• Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries.