Aristophanes Quotes

Youth ages, immaturity is outgrown, ignorance can be educated, and drunkenness sobered, but stupid lasts forever. ~ Aristophanes

According to Aristophanes in Plato's The Banquet, in the ancient world of legend there were three types of people.
In ancient times people weren't simply male or female, but one of three types : male/male, male/female or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangment and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everyone in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing half. ~ Haruki Murakami

Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever. ~ Aristophanes

Look at the orators in our republics; as long as they are poor, both state and people can only praise their uprightness; but once they are fattened on the public funds, they conceive a hatred for justice, plan intrigues against the people and attack the democracy. ~ Aristophanes

A demagogue must be neither an educated nor an honest man; he has to be an ignoramus and a rogue. ~ Aristophanes

Hunger knows no friend but its feeder. ~ Aristophanes

When men drink wine they are rich, they are busy, they push lawsuits, they are happy, they are friends. ~ Aristophanes

If a man owes me money, I never seem to forget. But if I do the owing, I somehow never remember. ~ Aristophanes

You cannot teach a crab to walk straight. ~ Aristophanes

A man can learn wisdom even from a foe ~ Aristophanes

It is the compelling power of great thoughts and ideas to engender phrases of equal size. ~ Aristophanes

Under every rock lurks a politician. ~ Aristophanes

There are dozens of ways of failing to make money. It is one thing to fail to make money because your single talent happens to be a flair amounting to genius for translating the plays of Aristophanes. It is quite another thing to fail to make money because you are black, or a child, or a woman. ~ Margaret Halsey

You should not decide until you have heard what both have to say. ~ Aristophanes

Shrines! Shrines! Surely you don't believe in the gods. What's your argument? Where's your proof? ~ Aristophanes

better not bring up a lion inside your city,
But if you must, then humour all his moods. ~ Aristophanes

Meton (astronomer in 5th century BC): With the straight ruler I set to work To make the circle four-cornered . ~ Aristophanes

A slave is but half a man. ~ Aristophanes

Politics, these days, is no occupation
for an educated man, a man of character.
Ignorance and total lousiness are better. ~ Aristophanes

Ye Children of Man! whose life is a span, Protracted with sorrow from day to day, Naked and featherless, feeble and querulous, Sickly, calamitous creatures of clay! ~ Aristophanes

But how should women perform so wise and glorious an achievement, we women who dwell in the retirement of the household, clad in diaphanous garments of yellow silk and long flowing gowns, decked out with flowers and shod with dainty little slippers? ~ Aristophanes

The swallows, fleeing before the hoopoes, shall have all flocked together in one place, and shall refrain them from all amorous commerce, then will be the end of all the ills of life; yea, and Zeus, which doth thunder in the skies, shall set above what was erst below ... ~ Aristophanes

A man should be able to stand up under any disaster for his country's good. ~ Aristophanes

The man credited with inventing the comma, colon, and full stop punctuation marks was a librarian of Alexandria called Aristophanes. ~ Aristophanes

If it is necessary for us to do anything [in view of peace], direct us and architect.

πρὸς τάδ' ἡμῖν, εἴ τι χρὴ δρᾶν, φράζε κἀρχιτεκτόνει. ~ Aristophanes

Woman is adept at getting money for herself and will not easily let herself be deceived; she understands deceit too well herself. ~ Aristophanes

What can you answer? Now be careful, don't arouse my spite, Or with my slipper I'll take you napping,
faces slapping
Left and right. ~ Aristophanes

Magistrate: What do you propose to do then, pray?

Lysistrata: You ask me that! Why, we propose to administer the treasury ourselves

Magistrate: You do?

Lysistrata: What is there in that a surprise to you? Do we not administer the budget of household expenses?

Magistrate: But that is not the same thing.

Lysistrata: How so – not the same thing?

Magistrate: It is the treasury supplies the expenses of the War.

Lysistrata: That's our first principle – no War! ~ Aristophanes

It is bad taste for a poet to be coarse and hairy. ~ Aristophanes

By words the mind is winged. ~ Aristophanes

To invoke solely the weaker arguments and yet triumph is an art worth more than a hundred thousand drachmae. ~ Aristophanes

Something is happening in Memphis; something is happening in our world. And you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of taking a kind of general and panoramic view of the whole of human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, "Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?" I would take my mental flight by Egypt and I would watch God's children in their magnificent trek from the dark dungeons of Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn't stop there.

