Renault Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

The rightness of a thing isn't determined by the amount of courage it takes.

I saw death come for you, and I had no philosophy.

To hate excellence is to hate the gods.

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.

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.

It's not what one is, it's what one does with it.

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

He stood between death and life as between night and morning, and thought with a soaring rapture, 'I am not afraid.

Do not believe that others will die, not you.... 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.

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

In hatred is love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul.

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

It is better to learn war early from friends, than late from enemies

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.

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

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.

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

He kept telling me I was queer, and I didn't like it. The word, I mean. Shutting you away, somehow; roping you off with a lot of people you don't feel much in common with, half of whom hate the other half anyway, and just keep together so that they can lean up against each other for support.

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.

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

It is the mark of little men to like only what they know; one step beyond, and they feel the black cold of chaos.

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

(Alexander)'Sometimes I forget all this for months on end. Sometimes I think of it day and night. Sometimes I think, unless I find out the truth of it, I shall go mad.' (Hephaistion)'That's stupid. You've got me now. Do you think I'd let you go mad?

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

I wanted someone to follow, I wanted him to be brave. But he wants to be brave for me; and no one can do that.

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

WITHOUT LAUGHTER, WHAT MAN of sense could endure either politics or war?

Is he weeping?" said the one with the softest heart.

It is not the bloodletting that calls down power. It is the consenting.

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

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

Alexander could transmit imagination as some other could transmit lust.

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.

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.

Hephaistion had known for many ages that if a god should offer him one gift in all his lifetime, he would choose this. Joy hit him like a lightning-bolt.

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

In seven years, thought Laurie, every cell in one's body has been replaced, even our memories live in a new brain. That is not the face I saw, and these are not the eyes I saw with. Even our selves are not the same, but only a consequence of the selves we had then. Yet I was there and I am here; and this man, who is sometimes what I remember and sometimes a stranger I met at a party the other day, is also to himself the I who was there: his mind in its different skull has travelled back to a place his living feet never visited; and the pain he felt then he can feel again.

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.

At the stair-foot Hephaistion was waiting. He happened to be there, as he happened to have a ball handy if Alexander wanted a game, or water if he was thirsty; not by calculation, but in a constant awareness by which no smallest trifle was missed. Now, when he came down the stairs with a shut mouth and blue lines under his eyes, Hephaistion received some mute signal he understood, and fell into step beside him.

Men would be as gods, if they had foreknowledge.

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

Ray Bannister started to build the guillotine the day Jerry Renault returned to Monument.

Women’s actions have never been more than symbolic agitation; they have won only what men have been willing to concede to them; they have taken nothing; they have received.5 It is that they lack the concrete means to organize themselves into a unit that could posit itself in opposition. They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and unlike the proletariat, they have no solidarity of labor or interests; they even lack their own space that makes communities of American blacks, the Jews in ghettos, or the workers in Saint-Denis or Renault factories. They live dispersed among men, tied by homes, work, economic interests, and social conditions to certain men—fathers or husbands—more closely than to other women. As bourgeois women, they are in solidarity with bourgeois men and not with women proletarians; as white women, they are in solidarity with white men and not with black women.

For I had felt too much and reasoned too little, hearing what I was ready to hear, not what had been said. There

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

You cannot step twice into the same river, said Herakleitos. People in the past were not just like us; to pretend so is an evasion and a betrayal, turning our back on them so as to be easy among familiar things.

Nothing will change, Alexias. No, that is false; there is change whenever there is life, and already we are not the two who met in Taureas' palaestra. But what kind of fool would plant an apple-slip, to cut it down at the season when the fruit is setting? Flowers you can get every year, but only with time the tree that shades your doorway and grows into the house with each year's sun and rain.

The school discussed friendship often. It is, they learned, one of the things man can least afford to lack; necessary to the good life, and beautiful in itself. Between friends is no need of justice, for neither wrong nor inequality can exist... Friendship is perfect when virtuous men love the good in one another; for virtue gives more delight than beauty, and is untouched by time.

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

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

What a blessing to be born with such Sloaney arrogance. Perpetua could be the size of a Renault Espace and not give it a thought.

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.

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.

I was a king and a king's heir and now I am a slave.

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

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

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

Change is the sum of the universe, and what is of nature ought not to be feared. But one gives it hostages, and lays one's grief upon the gods. Sokrates is free, and would have taught me freedom. But I have yoked the immortal horse that draws the chariot with a horse of earth; and when the one falls, both are entangled in the traces.

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.

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.

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.

A young man sat down beside him on the divan and, without any kind of preliminary, said, ‘Is it a queer book?’ ‘No,’ said Laurie. ‘Oh,’ said the young man, on a note of utter deflation. He got up and went away.

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.

