Mary Renault Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Miss Searle had always considered boredom an intellectual defeat.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Longing performs all things

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

To hate excellence is to hate the gods.

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

When we serve the great, they are our destiny.

By her shining and her power he knew her.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

death was the price of life.

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

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

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

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

Men would be as gods, if they had foreknowledge.

Each generation has its own dream of beauty. I have lived long enough to watch it change. Just then, he was what all sculptors were reaching after, and only the great achieved.

He stood between death and life as between night and morning, and thought with a soaring rapture, 'I am not afraid.

What is democracy? It is what it says, the rule of the people. It is as good as the people are, or as bad.

Is he weeping?" said the one with the softest heart.

It is not the bloodletting that calls down power. It is the consenting.

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

Alexander could transmit imagination as some other could transmit lust.

In grief more than in joy, man longs to know that the universe turns around him.