I would move on by Greece and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon. And I would watch them around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would go on, even to the great heyday of the Roman Empire. And I would see developments around there, through various emperors and leaders. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would even come up to the day of the Renaissance, and get a quick picture of all that the Renaissance did for the cultural and aesthetic life of man. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would even go by the way that the man for whom I am named had his habitat. And I would watch Martin Luther as he tacked his ninety-five theses on the door at the church of Wittenberg. But I wouldn't stop th ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

If I get clear of my debts, I care not though men call me bold, glib of tongue, audacious, impudent, shameless, a fabricator of falsehoods, inventor of words, practised in lawsuits, a pettifogger, a rattle, a fox, a sharper, a knave, a dissembler, a slippery fellow, an imposter, a rogue that deserves the cat-o-nine-tails, a blackguard, a twister, a licker-up of hashes; they call all this when they meet me, if they please, I care not. ~ Aristophanes

In Plato's Symposium, Aristophanes accounts for this feeling of familiarity by claiming that the loved one was our long-lost 'other half to whose body our own had originally been joined. In the beginning, all human beings were hermaphrodites with double backs and flanks, four hands and four legs and two faces turned in opposite directions on the same head. These hermaphrodites were so powerful and their pride so overweening that Zeus was forced to cut them in two, into a male and female half – and from that day, every man and woman has yearned nostalgically but confusedly to rejoin the part from which he or she was severed. ~ Alain De Botton

Thou shouldst not decide until thou hast heard what both have to say. ~ Aristophanes

No man is really honest; none of us is above the influence of gain. ~ Aristophanes

Chorus of women: [ ... ] Oh! my good, gallant Lysistrata, and all my friends, be ever like a bundle of nettles; never let you anger slacken; the wind of fortune blown our way. ~ Aristophanes

I suppose I should have laughed even more uproariously at what happened next; as a newly anointed convert to the Old Comedy, I should have bounded to my feet, cried aloud, "Hallelujah!" and sung the praises of He Who Created Us, He Who Formed Us from the Mud, the One and Only Comic Almighty, OUR SOVEREIGN REDEEMER ARISTOPHANES, but for reasons all too profane (total mental paralysis) I could only gape at the sight of nothing less than the highly entertaining Aristophanic erection that Pipik had produced ... ~ Philip Roth

Prayers without wine are perfectly pointless. ~ Aristophanes

A man may learn wisdom even from a foe. ~ Aristophanes

The Ghost of Sir Felix Finch whines, "But it's been done a hundred times before!"
as if there could be anything not done a hundred thousand times between Aristophanes and Andrew Void-Webber! As if Art is the What, not the How! ~ David Mitchell

Comedy too can sometimes discern what is right. ~ Aristophanes

need a poet who can really write. Nowadays it seems like 'many are gone, and those that live are bad'.12 ~ Aristophanes

Let each man exercise the art he knows. ~ Aristophanes

An ancient tradition declares that every idiot blunder we pass into law will sooner or later redound to Athens' profit. ~ Aristophanes

Characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner. ~ Aristophanes

I must think of something foolproof for a fool. ~ Aristophanes

Ah! the Generals! they are numerous, but not good for much! ~ Aristophanes

It is difficult to be funny and great at the same time. Aristophanes and Moliere and Mark Twain must sit below Aristotle and Bossuet and Emerson. ~ Stephen Leacock

Comedy is allied to justice. ~ Aristophanes

You [demagogues] are like the fishers for eels; in still waters they catch nothing, but if they thoroughly stir up the slime, their fishing is good; in the same way it's only in troublous times that you line your pockets. ~ Aristophanes

Calonice: My dear Lysistrata, just what is this matter you've summoned us women to consider.What's up? Something big?
Lysistrata: Very big.
Calonice: (interested) Is it stout too?
Lysistrata: (smiling) Yes, indeed
both big and stout.
Calonice: What? And the women still haven't come?
Lysistrata: It's not what you suppose; they'd come soon enough for that. ~ Aristophanes

Poverty, the most fearful monster that ever drew breath. ~ Aristophanes

Does it seem that everything is extravagance in the world, or rather madness, when you watch the way things go? A crowd of rogues enjoy blessings they have won by sheer injustice, while more honest folks are miserable and die of hunger. ~ Aristophanes