That there are fashions in admiration and denigration is inevitable; they should not however be followed at the expense of truth.

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

Speak for me, Nikeratos. Someone's soul is always listening." Someone's always is, I suppose, if one only knew. Plato never forgot it.

A starving man won't notice a dirty plate.

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

Each moment free from fear makes a man immortal. - Herakles

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.

...temptation, that in itself it is nothing but an opportunity for choice; so it is rather defeatist to feel very guilty about it, as though one were half ready to commit the sin.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Sometimes things are easier if there isn’t anyone to know how you’re feeling.

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.

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

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.

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.

the maxim of the famous Spartan nurses: never expose a small child to fear, let him enter confidently on boyhood.

Then an unjust democracy must be worse than an unjust oligarchy, mustn’t it?

Each moment free from fear makes a man immortal.

you’ll get into this morbid state when you think if you want something, then you shouldn’t have it.

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.

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.

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.

I doubt he’d ever in his life lain down with anyone for whom he had not felt some kind of fondness. He needed love as a palm tree needs water, all his life long: from armies, from cities, from conquered enemies, nothing was enough. It laid him open to false friends, as anyone will tell you. Well, for all that, no man is made a god when he is dead and can do no harm, without love. He needed love and never forgave its betrayal, which he had no understanding of. For he himself, if it was given him with a whole heart, never misused it, nor despised the giver. He took it gratefully, and felt bound by it.

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.

Allen Leech is Tom Branson: The car I drive is a 1920 Renault and it is an absolute nightmare with all the double declutching. The owner drives it first, then I get in and the gears start clunking. Once I heard a massive clunk and I looked back and a huge piece of metal had fallen out into the road - he had to go back and get it. He'd driven that car to France and back, so I blame the owner for losing half the gearbox, not my gear changing! It's a hand-crank start and you have to be careful how you do it because once it starts spinning you can lose your thumb.

Alexander offered him (Aristotle)a hand to mount the gangplank, and tried the effect of a smile. When the man returned it, it could be seen that smiling was what he would do best; he would not often be caught with his head back laughing. But he did look like a man who would answer questions.

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.

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.

After some years of muddled thinking on the subject, he suddenly saw quite clearly what it was he had been running away from; why he had refused Sandy's first invitation, and what the trouble had been with Charles. It was also the trouble, he perceived, with nine-tenths or the people here tonight. They were specialists. They had not merely accepted their limitations, as Laurie was ready to accept his, loyal to his humanity if not to his sex, and bringing an extra humility to the hard study of human experience. They had identified themselves with their limitations; they were making a career of them. They had turned from all other reality, and curled up in them snugly, as in a womb.

You wished for me, Athenians; I am here. Do not question me, do not hurt me; I am the wish sprung from your heart, and if you wound me your heart will bleed for it. Your love made me. Do not take it away; for without love I am a temple forsaken by its god, where dark Alastor will enter. It was you, Athenians, who conjured me, a daimon whose food is love. Feed me, then, and I will clothe you with glory, and show you to yourselves in the image of your desire. I am hungry: feed me. It is too late to repent.

Men are not born equal in themselves, so I think it beneath a man to postulate that they are. If I thought myself as good as Sokrates I should be a fool; and if, not really believing it, I asked you to make me happy by assuring me of it, you would rightly despise me. So why should I insult my fellow-citizens by treating them as fools and cowards? A man who thinks himself as good as everyone else will be at no pains to grow better. On the other hand, I might think myself as good as Sokrates, and even persuade other fools to agree with me; but under a democracy, Sokrates is there in the Agora to prove me wrong. I want a city where I can find my equals and respect my betters, whoever they are; and where no one can tell me to swallow a lie because it is expedient, or some other man's will.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Certainly, I thought, Dion means to have his way. But I suppose that's what makes a king.

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

Man's immortality is not to live for ever; for that wish is born of fear. Each moment free from fear makes a man immortal.

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

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.

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.

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 was what you wanted.

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

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

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!

There is a labyrinth,' he said, 'in the heart of every man; and to each comes the day when he must reach the center, and meet the Minotaur.

She had closed her eyes, but now she opened them. “Children and men want everything for nothing. Life will have death, and you will not change it.

The living need the truth, before rumor pollutes it.

Renault

I looked at him, tipping down the coarse wine like a man who expects to put up with worse. I felt I was looking my last at the lad I still remembered. I was right. When I saw him again, it was five years later, and not in Athens. He was tanned like the thong of a javelin, and as tough as the shaft, a soldier who looked to have been cradled in a shield; but the oddest change, I think, was to see in one always so mindful of convention that careless outlandishness you find in irregular troops of great renown; men who seem to say, "Take it or leave it, you who never went where we have been. We are the only judges of one another.

