Top 120 Mary Renault Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Mary Renault

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

— Mary Renault

3. “Man’s immortality is not to live forever; for that wish is born of fear. Each moment free from fear makes a man immortal.”

— Mary Renault

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

— Mary Renault

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

— Mary Renault

6. “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?”

— Mary Renault

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

— Mary Renault

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

— Mary Renault

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

— Mary Renault

10. “I was a king and a king’s heir and now I am a slave.”

— Mary Renault

11. “It is bitter to lose a friend to evil before one loses him to death.”

— Mary Renault

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

— Mary Renault

13. “Never destroy without thought your enemy’s pretences; they are usually your best weapon against him.”

— Mary Renault

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

— Mary Renault

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

— Mary Renault

16. “It is better to learn war early from friends, than late from enemies.”

— Mary Renault

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

— Mary Renault

18. “Often I wished for someone to share my mind with; but their hearts were in little things, they would have thought me a dreamer, and I had to plan alone.”

— Mary Renault

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

— Mary Renault

20. “Alexander, of whom men tell many legends, lived by his own. Achilles must have Patroklos. He might love his Briseis; but Patroklos was the friend till death. At their tombs in Troy, Alexander and Hephaistion had sacrificed together. Wound Patroklos, and Achilles will have your blood.”

— Mary Renault

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

— Mary Renault

22. “The rightness of a thing isn’t determined by the amount of courage it takes.”

— Mary Renault

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

— Mary Renault

24. “Longing performs all things.”

— Mary Renault

25. “A starving man won’t notice a dirty plate.”

— Mary Renault

26. “Men would be as gods, if they had foreknowledge.”

— Mary Renault

27. “It is not the bloodletting that calls down power. It is the consenting.”

— Mary Renault

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

— Mary Renault

29. “The perpetual stream of human nature is formed into ever-changing shallows, eddies, falls and pools by the land over which it passes. Perhaps the only real value of history lies in considering this endlessly varied play between the essence and the accidents.”

— Mary Renault

30. “I thought, There goes my lord, whom I was born to follow. I have found a King. And, I said to myself, looking after him as he walked away, I will have him, if I die for it.”

— Mary Renault

31. “Do you know that old song about Orpheus, how he played his lyre on the mountainside, and found a lion had crouched at his feet to listen? I’m no Orpheus, I know; but sometimes I see the lion’s eyes. Where did it go, after the music, what became of it? The story doesn’t say.”

— Mary Renault

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

— Mary Renault

33. “He was like a fine olive tree, which when its roots are checked one way will put them out another. Summer or winter, storm or calm, his soul sought justice and the end of wrong.”

— Mary Renault

34. “May the Mother curse him and all gods below, and may Night’s Daughters hunt him down into the ground! And on the hand that sheds his blood let there be a blessing.”

— Mary Renault

35. “I said, ‘We have dreamed, dear friend. Another time, we might awaken. Let it be a dream forgotten at morning.’ That seemed a better way of saying it than, ‘Never remind me of this, for fear I should stick a knife in you.”

— Mary Renault

36. “That is the life of the gods, who only seem to die like the sun at his setting. But do not ride too fast across the sky and leave us all in darkness.”

— Mary Renault

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

— Mary Renault

38. “It is a grief to see a hero go down to the house of Hades. It is bitter to lose a friend to evil, before one loses him to death.”

— Mary Renault

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

— Mary Renault

40. “To hate excellence is to hate the gods.”

— Mary Renault

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

— Mary Renault

42. “In his imagination the pages were printed not with their own paragraphs only, but with all that he himself had brought to them: it seemed as though he must be identified and revealed in them, beyond all pretence of detachment, as if they were a diary to which he had committed every secret of his heart.”

— Mary Renault

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

— Mary Renault

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

— Mary Renault

45. “It is better to believe in men too rashly, and regret, than believe too meanly. Men could be more than they are, if they would try for it. He has shown them that. How many have tried, because of him? Not only those I have seen; there will be men to come. Those who look in mankind only for their own littleness, and make them believe in that, kill more than he ever will in all his wars.”

— Mary Renault

46. “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.”

— Mary Renault

47. “People like me are blamed for curiosity; having lost part of our lives, we are apt to fill the gap from the lives of others. In this I am like the rest, and make no pretences.”

— Mary Renault

48. “It’s not what one is, it’s what one does with it.”

— Mary Renault

49. “All these years you have made a boy of him. But with me, he shall be a man.”

— Mary Renault

50. “Laurie stood casting his long shadow on the room behind him, silent in a grief and wonder too deep for tears, that life was so divided and irreconcilable, and the good so implacably the enemy of the best.”

— Mary Renault