The Greeks have given to the world the science of history; the Israelites gave to the world historical religion. In contrast to al...l their neighbors, both peoples knew what history is; this is no consequence of their mental giftedness, however, for there is another reason. Through mighty events both peoples experienced what history is, and by the investment of their lives they made history. The peculiar mental capacity of each of the two peoples comes to the fore in the way in which they experience history and express it. For both peoples history was a source of present and future knowledge. Thucydides wrote his history because what happened would, according to human ways, surely happen again in the future in the same or a similar way. This was conceived in a genuinely Greek way, for history is an eternal repetition; nothing new happens under the sun. Even in the stream of eternally changing events the Greeks sought the unalterable, the regular occurrence. Thus they employed the same method with regard to history as with regard to nature because history was a piece of nature. For this reason their mental life can justifiably be called non-historical. If God is to be found, he must be sought in the unalterable, in mental being, in the Ideas. God revealed himself to the Israelites in history and not in Ideas; he revealed himself when he acted and created. His being was not learned through propositions but known in actions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have looked warily at anthropologists ever since the day when I went to hear a great Greek scholar lecture on the Iliad, and lis...tened for an hour to talk about bull-roarers and leopard-societies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Dionysus, as we see him in art and poetry, is the projected expression of the ways and dreams of this primitive people, brooded ov...er and harmonised by the energetic Greek imagination; the religious imagination of the Greeks being, precisely, a unifying or identifying power, bringing together things naturally asunder, making, as it were, for the human body a soul of waters, for the human soul a body of flowers; welding into something like the identity of a human personality the whole range of man's experiences of a given object, or series of objects--all the hidden ordinances by which those facts and qualities hold of unseen forces, and have their roots in purely visionary places.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The myth of Demeter and Persephone, then, illustrates the power of the Greek religion as a religion of pure ideas--of conceptions,... which having no link on historical fact, yet, because they arose naturally out of the spirit of man, and embodied, in adequate symbols, his deepest thoughts concerning the conditions of his physical and spiritual life, maintained their hold through many changes, and are still not without a solemnising power even for the modern mind, which has once admitted them as recognised and habitual inhabitants; and, abiding thus for the elevation and purifying of our sentiments, long after the earlier and simpler races of their worshippers have passed away, they may be a pledge to us of the place in our culture, at once legitimate and possible, of the associations, the conceptions, the imagery, of Greek religious poetry in general, of the poetry of all religions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge; you did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were en...tering.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Woe unto you, lawyers! for ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in y...e hindered.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The gothic is singular in this; one seems easily at home in the renaissance; one is not too strange in the Byzantine; as for the R...oman, it is ourselves; and we could walk blindfolded through every chink and cranny of the Greek mind; all these styles seem modern when we come close to them; but the gothic gets away.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I ascend from darkness And depart on the winds of space for I know not where;... My watch is wound, a key is in my pocket, And the sky is darkened as I descend the stair.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »