Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Aesop. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Aesop Quotes And Sayings by 86 Authors including Ian S Varty,Dorien Kelly,Edmund Waller,Bill Vaughan,Franz Grillparzer for you to enjoy and share.
Go tell the Spartans, you who passeth by,
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie Poems by Simonides (556 BC - 468 BC)
The three things Aristotle couldn't understand: the work of the bees, the coming and going of the tide, and the mind of a woman. - Irish Triad
Poets that lasting marble seek Must come in Latin or in Greek.
The Wise (Minstrel or Sage,) out of their books are clay; But in their books, as from their graves they rise. Angels
that, side by side, upon our way, Walk with and warn us!
Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.
What primitive tastes the ancients must have had if their poets were inspired by those absurd, untidy clumps of mist, idiotically jostling one another about
Pythagoras, Locke, Socrates - but pages might be filled up, as vainly as before, with the sad usage of all sorts of sages, who in his life-time, each was deemed a bore! The loftiest minds outrun their tardy ages.
Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (one of the doer-Stoic authors), "fire feeds on obstacles.
Bathsheba! to whom none ever said scat- No worthier cat Ever sat on a mat, Or caught a rat. Requiescat!
[Pliny the Elder] used to say that no book was so bad but some good might be got out of it.
* Pindar, a Thebian Greek wrote (circa 350 B.C.E.) War is sweet to those who have no experience of it. But the experienced man trembles exceedingly in his heart at its approach.
Dante, or the hyena that writes poetry in tombs.
Ancient person, for whom I
All the flattering youth defy,
Long be it ere thou grow old,
Aching, shaking, crazy, cold;
But still continue as thou art,
Ancient person of my heart.
Socrates called himself a midwife of ideas. A great book is often such a midwife, delivering to full existence what has been coiled like an embryo in the dark, silent depths of the brain.
Eliakim, Eliakim the father of Azor,
I would join Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if only, each time it rolled back down, I were given a line of Aeschylus.
Ariadne in the labyrinth. The most alive of worlds, human beings with the tenderest flesh, are made of marble. I strew devastation as I pass. I wander dead-eyed through cities and petrified populations.
The Odyssey was written by Homer, or another Greek of the same name.
How is the soul profited by the strife of Hector, the arguments of Plato, the poems of Virgil, or the elegies of Ovid, who, with others like them, are now gnashing their teeth in the prison of the infernal Babylon, under the cruet tyranny of Pluto?
Don Quixote - I read that every year, as some do the Bible.
Tall as the sea-kings of old, he stood above all that were near; ancient of days he seemed and yet in the flower of manhood; and wisdom sat upon his brow, and strength and healing were in his hands, and a light was about him.
Achilleus started awake, staring, and drove his hands together, and spoke, and his words were sorrowful: Oh, wonder! Even in the house of Hades there is left something, a soul and an image, but there is no real heart of life in it.
The seven wise men of Greece, so famous for their wisdom all the world over, acquired all that fame, each of them, by a single sentence consisting of two or three words.
Roberto Calasso's survey of the renewed interest in myth demonstrates how decisive the gods' influence was on modern literature. Calasso is not only immensely learned; he is one of the most original thinkers and writers we have today.
Aelin of the wildfire.
Thing to act. Act with thought. -The Pythian Scrolls.
Through the Oracle's Mist
The great Cham of literature. (Samuel Johnson)
Ere Babylon was dust, The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child, Met his own image walking in the garden, That apparition, sole of men, he saw.
An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise.
Athenian men, I respect and love you,
but I shall obey the god rather than you ...
Upon that foreign soil he chose
Died he! For ever laid
Low, in the kindly shade,
He left behind no tearless grief,
No measured mourning, dull and brief,
These eyes are wet
With weeping yet,
Nor know I how to find relief."
Antigone
Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. It
Homer's Iliad was the cultural encyclopedia of pre-literate Greece, the didactic vehicle that provided men with guidance for the management of their spiritual, ethical, and social lives.
You ask a question, I said, to which a reply can only be given in a parable. Yes, Socrates; and that is a way of speaking to which you are not at all accustomed, I suppose.
I am wonderfully pleased when I meet with any passage in an old Greek or Latin author, that is not blown upon, and which I have never met with in any quotation.
Chorus: Zeus, who guided men to think who laid it down that wisdom comes alone through suffering. Still there drips in sleep against the heart grief of memory; against our pleasure we are temperate.
OT Old Testament
The richest author that ever grazed the common of literature.
The sea, as Euripides says in one of his plays about Iphigenia, washes away the stains and wounds of the world.
There is also a fable told by Phaedrus, about how Simonides was once a victim of shipwreck. As the other passengers scurried about the sinking ship trying to save their possessions, the poet stood idle. When questioned, he declared, mecum mea sunt cuncta: everything that is me is with me.
Wise men read books about history, Pliny. Strong men write them.
Life is short, but art is long. Sophocles is dead, but Oedipus lives on ... Each of us when we read a great piece of literature is a little more human than befor
The sands have run through, you have but moments, make peace with your gods.
'Aelfric of the Green Isle
Who can Perswade more Powerfully than Poets?
Though the modern world may know a million secrets, the ancient world knew one - and that was greater than the million; for the million secrets breed death, disaster, sorrow, selfishness, lust, and avarice, but the one secret confers life, light, and truth.
Caesar. Nor heaven nor earth have been at peace to-night. Thrice
Antiquity breached mortality with myths.