Continuing up Rennes. Dodging little Saabs and Renaults. Loving walking here. Sun alternately streaming. Obliterating physiognomies. No longer nouns. But movement. Disappearing. Now heavily raining. Sitting out anyway. Over drain smelling of beer. Metro. Sewers. Fetid breath of Paris. Two cold coffees. Watching shadows lengthening. On la Gaite opposite. Where Colette once performing. Having walked in old boots across city. Drawing mole above lip. Rice-powdering delicious arms. Paris a drug. P saying on phone. Yes Paris a drug. A woman. And I waking this a.m. Thinking there must be some way. Of staying. Now my love’s silhouette of rooftops eclipsing. Into night. Cold heinous breath. Blowing on privates. Through grille underneath.

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.

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.

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.

It's only since it's been made impossible that it's been made so damn easy. It's got like prohibition, with bums and crooks making fortunes out of hooch, everyone who might have had a palate losing it, nobody caring how you hold your liquor, you've been smart enough if you get it at all. You can't make good wine in a bathtub in the cellar, you need sun and rain and fresh air, you need pride in a job you can tell the world about. Only you can live without drink if you have to, but you can't live without love.

All tragedies deal with fated meetings; how else could there be a play? Fate deals its stroke; sorrow is purged, or turned to rejoicing; there is death, or triumph; there has been a meeting, and a change. No one will ever make a tragedy-and that is as well, for one could not bear it-whose grief is that the principals never met.

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.

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.

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.

Quietly, as night shuts down the uncertain prospect of the road ahead, the wheels sink to stillness in the dust of the halting-place, and the reins drop from the driver’s loosened hands. Staying each his hunger on what pasture the place affords them, neither the white horse nor the black reproaches his fellow for drawing their master out of the way. They are far, both of them, from home and lonely, and lengthened by their strife the way has been hard. Now their heads droop side by side till their long manes mingle, and when the voice of the charioteer falls silent they are reconciled for a night in sleep.

What have I done, Obie?" Obie flung his hand in the air, the gesture encompassing all the rotten things that had occur under Archie's command, at Archie's direction. The ruined kids, the capsized hopes. Renault last fall and poor Tubs Casper and all the others including even the faculty. Like Brother Eugene. "You know what you've done, Archie. I don't need to draw up a list-" "You blame me for everything, right, Obie? You and Carter and all the others. Archie Costello, the bad guy. The villain. Archie, the bastard. Trinity would be such a beautiful place without Archie Costello. Right, Obie? But it's not me, Obie, it's not me...." "Not you?" Obie cried, fury gathering in his throat, his chest, his guts. "What the hell do you mean, not you? This could have been a beautiful place to be, Archie. A beautiful time for all of us. Christ, who else, if not you?" "Do you really want to know who?" "Okay, who then?" Impatient with his crap, the old Archie crap. "It's you, Obie. You and Carter and Bunting and Leon and everybody. But especially you, Obie. Nobody forced you to do anything, buddy. Nobody made you join the Vigils. Nobody twisted your arm to make you secretary of the Vigils. Nobody pain you to keep a notebook with all that crap about the students, all their weaknesses, soft points. The notebook made your job easier, didn't it, Obie? And what was your job? Finding the victims. You found them, Obie. You found Renault and Tubs Casper and Gendreau-the first one, remember, when we were sophomores?-how you loved it all, didn't you Obie?" Archie flicked a finger against the metal of the car, and the ping was like a verbal exclamation mark. "Know what, Obie? You could have said no anytime, anytime at all. But you didn't...." Archie's voice was filled with contempt, and he pronounced Obie's name as if it were something to be flushed down a toilet. "Oh, I'm an easy scapegoat, Obie. For you and everybody else at Trinity. Always have been. But you had free choice, buddy. Just like Brother Andrew always says in Religion. Free choice, Obie, and you did the choosing....

Presently, he looked at the people standing round and said, "You have leave to go." They bowed out. When the lads behind him started to follow, he reached out and caught one by the arm, saying, "No, you stay, Hephaistion." The tall boy came back with a lightening of all his face, and stood close beside him. He said to me, "The others are the Companions of the Prince; but we two are just Hephaistion and Alexander." "So it was" I said, smiling at them, "in the tent of Achilles". He nodded; it was a thought he was used to.

As i was beginning to understand, this kind of love was foreign ground to him. I may add that he never did, as far as I know, accept a suitor.... Sometimes indeed I asked myself whether he lacked the capacity for loving men at all; but I liked him too well to offend him by such a question.

