Favourite Quotations (Moderator: Frederique)

Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid

Started by spiros

If you don’t remember Death, Death reminds you to do so. And if you can’t cope with the facts the next best thing is to go away for a holiday.

Started by spiros

Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and dying as on a battlefield.

Started by spiros

It is difficult for people of advanced years to start remembering they must die. It is best to form the habit while young.

Started by spiros

Seduction is inevitable. No one living escapes it—not even the dead. For the dead are only dead when there are no longer any echoes from this world to seduce them, and no longer any rites challenging them to exist.

Started by spiros

If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practise which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.

Started by spiros

People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

Started by spiros

The Greek, on the other hand, is an adventurer: he is reckless and adaptable, he makes friends easily. The walls which you see in Greece, when they are not of Turkish or Venetian origin, go back to the Cyclopean age. Of my own experience I would say that there is no more direct, approachable, easy man to deal with than the Greek.

Started by spiros

The English in Greece—a sorry lot, by the way—seem to have a poor opinion of the Greek character. The English are torpid, unimaginative, lacking in resiliency. They seem to think that the Greeks should be eternally grateful to them because they have a powerful fleet. The Englishman in Greece is a farce and an eye-sore: he isn’t worth the dirt between a poor Greek’s toes.

Started by spiros

There are so many ways of walking about and the best, in my opinion, is the Greek way, because it is aimless, anarchic, thoroughly and discordantly human.

Started by spiros

There are many ways of being a man; mine is to express what is deepest in my heart.

Started by spiros

How indeed is it possible for one human being to be sorry for all the sadness that meets him on the face of the earth, for the pain that is endured not only by men, but by animals and plants, and perhaps by the stones?

Started by spiros

It is easy to sympathize at a distance, said an old gentleman with a beard. I value more the kind word that is spoken close to my ear.

Started by spiros

I'd far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.

Started by spiros

Sometimes I think too much fuss is made about marriage. Century after century of carnal embracement and we're still no nearer to understanding one another.

Started by spiros

Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate. Adventures do occur, but not punctually.

Started by spiros

By sacrificing good taste, this worship achieved what Christianity has shirked: the inclusion of merriment. All spirit as well as all matter must participate in salvation, and if practical jokes are banned, the circle is incomplete.

Started by spiros

It’s easy to be stoic when no one wants what you have to offer

Started by spiros