Top 120 Mary Renault Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “By her shining and her power he knew her.”

— Mary Renault

52. “I should think more crimes have probably been committed by chaps with inferiority complexes trying to demonstrate their virility, than even for money.”

— Mary Renault

53. “They say women forget the pain of childbirth. Well, they are in nature’s hand. No hand took mine. I was a body of pain in an earth and sky of darkness. It will take death to make me forget.”

— Mary Renault

54. “It is something, I thought, when a king can put a courtesan to the blush.”

— Mary Renault

55. “Tell a man what he may not sing and he is still half free; even all free, if he never wanted to sing it. But tell him what he must sing, take up his time with it so that his true voice cannot sound even in secret – there, I have seen is slavery.”

— Mary Renault

56. “He was filled with a vast sense of the momentous, of unknown mysteries. He did not know what he should demand of himself, nor did it seem to matter, for he had not chosen this music he moved to, it had chosen him.”

— Mary Renault

57. “His mouth felt cold to mine ; he neither opened his eyes, nor spoke, nor moved. I said in my heart, “Too late I am here within your cloak, I who never of my own will would have denied you anything. Time and death and change are unforgiving, and love lost in the time of youth never returns again.”

— Mary Renault

58. “When we serve the great, they are our destiny.”

— Mary Renault

59. “Do I grudge my lord the herb that will heal him, because another gathers it? No, let him be healed.”

— Mary Renault

60. “It had come to him that no one would ever look from these eyes but he: that among all the lives, numerous beyond imagination, in which he might have lived, he was this one, pinned to this single point of infinity; the rest always to be alien, he to be I.”

— Mary Renault

61. “Great anguish lies in wait for those who long too greatly.”

— Mary Renault

62. “I’m not prepared to accept a standard which puts the whole of my emotional life on the plane of immorality.”

— Mary Renault

63. “There is truth and truth,’ said the priest of Delos. ‘It is true after its kind.”

— Mary Renault

64. “We are weary of ourselves, and have dreamed a king. If now the gods have sent us one, let us not ask him to be more than mortal.”

— Mary Renault

65. “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.”

— Mary Renault

66. “Often beauty grows dull or common when speech breaks the mask...”

— Mary Renault

67. “Miss Searle had always considered boredom an intellectual defeat.”

— Mary Renault

68. “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.”

— Mary Renault

69. “The world had broken; the pieces lay like shattered gold, spoil for the strongest.”

— Mary Renault

70. “Plato, in his opinion, had committed too much to love.”

— Mary Renault

71. “We shall either find what we are seeking, or free ourselves from the persuasion that we know what we do not know.”

— Mary Renault

72. “It gives me no joy to be praised at the expense of a better artist, by someone who does not know the difference or who thinks me too vain to be aware of it myself.”

— Mary Renault

73. “In grief more than in joy, man longs to know that the universe turns around him.”

— Mary Renault

74. “You can make an audience see nearly anything, if you yourself believe in it.”

— Mary Renault

75. “Now for the first time he realized how important it had been not to admit any alternative to the hard, decent, orthodox choice which need not be regarded as a choice at all; how important not to be different.”

— Mary Renault

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

— Mary Renault

77. “I could not tell what I should fill even this one day with; and there were years ahead. She.”

— Mary Renault

78. “Power is the test. Some, once they have it, are content to buy the show of liking, and punish those who withhold it; then you have a despot. But some keep a true eye for how they seem to others, and care about it, which holds them back from much mischief.”

— Mary Renault

79. “If you know about yourself, presumably you know about at least one other person.”

— Mary Renault

80. “Then an unjust democracy must be worse than an unjust oligarchy, mustn’t it?”

— Mary Renault

81. “She stood laughing in the water. Her laughter made my backbone ripple. It had neither shame nor shamelessness; she laughed alone, please with her victory over strange monstrous things.”

— Mary Renault

82. “He looked as if he were anxiously balancing a large handful of tact, without quite knowing where to put it down.”

— Mary Renault

83. “An audience of twenty thousand, sitting on its hands, could not have produced such an echoing silence.”

— Mary Renault

84. “Each generation has its own dream of beauty. I have lived long enough to watch it change. Just then, he was what all sculptors were reaching after, and only the great achieved.”

— Mary Renault

85. “Is he weeping?” said the one with the softest heart.”

— Mary Renault

86. “Certainly, I thought, Dion means to have his way. But I suppose that’s what makes a king.”

— Mary Renault

87. “But courage without conduct is the virtue of a robber, or a tyrant.”

— Mary Renault

88. “And suddenly he knew that this was not, as he had been saying to himself, simply an unlucky day. It was a day dedicated beforehand to a lost cause.”

— Mary Renault

89. “It can be good to be given what you want; it can be better, in the end, never to have it proved to you that this is what you wanted.”

— Mary Renault

90. “Fate is our master,” I thought. “Yesterday a king, and today a tumbler’s man. I hope my father never hears of it.”

— Mary Renault

91. “Love is the true food of the soul. But the soul eats to live, like the body– it mustn’t live to eat... The soul lives to do!”

— Mary Renault

92. “I stretched out my hand to Poseidon, but he sent no sign. He was away perhaps, shaking the earth somewhere. All about us I felt another power, dark, past man’s thoughts, giver of desolation or of joy, she who can cherish or cast away but abides no question.”

— Mary Renault

93. “Just lately I have been happier than I ever had the right to expect, and as one goes around the world one sees that happiness is hard to come by and seldom lasts for long.”

— Mary Renault

94. “Solo hay un sobresalto peor que el totalmente inesperado, el esperado para el cual uno se ha negado a prepararse.”

— Mary Renault

95. “The sons of dreams outlive the sons of seed.”

— Mary Renault

96. “She looked up at the whirling effulgent cloud, and thought, I brought down the fire from heaven; I have lived with glory. A thunderbolt struck from the sky and all was gone.”

— Mary Renault

97. “The man who sleeps on a warning does not deserve one. What wait till tomorrow? I will go today?”

— Mary Renault

98. “Let the hand of discretion cover the wise mouth.”

— Mary Renault

99. “I left you to make you understand my mystery. Do not believe others will die, not you. It is not for that I’m your friend. By laying myself on the pyre, I became divine. I have wrestled with Thanatos knee to knee, and I know how death is vanquished. 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

100. “Apollo, who understands all mysteries, says also, “Nothing too much.” He is knowledge, Theseus; but She is what he knows.”

— Mary Renault