Don't talk so, Lysis. I'm sure you kept your head much better than I did." He smiled, and quoted a certain phrase, recalling a personal matter between us. Then he said, "Am I getting old, to find myself always thinking, 'Last year was better'?"-"Sometimes it seems to me, Lysis, that nothing has been the same since the Games."-"We think so, my dear, because that was our concern. If you asked that potter over there, or that old soldier, or Kallippides the actor, each would name his own Isthmia, I daresay... It has been a long war, Alexias. Twenty-four years now. Even Troy was only ten.

That,” I said, “is the business of the gods, who made us.” “Yes, but for what? We ought to be good for it, whatever it is. How can we live, until we know?” I gazed at him; such desperate words, yet he looked all lit from within. He saw I was paying attention; that was enough to draw him on.

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.

...maybe his soul remembered. as we know. the ashes of Achilles and Patroklos were mingled in one urn. not even a god could sift the one from the other. Achilles has come back with his fierceness and his pride, and with Patroklos’ feeling. each of them suffered for what he was; this boy will suffer for both.

Go in peace," I said to him; "bear no ill-will to me, for Necessity yields to no man: and do not complain of me to our mother, for her blood is on your head as well as mine. If the gods had not forbidden it, my brother, I would put you to sleep before I left you, for night comes on; this is an empty place, and the clouds look dark upon the mountains. But the blood of kindred is not to be washed away; and when a man has once felt the breath of the Honoured Ones upon his neck, he will not bid them across the threshold. So forgive me, and suffer what must be. The clouds are heavy; if the gods love you, before morning there will be snow.

Men are seldom helpless against their own evil wishes, and in their souls they know it. But common men love flattery not less than tyrants, if anyone will sell it to them. If they are told that the struggle for the good is an illusion, that no one need be ashamed to drop his shield and run, that the coward is the natural man, the hero is fable, many will be grateful. But will the city, or mankind, be better?’ No being a sophist, trained to bring out answers pat, I could only say, 'But it’s such marvelous theater.

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.

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.

(...) when you feel less superior it seems you feel more lonely.

Among the cheerful pieties, his voice said tartly, “Be less wasteful of such precious things, Alexander, till you are master of the lands they grow in.

Fate is our master," I thought. "Yesterday a king, and today a tumbler's man. I hope my father never hears of it.

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

He looked almost human, Laurie thought

As the saying is, only those the snake has bitten can tell each other how it feels

The pressure rose in him, working toward the raging rebellious grief of the man-child who seeks in sound and fury for the strength of a man.

only those the snake has bitten can tell each other how it feels.

The future no man knows; the past has been, now and forever.

To tell the truth, I was not sorry to pay Mother Dia some respect. She does not like men who rule; and in Crete I knew she was supreme.

When day was bright, we saw before us the high shores of Crete: huge wrinkled yellow cliffs, sheer-standing, the land hidden above them. It looked a cruel coast.

Fui felice di sfoggiare quel poco che sapevo; e poiché mi sentivo già a mio agio con lui, gli domandai perché mai un vecchio volesse frequentare la scuola. Non si risentì; rispose che per un vecchio non imparare ciò che avrebbe potuto renderlo migliore era assai più disonorevole che per i ragazzi, dato che aveva avuto tutto il tempo di comprenderne l’importanza”.

Encontrar a Fedro guiando a Sócrates casi al mismo sitio, quizá lo era, le había impresionado profundamente. El árbol de amplia copa, la verde ladera en que recostarse, el agua fría al pie; sólo faltaban las ofrendas votivas y el santuario. «Concededme ser hermoso por dentro ―había suplicado Sócrates― y haced que las cosas exteriores e interiores se reconcilien».

Your people! Six boys and seven girls! You who are worthy to rule a kingdom." "Not unless I am worthy to rule them. Few or many, it's all one, once one has put oneself in the god's hand.

THE SEAS ROUND CRETE are dark blue almost to blackness, wild, bare, and empty. None of us had been before on water where one saw no land. There indeed man is a dust-grain in the palm of the god.

Many of the girls were almost children. Only virgins could be bull-dancers; there was a rush of weddings before tribute-time. The Cretans always brought a priestess with them, to settle arguments.

He looked at me with his bright gray eyes, and said, “I feel the touch of fate. You have a strong life-thread, Theseus. Where it crosses other men’s it frays them. But that’s as the Spinners spin it.

Remorse, even the greatest, has the nature of a debt; if we could only clear the books, we feel that we should be free. But a deep compassion has the nature of love, which keeps no balance sheet; we are no longer our own.

Man born of woman cannot outrun 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.

I looked at the priest. He had turned his face to the moon, which glittered on his open eyes; his body was quiet as the olive tree, or as a snake upon a stone. He seemed like a man who knew earth magic, and would prophesy in the madness of the dance. And then I thought of the great Labyrinth, which had stood a thousand years; and how Minos had said the god’s voice called them no longer. “All things change,” I thought, “except the gods who live for ever.

