Thomas Cahill quotes - page 2

Human beings never know more than a part, as "through a glass darkly"; and all knowledge comes to us in pieces. (Thomas Cahill)
If we are to be saved, it will not be by Romans but by saints. View quote
Thomas Cahill
The high abbesses... had the power to heal, ...almost certainly heard confessions, probably ordained clergy, and may even have celebrated Mass. View quote
Thomas Cahill
The five-hundred-bushelers... were on average five, at most ten, times as rich as the thetes, the lowest grade of citizen. ...Today, the gap between, say, a municipal bus driver and a Fortune 500 CEO approaches infinity. View quote
Thomas Cahill
For a century and a half-from the middle of the fifth century to the end of the sixth-there had been... no formal communication between Rome and the Christians of Britain, nor had there been any between Rome and Ireland... View quote
Thomas Cahill
If there are no books. There is no civilization. View quote
Thomas Cahill
This paucity of actors on the stage reflects the liturgical roots of Greek theater, which continued to stick close to its religious origins. ... [A] machine, called the mēchanē, was a sort of crane that swung an actor playing a god over the parapet of the skēnē and out above the stage (thus the Latin phrase deus ex machina for a solution from nowhere, an unforeseen answer to prayers). View quote
Thomas Cahill
Ireland is unique in religious history for being the only land into which Christianity was introduced without bloodshed. View quote
Thomas Cahill
Beowulf grappling with the monstors was a type of Christ grappling with Satan. View quote
Thomas Cahill
Never interested in impressive edifices, Irish monks preferred to spend their time in study, prayer, farming-and, of course, copying. ...a little hut for each monk... a refectory and kitchen; a scriptorium and library; a smithy, a kiln, a mill, and a couple of barns; a modest church-and they were in business. View quote
Thomas Cahill
More than a billion people in our world today survive on less than $370 a year, while Americans, who constitute five percent of the world's population, purchase fifty percent of its cocaine. (Thomas Cahill)
Like fish who do not know they swim in water, we are seldom aware of the atmosphere of the times through which we move, how strange and singular they are. But when we approach another age, its alienness stands out before us, almost as if that were its most obvious quality... View quote
Thomas Cahill
For me, the historian's principal task should be to raise the dead to life. View quote
Thomas Cahill
Though the poems of Homer and his successors were recorded, there will be no Greek reading public till we reach the fifth century B.C. ...There was instead, a hearing public that formed responsive audiences at festivals and contests. View quote
Thomas Cahill
Dour, anxious Hesiod writes about the daily round of farming and the effects if the seasons on rural life but also speaks in his Works and Days about the value of festal competitions with "potter against potter, carpenter against carpenter... poet against poet." View quote
Thomas Cahill
To be without music was, for the ancient Greeks, to be already dead... Ancient Greece was a culture of song. View quote
Thomas Cahill
Solon was a sort of Athenian Franklin D. Roosevelt... He was an aristocratic reformer who understood instinctively that the aristocracy's monopoly on power had to be loosened and some power given to the lesser orders if social peace was to be shored up. View quote
Thomas Cahill
...the turns of the screw that Sophocles administered throughout the play [Oedipus Tyrannos] must have been received with sharp pain... because these cocky, princely, Oedipal Greeks were being made to feel acutely the limitations of human society-in which no political leader, no matter how gifted or courageous, can remain a savior forever, in which every man must come to know that he is no hero but essentially a flawed and luckless figure and that "the pains we inflict upon ourselves hurt most of all." View quote
Thomas Cahill
If we could save one word from Greek civilization, it would have to be aretē, excellence. The aristocrats gave themselves their name, the aristoi (the best). It is an open question whether anyone considered himself a member of the kakoi (the worst, the craven, the dumb shits). though this put-down prances everywhere in the surviving literature. ...that shame-the paralyzing fear of being numbered among the kakoi-is the hidden engine that ran Greek life. View quote
Thomas Cahill
The [Greek] myths were... attempting-at a deeper level-to feel the intangible and say the unsayable. View quote
Thomas Cahill
The philosophy of self-denial also taught the brotherhood of man, based on the Stoical belief that every human being without distinction possesses a spark of divinity that is in communion with God, who in the Stoical system is called Logos (Word, Reason, Meaning)-the word John's Gospel uses to describe Jesus. (Thomas Cahill)
As... Greek philosophy split into scores of yip-yapping schools, the Greeks became more and more puzzled. They had lost their way philosophically-and the Romans, who were just aping them, had nothing original to propose by way of saving them all from their dilemmas. View quote
Thomas Cahill
Thomas Cahill in conversation with Margaret Atwood at the New York Public Library, December 1, 2006. View quote
Thomas Cahill