Narcissus is vocabulary. Hermes decorates
A cornice on the Third National Bank.
Who hath not known ill fortune, never knew himself, or his own virtue.
The truth now.He was disappointed in human beings.He had seen too many betrayals,too many pitiful weaknesses,too much greed for money and fame.The falseness between lovers,husbands and wifes,fathers,sons,mothers,daughters
Lastly, this threefold poetry flows from three great sources - The Bible, Homer, Shakespeare ... The Bible before the Iliad, the Iliad before Shakespeare.
Not only was Thebes built by the music of an Orpheus; but without the music of some inspired Orpheus was no city ever built, no work that man glories in ever done.
By Hercules! I prefer to err with Plato, whom I know how much you value, than to be right in the company of such men.
In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.
Agosins poetic language engages the reader in a mesmerizing journey of inward reflection and exile.
Sophocles said he drew men as they ought to be, and Euripides as they were.
That the grace of fable stirs the mind" ... and ... "that the perusal of excellent books is, as it were, to interview with the noblest men of past ages
I will quote Cioran (who is not yet a classic but will become one): "While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning a tune on the flute. 'What good will it do you,' they asked, 'to know this tune before you die?
The ancient Greeks have a knack of wrapping truths in myths.
The story of Ulysses and Agamemnon and Menelaus, of Jesus, of the Good Knight of Chaucer, lives in every one of us.
Argos the greatest tragedy in Greek legend was
Sappho survives, because we sing her songs; And Eschylus, because we read his plays!
Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage - and, foolish as I am, taught thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope.
Not by wisdom do they [poets] make what they compose, but by a gift of nature and an inspiration similar to that of the diviners and the oracles.
Friend, hast thou considered the "rugged, all-nourishing earth," as Sophocles well names her; how she feeds the sparrow on the housetop, much more her darling man?
I admire the courage and wisdom of Socrates in everything he did, said
and did not say.
Sing, O muse, of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.
Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order.
There was a lust of wandering in his feet that burned to set out for the ends of the earth. On! On! his heart seemed to cry. Evening would deepen above the sea, night fall upon the plains, dawn glimmer before the wanderer and show him strange fields and hills and faces. Where?
Wise Penelope! That's was Odysseus said to his wife when he got home. I don't think he ever told her he loved her. He probably knew the words would sound too small.
Men of Athens, I honor and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy ... Understand that I shall never alter my ways, not even if I have to die many times.
Man is the animal who weeps and laughs - and writes. If the first Prometheus brought fire from heaven in a fennel-stalk, the last will take it back - in a book.
The ancient Oracle said that I was the wisest of all the Greeks. It is because I alone, of all the Greeks, know that I know nothing.
Empedocles believed that there were two different forces at work in nature. He called them love and strife. Love binds things together, and strife separates them.
One reads thousands of books, of poets, modern and ancient, as one meets thousands of people. What remains of it all is hard to tell.
It was said of Euripides, that every verse was a precept; and it may be said of Shakespeare, that from his works may be collected a system of civil and economical prudence.
Illiada by Homer is one of the great stories in literature. And I thought its themes really resonated today, whether that was my projection or Homer's intentions. It didn't seem like we had come very far.
At an early age I sucked up the milk of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Terence, Anacreon, Plato and Euripides, diluted with that of Moses and the prophets.
Jane Austen Emma
Socrates ... brought human wisdom back down from heaven, where she was wasting her time, and restored her to man ... It is impossible to go back further and lower. He did a great favor to human nature by showing how much it can do by itself.
Wisdom is the adobe of a great mind.
Medea and the sacred wolf, J. Malachi thought. Somebody help me, I'm going to rehab in a Greek myth.
Only in fables survives what cannot survive in nature. Only myths and fables do not know the limits of possibility.' Three
The writer must be a transcendent, not immanent, deity.
Despairing Dido, queen of ancient Carthage, slain by her own hand as her magnificent lover Aeneas lifts anchor and sails away forever: this is one of the most haunting and permanent images of the classical world.
Modern writers are the moons of literature; they shine with reflected light, with light borrowed from the ancients.
Life is a rich literature.
In world mythology, there are countless examples of tragic characters whose greatest strength is also the source of their undoing. But the ancient Greeks and Romans also held the view that acceptance is the beginning of wisdom.
The wise men of old have sent most of their morality down the stream of time in the light skiff of apothegm or epigram; and the proverbs of nations, which embody the commonsense of nations, have the brisk concussion of the most sparkling wit.
Wisdom married to immortal verse.
There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.
No man ever wrote more eloquently and luminously [than Heraclitus].
All the ancient histories, as one of our wits say, are just fables that have been agreed upon
You searched through all my poets, From Sappho through to Auden, I saw the book fall from your hands, As you slowly died of boredom.
Those ancients who in poetry presented
the golden age, who sang its happy state,
perhaps, in their Parnassus, dreamt this place.
Here, mankind's root was innocent; and here
were every fruit and never-ending spring;
these streams
the nectar of which poets sing.
But where the ignorant are asleep, there the sage keeps awake
What fools these mortals be. (Acheron)
A very great Iliad ... concerns the creation of a nation.
Thoth, Hermes, the stylus,
the palette, the pen, the quill endure,
though our books are a floor
of smouldering ash under our feet.
Bitterness filled his heart, and he learned to love the feel of its magic.(Darius)
From Spiritual Directions of Diadochus of Photiki