Top 90 Edith Hamilton Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.”

— Edith Hamilton

52. “A tendency to exaggeration was a Roman trait.”

— Edith Hamilton

53. “When the mind withdraws into itself and dispenses with facts it makes only chaos.”

— Edith Hamilton

54. “Convention, so often a mask for injustice...”

— Edith Hamilton

55. “They were the first Westerners. The spirit of the West, the modern spirit, is a Greek discovery; and the place of the Greeks is in the modern world.”

— Edith Hamilton

56. “He was there beside her, yet she was far away from him, aone with her outraged love and her ruined life.”

— Edith Hamilton

57. “We must not contradict, but instruct him that contradicts us; for a madman is not cured by another running mad also. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought – that is being educated.”

— Edith Hamilton

58. “I came to the Greeks early, and I found answers in them. Greece’s great men let all their acts turn on the immortality of the soul. We don’t really act as if we believed in the soul’s immortality and that’s why we are where we are today.”

— Edith Hamilton

59. “No facts, however indubitably detected, no effort of reason, however magnificently maintained, can prove that Bach’s music is beautiful.”

— Edith Hamilton

60. “They would allow no woman to be forced to marry against her will they told the newcomers, nor would they surrender any suppliant, no matter how feeble, and no matter how powerful the pursuer.”

— Edith Hamilton

61. “The modern mind is never popular in its own day. People hate being made to think.”

— Edith Hamilton

62. “Appropriately, his bird was the vulture. The dog was wronged by being chosen as his animal.”

— Edith Hamilton

63. “The easy way has never in the long run commanded the allegiance of mankind.”

— Edith Hamilton

64. “This idea the Greeks had of him is best summed up not by a poet, but by a philosopher, Plato: “Love – Eros – makes his home in men’s hearts, but not in every heart, for where there is hardness he departs. His greatest glory is that he cannot do wrong nor allow it; force never comes near him. For all men serve him of their own free will. And he whom Love touches not walks in darkness.”

— Edith Hamilton

65. “To the Greeks, the word “character” first referred to the stamp upon a coin. By extension, man was the coin, and the character trait was the stamp imprinted upon him. To them, that trait, for example bravery, was a share of something all mankind had, rather than means of distinguishing one from the whole.”

— Edith Hamilton

66. “Genius moves to creation, not to destruction. Only a very few have combined both.”

— Edith Hamilton

67. “The fifth race is that which is now upon the earth: the iron race. They live in evil times and their nature too has much of evil, so that they never have rest from toil and sorrow. As the generations pass, they grow worse; sons are always inferior to their fathers. A time will come when they have grown so wicket that they will worship power, might will be right to them, and reverence for the good will cease to be.”

— Edith Hamilton

68. “All things are at odds when God sets a thinker loose on the planet.”

— Edith Hamilton

69. “In theology the conservative temper tends to formalism.”

— Edith Hamilton

70. “When she came into Venus’ presence the goddess laughed aloud and asked her scornfully if she was seeking a husband since the one she had had would have nothing to do with her because he had almost died of the burning wound she had given him.”

— Edith Hamilton

71. “When we speak of beauty, we’re speaking of something we’re more or less indifferent to.”

— Edith Hamilton

72. “The Old Testament is the record of men’s conviction that God speaks directly to men.”

— Edith Hamilton

73. “There are few efforts more conducive to humility than that of the translator trying to communicate an incommunicable beauty. Yet, unless we do try, something unique and never surpassed will cease to exist except in the libraries of a few inquisitive book.”

— Edith Hamilton

74. “Reality has actually very little to do with truth; there is no necessary connection between the two.”

— Edith Hamilton

75. “An ancient writer says of Homer that he touched nothing without somehow honoring and glorifying it.”

— Edith Hamilton

76. “Ages of faith and of unbelief are always said to mark the course of history.”

— Edith Hamilton

77. “Though the outside of human life changes much, the inside changes little.”

— Edith Hamilton

78. “Christ must be rediscovered perpetually.”

— Edith Hamilton

79. “He was softly breathing his life away, the dark blood flowing down his skin of snow and his eyes growing heavy and dim. She kissed him, but Adonis knew not that she kissed him as he died.”

— Edith Hamilton

80. “Euripides “questioned everything. He was a misanthrope who preferred books to men.”

— Edith Hamilton

81. “Poetry and preaching do not go well together; when the preacher mounts the pulpit the poet usually goes away.”

— Edith Hamilton

82. “There is no better indication of what the people of any period are like than the plays they go to see.”

— Edith Hamilton

83. “Mind and spirit together make up that which separates us from the rest of the animal world, that which enables a man to know the truth and that which enables him to die for the truth.”

— Edith Hamilton

84. “A magical universe was so terrifying because it was so irrational. There was no cause and effect anywhere.”

— Edith Hamilton

85. “Old ideas are continually being slain by new facts. There is nothing stable in the conclusions of the mind, and it is impossible that there ever should be unless we hold that the universe is made to the measure of the human mind, an assumption for which nothing in the past gives any warrant.”

— Edith Hamilton

86. “The Greeks were realists. They saw the beauty of common things and were content with it.”

— Edith Hamilton

87. “Tragedy cannot take place around a type. Suffering is the most individualizing thing on earth.”

— Edith Hamilton

88. “The spiritual world was not to them another world from the natural world. It was the same world as that known to the mind. Beauty and rationality were both manifested in it. They did not see the conclusions reached by the spirit and those reached by the mind as opposed to each other. Reason and feeling were not antagonistic. The truth of poetry and the truth of science were both true. It.”

— Edith Hamilton

89. “A gifted young sculptor of Cyprus, named Pygmalion, was a woman-hater. Detesting the faults beyond measure which nature has given to women, he resolved never to marry.”

— Edith Hamilton

90. “The author determines that the bitterest struggles are for one side of the truth to the suppression of the other side.”

— Edith Hamilton

91. “Far better die,” she said. She took in her hand a casket which held herbs for killing, but as she sat there with it, she thought of life and the delightful things that are in the world; and the sun seemed sweeter than ever before.”

— Edith Hamilton

92. “The wise are doubtful,′ Socrates returned, ’and I should not be singular if I too doubted.”

— Edith Hamilton

93. “Very few great artists feel the giant agony of the world.”

— Edith Hamilton

94. “Help me to vengeance,” she said. “Give the Greeks a bitter homecoming. Stir up your waters with wild whirlwinds when they sail. Let dead men choke the bays and line the shores and reefs.”

— Edith Hamilton

95. “The end, the tale of what happened to the Trojan women when Troy fell, comes from a play by Sophocles’ fellow playwright, Euripides. It is a curious contrast to the martial spirit of the Aeneid. To Virgil as to all Roman poets, war was the noblest and most glorious of human activities. Four hundred years before Virgil a Greek poet looked at it differently. What was the end of that far-famed war? Euripides seems to ask. Just this, a ruined town, a dead baby, a few wretched women.”

— Edith Hamilton

96. “And now, though feeble and short-lived, mankind has flaming fire and therefrom learns many crafts.”

— Edith Hamilton