He was lifted into a kind of exalted dream, part loyalty, part hero-worship, all romance. Half-remembered images moved in it, the tents of Troy, the columns of Athens, David waiting in an olive grove for the sound of Jonathan's bow.

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.

I felt well pleased with myself. I had thought I should have my work cut out with him. Once or twice, since the tussle in the marriage chamber, I had caught his eye on me. I thought my eloquence had won him over. A boy is youngest when he thinks himself a man.

With a cold barren weariness that quenched the dry glow of anger, he thought, What can you do about these people? The terrible thing is, there are such a lot of them. There are so many, they expect to meet each other wherever they go. Not wicked, he thought: that’s not the word, that’s sentimentality. These are just runts. Souls with congenitally short necks and receding brows. They don’t sin in the sight of heaven and feel despair: they only throw away lighted cigarettes on Exmoor, and go on holiday leaving the cat to starve, and drive on after accidents without stopping. A wicked man nowadays can set millions of them in motion, and when he’s gone howling mad from looking at his own face, they’ll be marching still with their mouths open and their hands hanging by their knees, on and on and on. …

It is a strange thing to recall; but as I fell asleep, I was wondering how it might feel to be courted for one's beauty. I expect Pythagoras would have told me that in some past life, as youth or woman, I had been cruel to my lovers, and had chosen to make amends. In my time I have talked with many philosophers, who have expounded to me the ways of the gods with men. Out of them all, Pythagoras' belief seems to me the most just, supposing it is true. But then, if it is, and all these things befall us, unless we have the Sight we shall never know.

Oh, yes. I thought the god had more left for me to do; but one must be ready.” He touched my hand; his thanks had been wordless, but none the worse for that. “One must live as if it would be forever, and as if one might die each moment. Always both at once.” I answered, “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.” “One thing,” he said, “I’ve taken to heart from this. The water in the plains is poison. Do as I mean to do, and stick to wine.

I wondered what service a horse god wanted, and pictured myself combing his forelock, or putting ambrosia before him in golden bowls. But he was also Poseidon Bluehair, who raises storms; and the great black Earth Bull whom, as I had heard, the Cretans fed with youths and girls.

I had never before singled out Apollo for worship. But of course I had always prayed to him before stringing a lyre or a bow; and when I went shooting, I was never mean with his share. He had given me good bags time and again. Though he is very deep, and knows all mysteries, even those of the women, he is a Hellene and a gentleman. Keeping that in mind, it is easier than it seems not to offend him. He does not like tears intruded on his presence, any more than the sun likes rain. Yet he understands grief: bring it to him in a song, and he will take it away.

I said to him, “Who was that man in the ox-car?” He looked about him, hiding it, in the way of the Palace people; then he said. “You were foolish. That was the King’s son, Asterion.” I laughed and said, “A starry name for an earthy thing.” He answered, “It is not for you to use it. The style of the heir is Minotauros.

And to this very day, though we live in the Isle of Pelops and build walls, planting olives and barley, still for the theft of cattle there is always blood. But the horse is more. With horses we took these lands from the Shore People who were here before us. The horse will be the victor’s sign, as long as our blood remembers.

With new friendships had come visits to the philosophers and teachers of rhetoric; and, presently, the chance to learn from experts the art of war. He had longed for home and had returned with gladness; but by then he had been received into the mystery of Hellas, forever her initiate. Athens was her altar, almost her self. All he asked of Athens was to restore her glories; her present leaders seemed to him like the Phokians at Delphi, unworthy men who had seized a holy shrine. Deep in his mind moved a knowledge that for Athenians freedom and glory went together; but he was like a man in love, who thinks the strongest trait of the loved one’s nature will be easily changed, as soon as they are married.

There was muttering, and I said, “What curse is this?” Bias said, “The Queen put the cold curse on any man who let you pass.” “I don’t know the cold curse,” I said to them. “Tell it me.” I thought I should feel better knowing what it was, than not knowing. They took it for boldness. Bias said, “Cold loins and a cold hearth, cold in battle, and a cold death.

Meantime Lukos had been talking to the man with the cat, whom I now heard saying, “Yes, yes, no doubt; but does it signify much? These mainland kings breed like conies; I daresay he has fifty.” Lukos said, “But this one is legitimate. More than that, the heir … Certainly I am sure; you should have heard the scene. And what is more, he came of his own desire. An offering to Poseidon, so I understand.

We were making for an island, to lie up for the night, a lovely spot, with high mountains inland, whose slopes were clothed with vines and flowering fruit trees. From one tall peak, that had a flattened tip, a thin smoke was rising. I asked Menesthes if he knew where we were. He said, “It is Kalliste, the fairest of the Cyclades. That mountain is sacred to Hephaistos. You can see the smoke of his smithy, coming out of the top.

