“Alexander the Great found the philosopher looking attentively at a pile of human bones. Diogenes explained, ‘I am searching for the bones of your father but cannot distinguish them from those of a slave.’”

Chapters: 13. Honor and Disgrace
4. The Father of All Things

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“When people laughed at him because he walked backward beneath the portico, he said to them: ‘Aren't you ashamed, you who walk backward along the whole path of existence, and blame me for walking backward along the path of the promenade?’”

Chapters: 41. Distilled Life

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“a masterly storyteller, but a middling philosopher, an amateur in everything but war... Xenophon began, like Philip, with a vision of conquest; he ends, like Alexander, captivated by the people he thought to conquer.”

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“All in all, the philosophy of Heraclitus is among the major products of the Greek mind... he illuminates all life and conduct... the unity of opposites revived vigorously in Hegel, the idea of change came back into its own with Bergson, the conception of strife and struggle as determining all things reappears in Darwin, Spencer, and Nietzsche”

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“Christianity, itself a mystery religion of atonement and hope, of mystic union and release keeps the basic ideas and ritual of the Orphic cults alive and flourishing today.”

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“Civilization is always older than we think; and under whatever sod we tread are the bones of men and women who also worked and loved, wrote songs and made beautiful things, but whose names and very being have been lost in the careless flow of time.”

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“Demosthenes strikes us as a little less than great. He laid the secret of oratory in acting... We are amused by his histrionics, amazed by his self-esteem, confused by his digressions, and appalled by his ungracious scurrility. There is little wit in him, little philosophy. Only his patriotism redeems him, and the apparent sincerity of his despairing cry for freedom.”

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“Greatest of all dialogues, of course, is the Republic, being the fullest exposition of Plato's philosophy, and in its earlier parts a dramatic conflict of personalities and idea... Their form entitles them to as high a place in the annals of literature as their content has given them in the history of thought.”

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“It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.”

Chapters: 20. Unconventional Mind

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“Not that the form of the Iliad is perfect; the structure is loose, the narrative is sometimes contradictory or obscure, the conclusion does not conclude; nevertheless the perfection of the parts atones for the disorder of the whole, and with all its minor faults the story becomes one of the great dramas of literature, perhaps of history.”

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“Sophocles—a ‘classic’ artist clinging to a broken faith—fashioned the art with measured music and placid wisdom. This combination of philosophy with poetry, action, music, song and dance made Greek drama not only a new form in the history of literature, but one that achieved a grandeur never equaled again.”

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“The Copernicus and Darwin of his age”

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“The Locrians required any man who wished to propose a new law to speak with a rope around his neck, so that, if his motion failed, he might be hanged with a minimum of public inconvenience.”

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“The mythopoetic, theopoetic proess is natural, and goes on today as always; there is a birth rate as well as a death rate of the gods; deity is like energy, and its quantiy remains, through all vicissitudes of form, approximately unchanged from generation to generation.”

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“This god was identified by Xenophanes with the universe... all change in history, and all separateness in things, are superficial phenomena; beneath the flux and variety of forms is an unchanging unity, which is the innermost reality of God. From this starting point, Xenophanes's disciple, Parmenides, proceeded to that idealistic philosophy what was in turn to mold the thought of Plato and Platonists throughout antiquity, and of Europe even to our day.”

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“When some one reminded him that the people of Sinope had sentenced him to exile, he said, 'And I sentenced them to stay at home.'”

Chapters: 47. Effortless Success

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