Euripides Quotes

The care of God for us is a great thing, if a man believe it at heart: it plucks the burden of sorrow from him. ~ Euripides

The life of men is painful. ~ Euripides

Those who are held Wise among men and who search the reasons of things, are those who bring the most sorrow on themselves. ~ Euripides

The man that isn't jolly after drinking is just a drivelling idiot, to my thinking. ~ Euripides

Misery is the end of those with unbridled mouths. ~ Euripides

Old men's prayers for death are lying prayers, in which they abuse old age and long extent of life. But when death draws near, not one is willing to die, and age no longer is a burden to them. ~ Euripides

Whose sons would cling bold to the craggy heights of war ~ Euripides

Love must not touch the marrow of the soul. Our affections must be breakable chains that we can cast them off or tighten them ... ~ Euripides

O Zeus! why hast thou granted unto man clear signs to know the sham in gold, while on man's brow no brand is stamped whereby to gauge the villain's heart? ~ Euripides

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

Waste no tears over the griefs of yesterday. ~ Euripides

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. ~ Euripides

Luckier than one's neighbor, but still not happy. ~ Euripides

Pray the gods do not envy your happiness! ~ Euripides

And, they tell us, we at home
Live free from danger, they go out to battle: fools!
I'd rather stand three times in the front line than bear
One child. ~ Euripides

Wine enlivens the human soul. ~ Euripides

Yet censure strikes hard at women, while men, the true agents of trouble, hear no reproach. ~ Euripides

Of most dreadful suffering, I am the cause. ~ Euripides

Oh, trebly blest the placid lot of those whose hearth foundations are in pure love laid, where husband's breast with tempered ardor glows, and wife, oft mother, is in heart a maid! ~ Euripides

Let my heart be wise. It is the gods' best gift. ~ Euripides

It was my tongue that swore; my heart is unsworn. ~ Euripides

The God knows when to smile. ~ Euripides

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

All known great religions have had an exoteric aspect, that is, exterior, profane, for the masses of believers, and another esoteric, for a restricted select minority of initiates. So it was with the Egyptian and Greek cults. Those ignorant people who pompously speak to us about Aristotle, Socrates, Plato and the 'rational thought of the Greeks' ignore the fact that behind their ideas one finds the Eleusinian Mysteries of Delphi and elsewhere, in which these same philosophers, above all Plato, Aeschylus, Euripides took part, though they could not speak of it in public. The Orphic cults and mythology are the foundation of the philosophical thought of Ancient Greece. The word esoteric itself comes from the Greek work eisoteo and means 'to enter into' and 'to open a door' (towards the Gods: Theo, eiso-theo). ~ Miguel Serrano

Wine is an escape from grief,
a slip into sleep,
a cool forgetting of the hot pains of day.
What better cure for being human? ~ Euripides

If your life at night is good, you think you have everything. ~ Euripides

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

There is no harbor of peace from the changing waves of joy and despair. ~ Euripides

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

All of us judge by sight and not by knowledge. ~ Euripides

A just cause needs no interpreting. It carries its own case. But the unjust argument since it is sick, needs clever medicine. ~ Euripides

Light be the earth upon you, lightly rest. ~ Euripides

I would prefer as friend a good man ignorant than one more clever who is evil too. ~ Euripides

It is better that we live ever so Miserably than die in glory. ~ Euripides

Your very silence shows you agree. ~ Euripides

Terrible is the force of the waves of sea, terrible is the rush of the river and the blasts of hot fire, and terrible are a thousand other things; but none is such a terrible evil as woman. ~ Euripides

Not for the first time I find our lives are a shadow, and I am not afraid to say that people who think they have everything figured out and are masters of logic - they are responsible for the greatest folly. No human being is happy. Strike it rich and you are luckier than your neighbor - but happy, never. ~ Euripides

What mortal claims, by searching to the utmost limit, to have found out the nature of God, or of his opposite, or of that which comes between, seeing as he doth this world of man tossed to and fro by waves of contradiction and strange vicissitudes? ~ Euripides

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

New faces have more authority than accustomed ones. ~ Euripides

God hates violence. He has ordained that all men fairly possess their property, not seize it. ~ Euripides

Common sense is the best prophet. ~ Euripides

Dead men have no victory. ~ Euripides

My love for you
was greater than my wisdom. ~ Euripides

Mankind ... possesses two supreme blessings. First of these is the goddess Demeter, or Earth whichever name you choose to call her by. It was she who gave to man his nourishment of grain. But after her there came the son of Semele, who matched her present by inventing liquid wine as his gift to man. For filled with that good gift, suffering mankind forgets its grief; from it comes sleep; with it oblivion of the troubles of the day. There is no other medicine for misery. ~ Euripides

The same man cannot well be skilled in everything; each has his special excellence. ~ Euripides

It would have been better far for men To have got their children in some other way, and women Not to have existed. Then life would have been good. CHORUS ~ Euripides

The man who would prefer great wealth or strength more than love, more than friends, is diseased of soul. ~ Euripides

Helen's era was quite different from what most people think of when they hear the words ancient Greece. The Parthenon, the graceful statues, the works of Sophocles, Euripides, Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato, all came nearly a thousand years after Helen's time, during the classical era. In the Bronze Age, no one yet knew how to make brittle iron flexible enough to use for tools and weapons. Art, especially sculpture of the human form, was stiffer and more stylized. Few people could read or write. Instead of signing important papers, you would use a stone seal to leave an impression on clay tablets. The design on the seal would be as unique as a signature. There was a kind of writing in Bronze Age Greece, but it was mostly used to keep track of financial matters, such as royal tax records. Messages, poems, songs, and stories were not written down but were memorized and passed along by word of mouth. ~ Esther M. Friesner