There was no wrestling; it seemed that had been settled already. But if you are supposing these were the funeral games of the dead King, you will be wrong; they were held in my honor. He was gone from sight and mind; I have grieved longer for a dog than they did for him. What is more, I was Kerkyon now. It is the style of Kings of Eleusis, like Pharaoh in Egypt and Minos in Crete. So the man had not even left a name behind him.

Must we forsake the love of excellence, then, till every citizen feels it alike? I did not fight, Anytos, to be crowned where I have not run; but for a City where I can know who my equals really are, and my betters, to do them honour; where a man’s daily life is his own business; and where no one will force a lie on me because it is expedient, or some other man’s will.” The words seemed, as I spoke, to be my own thoughts that I owed to no one, only to some memory in my soul; but when I looked beyond the Stadium, to where they were kindling the lights on the High City in the falling dark, I saw the lamps of Samos shine through a doorway, and the wine-cup standing on the table of scoured wood. 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. The world grew hollow, a place of shadows; yet none would hold out the cup of Lethe to let me drink.

He was a priest of Paian Apollo, and perhaps he had foreknowledge. The old religion is dear to the Daughters of Night; and whoever else is glad, they do not like to see it changed. Their hand fell on him, as it fell on me. In Thrace, where he was killed, they keep the old custom for all his trying. Even in Eleusis, it dies very hard and its shadows linger. At any summer’s end there, you will see the people of town and village gathered on the hill-slopes, sitting to watch the herdboys mime their old tales of the deaths of kings.

I said, “You did well by me, to put me in Poseidon’s keeping. He has never forsaken me. When I have called on him, he has always spoken.” He looked at me quickly, and said, “How?” I had never talked of it, and the words came slowly, but I said at last, “He speaks like the sea.” “Yes,” he said. “That is the Erechthid token. It came when I was begetting you.” I waited, but he did not tell me of the other times; so I said, “How are we called, then, at the end?” “He calls us to a high place,” my father said, “and we leap down to him. We go of ourselves.

They seemed people broke to wonders, as the chariot horse is broke to noise. They had not come to stare, but to glance idly and pass on. Women with parasols leaned together heads crimped and bound with gems; slim men half bare, with gilded belts and jewelled necklaces and flowers behind their ears, led spotted hounds as languid and proud as they. Even the laborers seemed to look at us over their shoulders, as if in passing at a common thing. I felt the pride drain out of me, like blood from a mortal wound. These were the people I had thought to amaze.

Between her breasts, entangled in her shining hair, I wept as if to purge away my soul in water. She put me to bed, and sang to me, and said when I was quiet, “Don’t grieve for the King Horse; he has gone to the Earth Mother, who made us all. She has a thousand thousand children, and knows each one of them. He was too good for anyone here to ride; but she will find him some great hero, a child of the sun or the north wind, to be his friend and master; they will gallop all day, and never be tired. Tomorrow you shall take her a present for him, and I will tell her it comes from you.

So I came back to philosophy, but differently; feeling it in myself, and in those I met in talk, a fever of the blood. I had come to it as a boy from wonder at the visible world; to know the causes of things; and to feel the sinews of my mind, as one feels one’s muscles in the palaestra. But now we searched the nature of the universe, and our own souls, more like physicians in time of sickness. It was not that we were in love with the past. We were of an age to feel the present our own, and to suppose it would never outstrip us. In painting and sculpture and verse, the names we grew passionate over looked to us as big as those of Perikles’ day, and it still half surprises me when I find them unknown to my sons. But we seldom stood to enjoy good work, as one stands before a fine view or a flower, in simple gladness that it is. As we hailed each new artist we grew angry with the former ones, as with false guides we had caught out; we hastened, though we knew not where. To freedom, we said; the sculptors no longer proportioned their forms by the Golden Number of Pythagoras, as Pheidias and Polykleitos did; and art would do great things, we said, now it had cast off its chains.

Why, Anytos, I have fought as a democrat, here and in Samos, only because Sokrates taught me to think for myself. And Plato forsook the tyrants, though some were his kin, for Sokrates’ sake. He sets each man seeking the truth that is in him.” I could see him waiting for me to cease, to say what he had ready to say, exactly as if I had not spoken. I had felt easy with him, liking the way he treated every man as an equal; but it is strange to speak with someone one’s thoughts do not reach. Of a sudden it was as if a great desert surrounded me; I even felt the fear of Pan, driver of herds, as one does in lonely places.