There is nothing that has caused me to meditate more on Plato's secrecy and sphinx-like nature, than the happily preserved petit fait that under the pillow of his death-bed there was found no 'Bible,' nor anything Egyptian, Pythagorean, or Platonic - but a book of Aristophanes. How could even Plato have endured life - a Greek life which he repudiated - without an Aristophanes! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

These impossible women! How they do get around us! The poet was right: Can't live with them, or without them. ~ Aristophanes

What matters that I was born a woman, if I can cure your misfortunes? I pay my share of tolls and taxes, by giving men to the State. But you, you miserable greybeards, you contribute nothing to the public charges; on the contrary, you have wasted the treasure of our forefathers, as it was called, the treasure amassed in the days of the Persian Wars. You pay nothing at all in return; and into the bargain you endanger our lives and liberties by your mistakes. Have you one word to say for yourselves? ... Ah! don't irritate me, you there, or I'll lay my slipper across your jaws; and it's pretty heavy. ~ Aristophanes

An insult directed at the wicked is not to be censured; on the contrary, the honest man, if he has sense, can only applaud. ~ Aristophanes

The wise learn many things from their enemies. ~ Aristophanes

I left them to it, the pointing of fingers on maps, the tracing of mountain villages, the tracks and contours on maps of larger scale, and basked for the one evening allowed to me in the casual, happy atmosphere of the taverna where we dined. I enjoyed poking my finger in a pan and choosing my own piece of lamb. I liked the chatter and the laughter from neighbouring tables. The gay intensity of talk - none of which I could understand, naturally - reminded me of left-bank Paris. A man from one table would suddenly rise to his feet and stroll over to another, discussion would follow, argument at heat perhaps swiftly dissolving into laughter. This, I thought to myself, has been happening through the centuries under this same sky, in the warm air with a bite to it, the sap drink pungent as the sap running through the veins of these Greeks, witty and cynical as Aristophanes himself, in the shadow, unmoved, inviolate, of Athene's Parthenon. ("The Chamois") ~ Daphne Du Maurier

Wealth
the most excellent of all gods. ~ Aristophanes

First listen, my friend, and then you may shriek and bluster. ~ Aristophanes

Why, I'd like nothing better than to achieve some bold adventure, worthy of our trip. ~ Aristophanes

You cannot make a crab walk straight. ~ Aristophanes

A truce to idle phrases! ~ Aristophanes

There is no beast, no rush of fire, like woman so untamed. She calmly goes her way where even panthers would be shamed. ~ Aristophanes

It is right that the good should be happy, that the wicked and the impious on the other hand, should be miserable; that is a truth, I believe, which no one will gainsay. ~ Aristophanes

Lysistrata: To seize the treasury; no more money, no more war. ~ Aristophanes

Do not take a blind guide. ~ Aristophanes

One's country is wherever one does well. ~ Aristophanes

Aristophanes says we were all four-legged creatures to start, some the same sex, but most half man and half woman. Zeus was afraid us humans would get too powerful so he sliced us right down the middle, and everybody spends their life looking for the matching piece. ~ Scott Turow

Open your mouth and shut your eyes and see what Zeus will send you. ~ Aristophanes

There is no honest man! not one, that can resist the attraction of gold! ~ Aristophanes

A prudent person after all can pick something
Even from an enemy. ~ Aristophanes

You will never make the crab walk straight. ~ Aristophanes

Few footprints of the great remain in the sand before the ever-flowing tide. Long ago it washed out Homer's. Curiosity follows him in vain; Greece and Asia perplex us with a rival Stratford-upon-Avon. The rank of Aristophanes is only conjectured from his gift to two poor players in Athens. The age made no sign when Shakespeare, its noblest son, passed away. ~ Robert Aris Willmott

The boundaries between us had been breached for good, we gave a new meaning t the notion that man and wife were one flesh. You could track back this kind of alchemy in books: '...intimately to mix and melt and to be melted together with his beloved, so that one should be made out of two.' This is Shelley translating Plato, who was putting words into the mouth of Aristophanes, who's the only defender of heterosexual sex in the Symposium, although he makes it sound perverse. ~ Lorna Sage

I love him, oh! I love him; but he won't let himself be loved. ~ Aristophanes

Do you dare to accuse wine of clouding the reason? Quote me more marvelous effects than those of wine. Look! when a man drinks, he is rich, everything he touches succeeds, he gains lawsuits, is happy and helps his friends. Come, bring hither quick a flagon of wine, that I may soak my brain and get an ingenious idea. ~ Aristophanes

