When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.
Edith HamiltonRead
I came to the Greeks early, and I found answers in them. Greece's great men let all their acts turn on the immortality of the soul. We don't really act as if we believed in the soul's immortality and that's why we are where we are today.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of believing in the immortality of the soul as a guiding principle for actions.
Edith Hamilton reflects on the insights gained from ancient Greek philosophy, highlighting how the great thinkers of Greece based their lives and actions on the belief in the immortality of the soul. She suggests that modern society has strayed from this idea, leading to a disconnection from deeper moral and ethical motivations, which contributes to contemporary issues.
In practice
During a philosophy lecture about ancient beliefs.
When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.
The power of good is shown not by triumphantly conquering evil, but by continuing to resist evil while facing certain defeat.
Theories that go counter to the facts of human nature are foredoomed.
To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful ... was a mark of the Greek spirit.
Responsibility is the price every man must pay for freedom.
So far, we do not seem appalled at the prospect of exactly the same kind of education being applied to all the school children from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but there is an uneasiness in the air, a realization that the individual is growing less easy to find; an idea, perhaps, of what standardization might become when the units are not machines, but human beings.
It does not matter what men say in words, so long as their activities are controlled by settled instincts. The words may ultimately destroy the instincts; but until this has occurred, words do not count.
A good cause can become bad if we fight for it with means that are indiscriminately murderous. A bad cause can become good if enough people fight for it in a spirit of comradeship and self-sacrifice. In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad.
Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, the signet of its all-enslaving power, upon a shining ore, and called it gold: before whose image bow the vulgar great, the vainly rich, the miserable proud, the mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings, and with blind feelings reverence the power that grinds them to the dust of misery.
Many might go to Heaven with half the labor they go to hell.
It was our view of the worst that could befall our people if they were taken captive. So, what was fascinating to me was that somehow it appears the techniques that we have feared most in the world would be used on our people, we are using on people in our custody.
This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that these beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself.
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