[...] y así les ocurre a los seguidores de los demás dioses. Cada hombre se esfuerza por honrar e imitar en su vida al dios a cuyo coro pertenecía, mientras permanece incorrupto en su primera encarnación; y en la manera que ha aprendido se muestra ante su amado y ante los demás. Así, cada uno escoge de entre los hermosos un amor que corresponde a su índole; y entonces, como si su elegido fuera su dios, lo eleva y lo viste para la adoración [...] y esta ansia por descubrir la esencia de su propio dios en sí mismos es recompensada, pues están obligados a mirar al dios sin vacilación, y cuando la memoria lo retiene, su respiración los inspira y comparten sus atributos y su vida, en la medida en que un hombre puede participar de la divinidad. Y por estas bendiciones dan gracias al amado y lo aman todavía más [...] y llena el alma del amado [...] Por lo tanto está enamorado, pero no sabe de quién; no sabe qué le ha sucedido, no lo entiende. Se ve en su amante como en un espejo, sin saber a quién ve. Y cuando están juntos también él se ve liberado del dolor, y cuando están separados añora como él es añorado; pues reflejada en su corazón está la imagen del amor, que es la respuesta del amor. Pero lo llama y lo considera no amor sino amistad [...]

The words seemed, as I spoke, to be my own thoughts that I owed to no one, only to some memory in my soul; but when I looked beyond the Stadium, to where they were kindling the lights on the High City in the falling dark, I saw the lamps of Samos shine through a doorway, and the wine-cup standing on the table of scoured wood. 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. The world grew hollow, a place of shadows; yet none would hold out the cup of Lethe to let me drink. “No,” I thought, “I would not drink it. For here he lives in the thing we made: the boys down there, dancing for Zeus; people watching in freedom, their thoughts upon their faces; this silly old man speaking his mind, such as it is, with none to threaten him; and Sokrates saying among his friends, ‘We shall either find what we are seeking, or free ourselves from the persuasion that we know what we do not know.’” I looked down the benches, and saw him in conversation with the wine-seller, from whom Chairophon was buying a round. The flambeaux had been kindled ready for the race, showing me his old Silenos mask, and Plato and Phaedo laughing. I touched the ring on my finger, saying within me, “Sleep quietly, Lysis. All is well.

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 thought, giver of desolation or of joy, she who can cherish or cast away but abides no question. Two gulls flew by me, one following the other with wild cries, the pursued screaming as if in scorn. I was cold and weak, and grasped the bulwark to keep from falling. “Sea Mother,” I said, “Foam-Born Peleia of the Doves, this is your kingdom. Do not forsake us while we are in Crete. I have no offering now for you; but I swear, if I get back to Athens, you and your doves shall have a shrine upon the Citadel.

We live in Knossos Palace, the House of the Ax, and we never leave it. But from what he says, it is pretty big. It is old too—a thousand years, he says, as if anyone could count so many. He says Poseidon lives underneath it, deep in a cave, in the form of a great black bull. No one has ever seen him, he lives too far down; but when he shakes the earth he bellows. Lukos—that’s the Captain—has heard it himself and says no sound on earth is half so dreadful. And his deeds in Crete have been like his voice. Two or three times, in former ages, he has had the house down to the very ground. So he is a god they have to pay heed to; and that is how the bull-dance began.

This one too looked girlish at first glance. He was dressed for parade, bareheaded; a pretty black boy held his helmet and shield. His dark hair, rippling and sleek like a woman’s, fell to his waist behind, and his face was shaved so smooth it took time to see he was near thirty. His only garments were a thick rolled belt round his slim middle, and a loin-guard of gilded bronze. Round his neck was a deep collar of gold and crystal beads. All this I saw before he deigned to look at me; this and the way he stood; like a painting done on a wall of a princely victor, whom words do not touch, nor time and change, nor tears, nor anger; but he will stand so in his ease and pride, uncaring, till war or earthquake shakes down the wall.

I am the son of the myrtle grove, who the oracle foretold would change the custom. Don’t you think the Goddess saw me on the way? While my father passed through Troizen to take ship for Athens, my mother hung her girdle up for Mother Dia, and so I was conceived. Do you think the Gift-Bringer forgot? She has a thousand thousand children, but she knows each one of us. She knew I come from a king and from a king’s daughter of the Hellenes, who are ruled by men. She knew I am one to put my hand to what I find about me. Yet she called me to Eleusis, and gave the King into my hand. She knows best, who made us and calls us home. The mother changes to her sons as they grow to manhood. Everything has its term, except the gods who live for ever.

He was the vilest speaker I ever heard: vulgar, ignorant, not seeking to teach his hearers, but rather to stir in men as vulgar as himself the irrational excesses to which such people are prone; a whore among orators. Yet, when he denounced the men who were putting the City in fear, there was a kind of flame in him. He was a man so ignoble that if he remembered anything of the nature of excellence, excellence, I should think it was only so that he could taunt someone with the lack of it. He lived in spite and hate. And now he only invoked the good in the name of hatred; yet for a moment nobility glanced back at him, and made him brave. It was like seeing some mangy cur, who for years has lived on scraps and filth about the market, raising his hackles at a pack of wolves.

