Euripides Quotes

Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.

Pylades: I’ll take care of you. Orestes: It’s rotten work. Pylades: Not to me. Not if it’s you.

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.

Stronger than lover's love is lover's hate. Incurable, in each, the wounds they make.

It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, "more like deer than human being." To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.

Come back. Even as a shadow, even as a dream.

When one with honeyed words but evil mind Persuades the mob, great woes befall the state.

Anger exceeding limits causes fear and excessive kindness eliminates respect.

The fiercest anger of all, the most incurable, Is that which rages in the place of dearest love.

Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing.

Hate is a bottomless cup; I will pour and pour

One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives.

This is slavery, not to speak one's thought.

Of all creatures that can feel and think, we women are the worst treated things alive

Let no one think of me that I am humble or weak or passive; let them understand I am of a different kind: dangerous to my enemies, loyal to my friends. To such a life glory belongs.

Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me. Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.

Cleverness is not wisdom.

Waste not fresh tears over old griefs.

I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees.

When a good man is hurt, all who would be called good must suffer with him.

The wisest men follow their own direction.

He is not a lover who does not love forever.

In case of dissension, never dare to judge till you've heard the other side.

My love for you was greater than my wisdom.

Nothing is hopeless; we must hope for everything.

Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.

tell me how does it feel with my teeth in your heart!

I'd three times sooner go to war than suffer childbirth once.

Do not mistake the rule of force for true power. Men are not shaped by force.

It is a good thing to be rich and strong, but it is a better thing to be loved.

I loathe a friend whose gratitude grows old, a friend who takes his friend's prosperity but will not voyage with him in his grief

Arm yourself, my heart: the thing that you must do is fearful, yet inevitable.

Friends show their love in times of trouble.

Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes angry.

Come back! Even as a shadow, even as a dream.

For in other ways a woman is full of fear, defenseless, dreads the sight of cold steel; but, when once she is wronged in the matter of love, no other soul can hold so many thoughts of blood.

I know indeed what evil I intend to do, but stronger than all my afterthoughts is my fury, fury that brings upon mortals the greatest evils.

It's human; we all put self interest first.

Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm; great good fortune comes to failure in the end. All is change; all yields its place and goes; to persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man. The coward despairs.

Reading list (1972 edition)[edit] 1. Homer – Iliad, Odyssey 2. The Old Testament 3. Aeschylus – Tragedies 4. Sophocles – Tragedies 5. Herodotus – Histories 6. Euripides – Tragedies 7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War 8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings 9. Aristophanes – Comedies 10. Plato – Dialogues 11. Aristotle – Works 12. Epicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus 13. Euclid – Elements 14. Archimedes – Works 15. Apollonius of Perga – Conic Sections 16. Cicero – Works 17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things 18. Virgil – Works 19. Horace – Works 20. Livy – History of Rome 21. Ovid – Works 22. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia 23. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania 24. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic 25. Epictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion 26. Ptolemy – Almagest 27. Lucian – Works 28. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations 29. Galen – On the Natural Faculties 30. The New Testament 31. Plotinus – The Enneads 32. St. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine 33. The Song of Roland 34. The Nibelungenlied 35. The Saga of Burnt Njál 36. St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica 37. Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy 38. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales 39. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks 40. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy 41. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly 42. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres 43. Thomas More – Utopia 44. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises 45. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel 46. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion 47. Michel de Montaigne – Essays 48. William Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies 49. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote 50. Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene 51. Francis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis 52. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays 53. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences 54. Johannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World 55. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals 56. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan 57. René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy 58. John Milton – Works 59. Molière – Comedies 60. Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises 61. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light 62. Benedict de Spinoza – Ethics 63. John Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education 64. Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies 65. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics 66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology 67. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe 68. Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal 69. William Congreve – The Way of the World 70. George Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge 71. Alexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man 72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws 73. Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary 74. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones 75. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets

He who believes needs no explanation.

Mortal fate is hard. You'd best get used to it.

No one can confidently say that he will still be living tomorrow.

[Diontsos]. Swoony type, long hair, bedroom eyes, cheeks like wine.

Theseus: Stop. Give me your hand. I am your friend. Herakles: I fear to stain your clothes with blood. Theseus: Stain them, I don't care.

death is the only water to wash away this dirt

The man is happiest who lives from day to day and asks no more, garnering the simple goodness of life.

When love is in excess, it brings a man no honor, no worthiness.

I understand too well the dreadful act I'm going to commit, but my judgement can't check my anger, and that incites the greatest evils human beings do.

Whoso neglects learning in his youth, loses his past and is dead for the future.

There is in the worst of fortune the best of chances for a happy change.

Do not grieve so much for a husband lost that it wastes away your life.

Nothing has more strength than dire necessity.

Friends show their love in times of trouble, not in happiness.

Love is all we have, the only way that each can help the other.

I went mad, a god hurt me, I fell.

Prepare yourselves for the roaring voice of the God of Joy!

Authority is never without hate.

She came into the world fierce and stubborn and then she learned to hate.