You were a stranger to sorrow: therefore Fate has cursed you. ~ Euripides

He who believes needs no explanation. ~ Euripides

Bear calamities with meekness. ~ Euripides

Sweet is the remembrance of troubles when you are in safety. ~ Euripides

I suppose I'd have to say that my favourite author is Homer. After Homer's Ilaid, I'd name The Odyssey, and then I'd mention a number of plays of Euripides. ~ William Golding

But woe to him, who left to moan, Reviews the hours of brightness gone. ~ Euripides

Woman is woman's natural ally. ~ Euripides

A change is always nice. ~ Euripides

When a man's stomach is full it makes no difference whether he is rich or poor. ~ Euripides

I envy that man who passes through life safely, to the world and fame unknown. ~ Euripides

Of all things upon earth that bleed and grow, a herb most bruised is woman. ~ Euripides

Poetry is the Path on the Rainbow by which the soul climbs; it lays hold on the Friend of the Soul of Man. Such exalted states are held to be protective and curative. Medicine men sing for their patients, and, in times of war, wives gather around the Chief's woman and sing for the success of their warriors. "Calling on Zeus by the names of Victory" as Euripides puts it. ~ Carl Sandburg

If the Greeks had left no tragedies behind for us, the highest reach of their power would be unknown. The three poets who were able to sound the depths of human agony were able also to recognize and reveal it as tragedy. The mystery of evil, they said, curtains that of which "every man whose soul is not a clod hath visions." Pain could exalt and in tragedy for a moment men could have sight of a meaning beyond their grasp. "Yet had God not turned us in his hand and cast to earth our greatness," Euripides makes the old Trojan queen say in her extremity, "we would have passed away giving nothing to men. They would have found no theme for song in us nor made great poems from our sorrows." Why is the death of the ordinary man ~ Edith Hamilton

There is no worse evil than a bad woman; and nothing has ever been produced better than a good one. ~ Euripides

The fountains of sacred rivers flow upwards (i.e., everything is turned topsy turvy.) ~ Euripides

Wine is a terrible foe, hard to wrestle with. ~ Euripides

God gives each his due at the time allotted. ~ Euripides

Account no man happy till he dies. ~ Euripides

She needs a prophet's skill to sort out the man whose bed she shares. ~ Euripides

One moment, one short moment - and forever sorrow. ~ Euripides

What else goes wrong for a woman-except her marriage? ~ Euripides

There is safety in numbers. ~ Euripides

Try first thyself, and after call in God; For to the worker God himself lends aid. ~ Euripides

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! ~ Euripides

At an early age I sucked up the milk of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Terence, Anacreon, Plato and Euripides, diluted with that of Moses and the prophets. ~ Denis Diderot

Power and alliance for them, slavery and conquest over us. ~ Euripides

Worse than a true evil is it to bear the burden of faults that are not truly yours. ~ Euripides

Sound judgement, with discernment is the best of seers ~ Euripides

What we look for does not come to pass; God finds a way for what none foresaw. ~ Euripides

Too much zeal offends where indirection works. ~ Euripides

The unrighteous are never really fortunate. ~ Euripides

Forgive, son; men are men; they needs must err. ~ Euripides

It's folly that women measure their happiness with the pleasures of the bed, but they do. And when the pleasure cools or their man goes missing, all they once lived for turns dark and hateful. ~ Euripides

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

How sweet to remember the trouble that is past. ~ Euripides

God in heaven has dominion
Over so many events.
He can frustrate what seems inevitable,
And bring to pass the thing that you least expect. ~ Euripides

Nothing's as good as holding on to safety. ~ Euripides

Ill-gotten wealth is never stable. ~ Euripides

It is said that gifts persuade even the gods. ~ Euripides

Apollo, Apollo - but he is my lord. I will keep silence. He is wise forever, though his oracle spoke brutal words. We are bound to acquiesce. And you must do now as Fate and Zeus ordain. ~ Euripides

The sea, as Euripides says in one of his plays about Iphigenia, washes away the stains and wounds of the world. ~ Oscar Wilde

If one considers the characters in the plays of Shakespeare, in the poems of the Roman poet Ovid, in the Greek tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, and even in the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt, they can be recognized in our daily lives. Their actions were driven by the same motives as ours - ambition, love, pride, fear, anger, sympathy, and fun. ~ John H. Vanston

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

Time will cure you, but now is your grief still young. ~ Euripides

In my opinion, the unjust man whose tongue is full of glozing rhetoric, merits the heaviest punishment; vaunting that he can with his tongue gloze over injustice, he dares to act wickedly, yet he is not over-wise. ~ Euripides

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. ~ Euripides

A woman should always stand by a woman. ~ Euripides

This is courage in a man: to bear unflinchingly what heaven sends. ~ Euripides

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. ~ Euripides

I was thinking", he answered absently, "about Euripides; how, when he was an old man, he went and lived in a cave by the sea, and it was thought queer at the time. It seems that houses had become insupportable to him. I wonder whether it was because he had observed women so closely all his life. ~ Willa Cather

Rashness in a leader causes failure; the sailor of a ship is calm, wise at the proper time. Yes, and forethought: this too is bravery. ~ Euripides