Top 120 Mary Renault Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Don’t we say all helpless folk – the orphan, the stranger, the suppliant, who have nothing to bargain with and can only pray – are sacred to Zeus the Savior? The King must answer for them; he is next the god. For the serfs, the landless hirelings, the captives of the spear; even the slaves.”

— Mary Renault

102. “Friendship is perfect when virtuous men love the good in one another; for virtue gives more delight than beauty, and is untouched by time.”

— Mary Renault

103. “On the grave-mound of Leonidas, with its marble lion, he laid a garland. “I don’t think,” he remarked after, “that he was really much of a general. If he’d made sure the Phokian troops understood their orders, the Persians could never have turned the pass. These southern states never work together. But one must honor a man as brave as that.”

— Mary Renault

104. “I know I thought of many things: of death, and fate, and what the gods want of man; how far a man can move within his moira, or, if all is determined, what makes one strive; and whether one can be a king without a kingdom.”

— Mary Renault

105. “She had seen, at last, her real enemy. Not the terrible old woman on the black horse; she could be terrible only because of him, the glowing ghost, the lion-maned head on the silver drachmas, directing her fate from his golden bier.”

— Mary Renault

106. “Man born of woman cannot outrun his fate. Better then not to question the Immortals, nor when they have spoken to grieve one’s heart in vain. A bound is set to our knowing, and wisdom is not to search beyond it. Men are only men.”

— Mary Renault

107. “I came for the cause. Since I could not help, at least don’t let me remember that I hindered it. I’ve learned how to manage on the ship; it will be nothing, after all this. Goodbye, Niko. You have made me a truer philosopher. Go with God.”

— Mary Renault

108. “We lived in the Bull Court; a city sealed in a palace, and a life sealed in with death. Yet it is a proud city, and a strong fierce life. A man once in it is of it till he dies. So I, who have gray beginning in my beard, still say “it is”, as if the Bull Court stood and I might yet go back to it.”

— Mary Renault

109. “We started off, he and I, and the girl between us. She shivered as the cold struck her; he pulled the sheepskins higher, and put his arm with a fold of his cloak about her shoulders. I felt a sudden rush of the past upon me; for a moment grief pierced me like a winter night; yet it came to me like an old grief, I had suffered it long since and now it was behind me.”

— Mary Renault

110. “If one sat up as long as an hour past bedtime, except on Christmas and birthdays, one would be ill. Laurie, who had had this explained to him many times and accepted it as incontrovertible fact, inferred from it that after three hours one would probably die.”

— Mary Renault

111. “I now know something about myself which I have been suspecting for years, if I had had the honesty to admit it. I ought to be frightened and ashamed, but I am not.”

— Mary Renault

112. “Then the pain of loss leaped out on me, like a knife in the night when one has been on one’s guard all day.”

— Mary Renault

113. “You may think I have been rather quick to decide I am in love. But he is a clear kind of person, about whom one has to think clearly.”

— Mary Renault

114. “It was his nature to believe anything, before he would believe he could be wrong.”

— Mary Renault

115. “Some would take nothing, like Perdiccas; whose inclusion suggests, in spite of Ptolemy, that he did the right thing at Thebes. “What are you keeping for yourself?” he asked. “Hope,” said Alexander, to which Perdiccas’ prophetic answer was, “That I’ll share.”

— Mary Renault

116. “He was not analytical enough yet to have discovered that there are certain loves, and certain phases of love, which bring perfect happiness only in their pauses and intervals, as water grows clear when one’s progress has ceased to stir it.”

— Mary Renault

117. “It is grief to a man to look on mysteries he does not understand. To yield unquestioning, not to know too much; that is the wisdom of the god.”

— Mary Renault

118. “There is only one journey, she said, that all men make. They go forth from the Mother, and do what men are born to do, till she stretches out her hand, and calls them home.”

— Mary Renault

119. “I don’t know what more there is to say, except this: that since one can’t refuse to know oneself, and it must have happened eventually, I would rather it was through you than anyone else.”

— Mary Renault

120. “The living need the truth, before rumor pollutes it.”

— Mary Renault

121. “Always, in the Bull Court, our most precious trophies were the gifts of the dead.”

— Mary Renault

122. “With a poignancy he had never felt during the half-stupefying agony on the beach, he was beset by a terrible consciousness of the world’s ever-renewed, ever-varied, never-dying pain: children and animals without hope in the present moment’s eternity; the prisoners of cruel men, the cruel terribly imprisoned in themselves...”

— Mary Renault

123. “At twenty-three, one is not frightened off a conversation merely by the fear of its becoming intense.”

— Mary Renault

124. “One exercises to be a whole man, not a creature bred like a plough-ox to do one thing.”

— Mary Renault

125. “People who have earned no pride in themselves, are content to be proud of their cities through other men.”

— Mary Renault

126. “During this time he got news that a famous statue of Orpheus, enshrined in south Macedon, had started to sweat profusely. The seers, pondering the omen, decided that the new King’s exploits would give the poets work.”

— Mary Renault

127. “Hephaistion was thinking how fragile his rib cage seemed, how terrible were the warring desires to cherish and to crush it.”

— Mary Renault

128. “When I rode on to meet the army, I learned a thing one never forgets after: how much easier it is to move the many than the few.”

— Mary Renault

129. “The gods, in kindness to mankind, have put in most men’s hearts the wish to be loved and honored, even when they greatly wish for power. 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

130. “There is no doubt that a really first-class fire, when no fear for human life intrudes, is one of the great atavistic joys still known to man. Today it is very shocking to think of archaeological treasures burning; to Macedonians and still more to Greeks, the significance of Persepolis was rather different.”

— Mary Renault

131. “Between friends is no need of justice, for neither wrong nor inequality can exist. He described the degrees of friendship, up from the self-seeking to the pure, when good is willed to the friend for the friend’s own sake. Friendship is perfect when virtuous men love the good in one another; for virtue gives more delight than beauty, and is untouched by time.”

— Mary Renault

132. “The twilight struck chilly as he went outside. He experienced for the first time that special dread brought by the first touch of winter to lovers who have nowhere to meet except out of doors.”

— Mary Renault

133. “I know what you feel like anyone else. It’s people that matter. If not, what are you worrying about. What’s Madge got that you can’t have for a bob against the railings? You care about someone and they let you down. Where’s the difference?”

— Mary Renault

134. “His feelings were confused; he wanted to grasp till Alexander’s very bones were somehow engulfed within himself, but knew this to be wicked and mad; he would kill anyone who harmed a hair of his head.”

— Mary Renault

135. “There are always men who take their own measure against greatness, and hate it not for what it is, but for what they are. They can envy even the dead. So much Alexander saw. He did not understand, since it was not in him, the power such men have to rouse in others the sleeping envy they once had a decent shame of; to turn respect for excellence into hate. Nor did Kallisthenes understand it in himself. Vanity begets it, vanity covers it up.”

— Mary Renault

136. “He had to do them, to show he was the best.”

— Mary Renault

137. “Men are better watching the seasons, and putting good into the earth, than running together in cities, where they listen all day to each other’s noises and forgot the gods. Acharnai is quite far enough.”

— Mary Renault

138. “It is better to believe in men too rashly, and regret, than believe too meanly. Men.”

— Mary Renault

139. “The finished shape of our fate, the line drawn round it. It is the task the gods allot us, and the share of glory they allow; the limits we must not pass; and our appointed end. Moira is all these.”

— Mary Renault