But Aristophanes warned that this dream of completion through love is impossible. We are too broken as a species to ever entirely mend through simple union. The original cleaved halves of the severed eight-limbed humans were far too scattered for any of us to ever find our missing halves again. Sexual union can make a person feel completed and sated for a while (Aristophanes surmised that Zeus had given humans the gift of orgasm out of pity, specifically so that we could feel temporarily melded again, and would not die of depression and despair), but eventually, one way or another, we will all be left alone with ourselves in the end. So the loneliness continues, which causes us to mate with the wrong people over and over again, seeking perfected union. We may even believe at times that we have found our other half, but it's more likely that all we've found is somebody else who is searching for his other half - somebody who is equally desperate to believe that he has found that completion is us. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Misogyny was born of fear of women. It spawned the ideology of male superiority. But this was ideology, not statement of fact; as such, it could not be confirmed, but was open to constant doubt. Male status was not immutable. Myths of matriarchies and Amazons societies showed female dominance. Three of the eleven extant comedies of Aristophanes show women in successful opposition to men. ... These were the nightmares of victors: that someday the vanquished would arise and treat their ex-masters as they themselves had been treated. ~ Sarah B. Ponderous

[Y]ou [man] are fool enough, it seems, to dare to war with [woman=] me, when for your faithful ally you might win me easily. ~ Aristophanes

That man is sharp who can say what he wants in a minimum of words. ~ Aristophanes

LYSISTRATA May gentle Love and the sweet Cyprian Queen shower seductive charms on our bosoms and all our person. If only we may stir so amorous a feeling among the men that they stand firm as sticks, we shall indeed deserve the name of peace-makers among the Greeks. ~ Aristophanes

Love is simply the name for the desire and the pursuit of the whole. ~ Aristophanes

Atheism or similar charges was not unusual among intellectuals, nor condemned by the masses. The prize-winning plays of Aristophanes were not merely atheist, but made fun of the gods and their prophets and oracles. ~ Benjamin Jowett

Lewd to the least drop in the tiniest vein, Our sex is fitly food for Tragic Poets, Our whole life's but a pile of kisses and babies. But, hardy Spartan, if you join with me All may be righted yet. O help me, help me. ~ Aristophanes

Love is merely the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole. ~ Aristophanes

Because we're soul mates, just like Aristophanes described- one soul in two bodies. You're my missing half. You're my bashert. ~ Sylvain Reynard

The trickiest thing is the nature of man, apparent in everything. ~ Aristophanes

Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe and Lao-Tzu, Einstein, Morobuto, Buddy Holly, Aristophanes .. and all of this .. all of this was for nothing unless we go to the stars. ~ J. Michael Straczynski

When the soldier returns from the wars, even though he has white hair, he very soon finds a young wife. But a woman has only one summer; if she does not make hay while the sun shines, no one will afterwards have anything to say to her, and she spends her days consulting oracles that never send her a husband. ~ Aristophanes

To win the people, always cook them some savoury that pleases them. ~ Aristophanes

This is what extremely grieves us, that a man who never fought Should contrive our fees to pilfer, on who for his native land Never to this day had oar, or lance, or blister in his hand. ~ Aristophanes

In The Knights Aristophanes gave us a picture of the final state of corruption in which the vulgar rabble ends when
just as in Tibet they worship the Dalai Lama's excrement
they contemplate their own scum in its representatives; and that, in a democracy, is a degree of corruption comparable to auctioning the crown in a monarchy. ~ Soren Kierkegaard

Your lost friends are not dead, but gone before, advanced a stage or two upon that road which you must travel in the steps they trod. ~ Aristophanes

An actor should refine public taste. ~ Aristophanes

Only by being suspended aloft, by dangling my mind in the heavens and mingling my rare thought with the ethereal air, could I ever achieve strict scientific accuracy in my survey of the vast empyrean. Had I pursued my inquiries from down there on the ground, my data would be worthless. The earth, you see, pulls down the delicate essence of thought to its own gross level. ~ Aristophanes

Wise people, even though all laws were abolished, would still lead the same life. ~ Aristophanes

I saw a cavalry captain buy vegetable soup on horseback. He carried the whole mess home in his helmet. ~ Aristophanes