Who knoweth if to die be but to live, and that called life by mortals be but death?

Prosperity is full of friends.

She sings a dark destructive song.

O Dionysus, we feel you near, stirring like molten lava under the ravaged earth, flowing from the wounds of your trees in tears of sap, screaming with the rage of your hunted beasts.

Come here, let me share a bit of wisdom with you. Have you given much thought to our mortal condition? Probably not. Why would you? Well, listen. All mortals owe a debt to death. There's no one alive who can say if he will be tomorrow. Our fate moves invisibly! A mystery. No one can teach it, no one can grasp it. Accept this! Cheer up! Have a drink! But don't forget Aphrodite--that's one sweet goddess. You can let the rest go. Am I making sense? I think so. How about a drink. Put on a garland. I'm sure the happy splash of wine will cure your mood. We're all mortal you know. Think mortal. Because my theory is, there's no such thing as life, it's just catastrophe.

Leave no stone unturned.

Now every mortal has pain and sweat is constant, but if there is anything dearer than being alive, it's dark to me. We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth-- we call it life. We know no other. The underworld's a blank and all the rest just fantasy.

Who then will dare to say I'm weak or timid? No, they'll say I'm loyal as a friend, ruthless as a foe, so much like a hero destined for glory.

Who dares not speak his free thought is a slave.

Soon all of you immortals Will be as dead as we are! Come on then, what are you waiting for? Have you run out of thunderbolts?

ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred with out a head

I will storm the Gods and shake the Universe

The wisest men follow their own direction And listen to no prophet guiding them. None but the fools believe in oracles, Forsaking their own judgment.

Since I am wise, some people envy me, some think I'm idle, some the opposite, and some feel threatened. Yet I'm not all that wise.

Remember this! No amount of Bacchic reveling can corrupt an honest woman.

God helps him who strives hard.

Every man is like the company he wont to keep.

Better a humble heart, a lowly life. Untouched by greatness let me live - and live. Not too little, not too much: there safety lies.

He is life's liberating force. He is release of limbs and communion through dance. He is laughter, and music in flutes. He is repose from all cares -- he is sleep! When his blood bursts from the grape and flows across tables laid in his honor to fuse with our blood, he gently, gradually, wraps us in shadows of ivy-cool sleep.

For with slight efforts how should we obtain great results? It is foolish even to desire it.

Your grief is as great as your splendor was: some god is weighing the one out equal to the other.

Who can stop grief's avalanche once it starts to roll.

Come back! Even as a shadow, even as a dream.

Come, God -- Bromius, Bacchus, Dionysus -- burst into life, burst into being, be a mighty bull, a hundred-headed snake, a fire-breathing lion. Burst into smiling life, oh Bacchus!

ORESTES: Never shall I see you again. ELECTRA: Nor I see myself in your eyes. ORESTES: This, the last time I'll talk with you ever. ELECTRA: O my homeland, goodbye. Goodbye to you, women of home. ORESTES: Most loyal of sisters, do you leave now? ELECTRA: I leave with tears blurring all that I see.

There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you—may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself] act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours.

A bad beginning makes a bad ending.

Gods often contradict our fondest expectations. What we anticipate does not come to pass. What we don't expect some god finds a way to make it happen. So with this story

My hair is holy. I grow it long for the God.

The good and wise lead quite lives

Old loves are dropped when new ones come

Chance fights ever on the side of the prudent.

What other creatures are bred so exquisitely and purposefully for mistreatment as women are?

Tragedy is born of myth, not morality. Prometheus and Icarus are tragic heroes. Yet none of the myths in which they appear has anything to do with moral dilemmas. Nor have the greatest Greek tragedies. If Euripides is the most tragic of the Greek playwrights, it is not because he deals with moral conflicts but because he understood that reason cannot be the guide of life.

We must not think too much: people go mad if they think too much.

Isn’t it delightful to forget how old we are?

Knowledge is not wisdom: cleverness is not, not without awareness of our death, not without recalling just how brief our flare is. He who overreaches will, in his overreaching, lose what he possesses, betray what he has now. That which is beyond us, which is greater than the human, the unattainably great, is for the mad, or for those who listen to the mad, and then believe them.

Young man, two are the forces most precious to mankind. The first is Demeter, the Goddess. She is the Earth -- or any name you wish to call her -- and she sustains humanity with solid food. Next came Dionysus, the son of the virgin, bringing the counterpart to bread: wine and the blessings of life's flowing juices. His blood, the blood of the grape, lightens the burden of our mortal misery. Though himself a God, it is his blood we pour out to offer thanks to the Gods. And through him, we are blessed.

THOMASINA: ....the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue. Oh, Septimus! -- can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides -- thousands of poems -- Aristotle's own library!....How can we sleep for grief? SEPTIMUS: By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

Do you remember what we were speaking of earlier, of how bloody, terrible things are sometimes the most beautiful?” he said. “It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown back, throat to the stars, ‘more like deer than human being.’ To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.

Grief and rage--you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die. There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you--may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn't that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself] act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours.