“There are few efforts more conducive to humility than that of the translator trying to communicate an incommunicable beauty. Yet, unless we do try, something unique and never surpassed will cease to exist except in the libraries of a few inquisitive book lovers.”

“It is by our power to suffer, above all, that we are of more value than the sparrows.”

“We hold there is no worse enemy to a state than he who keeps the law in his own hands.”

“He was there beside her; yet she was far away from him, alone with her outraged love and her ruined life.”

“The easy way has never in the long run commanded the allegiance of mankind.”

“I came to the Greeks early, and I found answers in them. Greece's great men let all their acts turn on the immortality of the soul. We don't really act as if we believed in the soul's immortality and that's why we are where we are today.”

“None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.”