Best Hellenism Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“The world-view of the poets centred in their experience of human destiny itself and of the way in which it could be overcome through that spirit of heroism in the midst of tragedy which had grown to maturity in the hard struggles of a century filled with inward upheaval and threatened with constant danger from without.”

Pain Suffering Compassion Overcoming Tragedy Heroism Hellenism Mahayana

Book:The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers

Source: The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers

“Also I do not know who needs to fucking hear this. But the gods really can fucking manifest here. They choose to come here. They choose to change with the stories that are told about them. They choose to take the credit humans give them for things they aren't 100% of the time truly responsible for. They can perform miracles. They can shapeshift. They can take vessels. The fairy realm is a real fucking place outside the astral you can visit. These things are fucking real and have value and power and if you are on this path or stupid enough to disregard all that you are A, either going to get yourself killed or B, will never truly learn the secrets you’re meant to learn, rise as high as your meant to rise, or power yourself with what you can. If you are really so vein and stupid not to believe they are real or can do these types of things? How dare you call yourself a fucking witch.”

Mythology Witch Gods Occult Hellenism

Author:Acrians Locket

“Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied. It's not a coincidence that Omar Khayyam, rebuking and ridiculing the stone-faced Iranian mullahs of his time, pointed to the value of the grape as a mockery of their joyless and sterile regime. Visiting today's Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn't particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great brio and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human.”

Source: Hitch 22: A Memoir

“One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the goyim were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it's one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the Shoah or Endlösung or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for 'exile,' or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the 'proof,' so for a time the professional interpreters of god's will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate. I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind. (They are almost as repellent, in their combination of arrogance, masochism, and affected false modesty, as Edith Stein's 'offer' of her life to expiate the regrettable unbelief in Jesus of her former fellow Jews.) The sage Jews are those who have put religion behind them and become in so many societies the leaven of the secular and the atheist.”

Source: Hitch 22: A Memoir

“The failure of Hellenism has been, largely, a matter of organization. Rome never tried to impose any sort of worship upon the countries it conquered and civilized; in fact, quite the contrary, Rome was eclectic. All religions were given an equal opportunity and even Isis—after some resistance—was worshipped at Rome. As a result we have a hundred important gods and a dozen mysteries. Certain rites are—or were—supported by the state because they involved the genius of Rome. But no attempt was ever made to coordinate the worship of Zeus on the Capitol with, let us say, the Vestals who kept the sacred fire in the old forum. As time passed our rites became, and one must admit it bluntly, merely form, a reassuring reminder of the great age of the city, a token gesture to the old gods who were thought to have founded and guided Rome from a village by the Tiber to world empire. Yet from the beginning, there were always those who mocked. A senator of the old Republic once asked an auger how he was able to get through a ceremony of divination without laughing. I am not so light-minded, though I concede that many of our rites have lost their meaning over the centuries; witness those temples at Rome where certain verses learned by rote are chanted year in and year out, yet no one, including the priests, knows what they mean, for they are in the early language of the Etruscans, long since forgotten. As the religious forms of the state became more and more rigid and perfunctory, the people were drawn to the mystery cults, many of them Asiatic in origin. At Eleusis or in the various caves of Mithras, they were able to get a vision of what this life can be, as well as a foretaste of the one that follows. There are, then, three sorts of religious experiences. The ancient rites, which are essentially propitiatory. The mysteries, which purge the soul and allow us to glimpse eternity. And philosophy, which attempts to define not only the material world but to suggest practical ways to the good life, as well as attempting to synthesize (as Iamblichos does so beautifully) all true religion in a single comprehensive system.”

Philosophy Religion Paganism Julian Ecumenism 1962 Hellenism Formalism Eclecticism Mystery Religions 362

Book:JULIAN

Source: JULIAN

“The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness ; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience .”

Ideas Consciousness Conscience Governing Spontaneity Hellenism

Book:Arnold: 'Culture and Anarchy' and Other Writings

Source: Arnold: 'Culture and Anarchy' and Other Writings

“Over the years, I have become convinced that Hellenism as a culture represents not a static condition of uniform sublimity mysteriously achieved and maintained as an effect of some racial advantage. Rather it should be understood as an evolving process, governed by a dynamic of change, as both language and thought underwent transformational alteration caused by a transition from orality to literacy. The instrument of change is discerned to be the invention of the Greek alphabet, at a quite late stage in the history of developing cultures.”

“The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost ideas with Hebraism is conduct and obedience.Nothing can do away with this ineffaceable difference. The Greek quarrel with the body and its desires is, that they hinder right thinking; the Hebrew quarrel with them is, that they hinder right acting.”

Thinking Ideas Body Desire Can Do Differences Acting Obedience Greek Judaism Quarrels Hebrew Hinder Hellenism

Author:Matthew Arnold

“How can we prevent this telescoping of cultures and styles from ending up in kitsch eclecticism, a cool hellenism excluding all critical judgment?”

Culture Style Judgment Critical Kitsch Hellenism

Author:Nicolas Bourriaud

“Man is the measure of all things.”

Men Religion Atheism Awareness All Things Philosophical Greek Humanist Measurement Measuring Ancient Greek Greek Philosopher Relative Truth Western Philosophy Ancient Greek Philosophers Hellenism

Author:Protagoras

“It is against their own insoluble problem of being human that the dull and base in humanity are in revolt in anti-Semitism. Judaism, nevertheless, together with Hellenism and Christianity is an inalienable component of our Christian Western civilization, the eternal "call to Sinai" against which humanity again and again rebels.”