A god implants in mortal guilt whenever he wants utterly to confound a house.
AeschylusRead
[Hermes addresses Prometheus :] To you, the clever and crafty, bitter beyond all bitterness, who has sinned against the gods in bestowing honors upon creatures of a day--to you, thief of fire, I speak.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the tension between human creativity and divine order, highlighting the consequences of defying higher powers.
In this quote, Hermes confronts Prometheus for his audacity in gifting fire to humanity, symbolizing knowledge and enlightenment. It emphasizes the bitter irony of human achievements that often come with divine disapproval, suggesting a profound conflict between human ambition and the limits imposed by the gods.
In practice
In a discussion about creativity and innovation, one could quote this to emphasize the risks of challenging convention.
A god implants in mortal guilt whenever he wants utterly to confound a house.
Neither a life of anarchy nor a life under a despot should you praise. To all that lies in the middle has a god given excellence.
In every tyrant's heart there springs in the end this poison, that he cannot trust a friend.
It is not the oath that makes us believe the man, but the man the oath.
In war, truth is the first casualty.
There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.
A bigot is a person who makes an idol of his commitments.
To the scientist, nature is always and merely a 'phenomenon,' not in the sense of being defective in reality, but in the sense of being a spectacle presented to his intelligent observation; whereas the events of history are never mere phenomena, never mere spectacles for contemplation, but things which the historian looks, not at, but through, to discern the thought within them.
Everything you see has its roots in the unseen world. The forms may change, yet the essence remains the same.
We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms.
A man who has no office to go, to I don't care who he is, is a trial of which you can have no conception.
I thought there's something to be said for honor in this world where there doesn't seem to be any honor left. I thought that maybe happiness wasn't really anything more than the knowledge of a life well spent, in spite of whatever immediate discomfort you had to undergo, and that if a life well spent meant compromises and conciliations and reconciliations, and suffering at the hands of the person you love, well then better that than live without honor.
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