Mary Renault Quotations

Go with your fate, but not beyond. Beyond leads to dark places.

How can people trust the harvest, unless they see it sown?

Miss Searle had always considered boredom an intellectual defeat.

You can make an audience see nearly anything, if you yourself believe in it.

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

It is bitter to lose a friend to evil before one loses him to death.

Money buys many things... The best of which is freedom.

Money buts many things... The best of which is freedom.

To hate excellence is to hate the gods.

Never destroy without thought your enemy's pretences; they are usually your best weapon against him.

What keeps the democracy alive at all but the hatred of excellence; the desire of the base to see no head higher than their own?

But courage without conduct is the virtue of a robber, or a tyrant.

When we serve the great, they are our destiny.

Each man in his life honors, and imitates as well as he can, that god to whose choir he belonged, while he is uncorrupted in his first incarnation here; and in the fashion he has thus learned, he bears himself to his beloved as well as to the rest. So, then, each chooses from among the beautiful a love conforming to his kind, and then, as if his chosen were his god, he sets him up and robes him for worship.

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

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

death was the price of life.

Love is a boaster at heart, who cannot hide the stolen horse without giving a glimpse of the bridle.

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.

By her shining and her power he knew her.

Tell a man what he may not sing and he is still half free; even all free, if he never wanted to sing it. But tell him what he must sing, take up his time with it so that his true voice cannot sound even in secret -- there, I have seen is slavery.

Power is the test. Some, once they have it, are content to buy the show of liking, and punish those who withhold it; then you have a despot. But some keep a true eye for how they seem to others, and care about it, which holds them back from much mischief.

There is nothing like despair to make one throw oneself upon the gods.

Half the world's troubles come from men not being trained to resent a fallacy as much as an insult.

It gives me no joy to be praised at the expense of a better artist, by someone who does not know the difference or who thinks me too vain to be aware of it myself.

An audience of twenty thousand, sitting on its hands, could not have produced such an echoing silence.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

In all men is evil sleeping; the good man is he who will not awaken it, in himself or in other men.

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

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

The perpetual stream of human nature is formed into ever-changing shallows, eddies, falls and pools by the land over which it passes. Perhaps the only real value of history lies in considering this endlessly varied play between the essence and the accidents.

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.

Longing performs all things

But it is not for the perfect vase or the polished gem to choose their owners.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

He sees himself in his lover as if in a mirror, not knowing whom he sees, And when they are together, he too is released from pain, and when apart, he longs as he himself is longed for; for reflected in his heart is love's image, which is love's answer. But he calls it, and believes it, not love but friendship...

Often beauty grows dull or common when speech breaks the mask ...

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.

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