Picture to yourself all the kings’ palaces you ever saw, set side by side and piled on one another. That will be a little house, beside the House of the Ax. It was a palace within whose bounds you could have set a town. It crowned the ridge and clung to its downward slopes, terrace after terrace, tier after tier of painted columns, deep glowing red, tapering in toward the base, and ringed at head and foot with that dark brilliant blue the Cretans love. Behind them in the noonday shadow were porticoes and balconies gay with pictured walls, which glowed in the shade like beds of flowers. The tops of tall cypresses hardly showed above the roofs of the courts they grew in. Over the highest roof-edge, sharp-cut against the deep-blue Cretan sky, a mighty pair of horns reared toward heaven.

Thus it went on, each generation adding some flourish to the show; all men will seek honor, even victims doomed to death. It was thought nothing of, just to dodge the horns; you must make a graceful dance of it, and never look flurried or scared, but play the bull as if you loved him. And then, so Lukos says, came the golden age of the bull-dance. There was so much honor in it that the noblest and bravest of the Cretan youth did it for love, to win themselves a name and honor the god. That was the day of the first great bull-leapers; the day the songs are sung of. It is a good while back now, and the young lords and ladies have other pastimes. But sooner than lose the show, they brought in slaves to train. Even now, he says, a kind of glory sticks to a bull-dancer. They think the world of him, if he can keep alive.

You see, Spuddy, my dear,” said Ralph, speaking with great kindness and with care that Laurie shouldn’t be hurt, “you have a very sweet nature, really, and you let it ride you a bit sometimes. You say this boy has guts, but what you’re trying to do for him is to keep him like a mid-Victorian virgin in a world of illusion where he doesn’t know he’s alive. He mustn’t be told he’s a passenger when human decency’s fighting for survival, in case it upsets his religion. He mustn’t be told he’s a queer, in case he has to do a bit of hard thinking and make up his mind. He mustn’t know you’re in love with him, in case he feels he can’t go on having his cake and eating it. If he amounts to anything, he won’t really want to be let off being human. And if he does want it, then he isn’t worth all this, Spud. I’m sorry, but there it is.

Every day the Queen held audience. Seeing the Hall filled with women, I did not understand at first that she was doing all the kingdom’s business without me. But the women were heads of families; they came about land disputes, or taxes, or marriage portions. Fathers were nobody in Eleusis, and could not choose wives for their own sons, or leave them a name, let alone property. The men stood at the back till the women had been heard; and if she wanted a man’s advice, she sent for Xanthos. One night at bedtime, I asked her if there was nothing in Eleusis for the King to do. She smiled and said, “Oh, yes. Undo this necklace; it is caught in my hair.” I did not move at once, but looked at her. She said, “Why should the King sit at clerk’s business with ugly old men?” Then she let fall her belt and petticoat and said, coming nearer, “See, it is pulling here. It hurts me.” And there was no more talk that night.

Litter after litter was set down; lords and ladies were lifted out like precious jewels, and handed their lap dogs, their fans, or their parasols. Each seemed to have brought some toy or other; one young man had a monkey with its fur dyed blue. And yet, if you will believe it, out of all those men, the King’s daily companions fed at his board with his meat and wine, not one carried a sword. They all met and greeted, kissing cheeks or touching hands, talking together in the high clear voice of the Palace people. Their Greek was quite pure, but for the Cretan accent which sounds so mincing to a mainland ear. They have more words than we, for they talk continually of what they think and feel. But mostly one could understand them. The women called each other by such baby-names as we would use to children; and the men called them “darling” whether they were married to them or not; a thing which from their behavior nobody could guess. I saw one woman alone kissed by three men.

I looked. The Palace stood on an easy slope; yet it had no more walls than a common dwelling-house might have, to keep thieves out and slaves in. The roofs were even without battlements, crowned only by their insolent horns, a pair facing each way. Such was the power of Minos. His walls were on the waters, which his ships commanded. I stared in silence, shutting my face on my despair. I felt like a child come among warriors with a wooden spear. Also I felt up-country, rude and ignorant, which hurts a young man more. “All very fine,” I said. “But if war came to Crete, they could not hold it a day.” Lukos had heard me. But here on his home ground he was too easy for anger. He said with his careless smile, “The House of the Ax has stood here a thousand years, and never fell yet except when the Earth Bull shook it. It was old when you Hellenes were herdsmen still on the northern grasslands. I see you doubt me, but that is natural. We have learned from the Egyptians to reckon years and ages. You, I think, have a saying, ‘Time out of mind.’” He strolled on, before I had an answer.