Mary Renault
Mary Renault
Mary Renault, born Eileen Mary Challans, was an English writer best known for her historical novels set in Ancient Greece. In addition to vivid fictional portrayals of Theseus, Socrates, Plato and Alexander the Great, she wrote a non-fiction biography of Alexander...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth4 September 1905
best buts english-novelist money
Money buts many things... The best of which is freedom.
hate excellence
To hate excellence is to hate the gods.
enemy weapons pretence
Never destroy without thought your enemy's pretences; they are usually your best weapon against him.
hatred excellence desire
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?
courage tyrants virtue
But courage without conduct is the virtue of a robber, or a tyrant.
believe audience ifs
You can make an audience see nearly anything, if you yourself believe in it.
beautiful fashion men
Each man in his life honors, and imitates as well as he can, that god to whose choir he belonged, while he is uncorrupted in his first incarnation here; and in the fashion he has thus learned, he bears himself to his beloved as well as to the rest. So, then, each chooses from among the beautiful a love conforming to his kind, and then, as if his chosen were his god, he sets him up and robes him for worship.
inspire youth madness
There is madness in youth, but sometimes a god inspires it.
kings heirs slave
I was a king and a king's heir and now I am a slave.
life
death was the price of life.
horse heart love-is
Love is a boaster at heart, who cannot hide the stolen horse without giving a glimpse of the bridle.
grief fate play
All tragedies deal with fated meetings; how else could there be a play? Fate deals its stroke; sorrow is purged, or turned to rejoicing; there is death, or triumph; there has been a meeting, and a change. No one will ever make a tragedy - and that is as well, for one could not bear it - whose grief is that the principals never met.
men voice secret
Tell a man what he may not sing and he is still half free; even all free, if he never wanted to sing it. But tell him what he must sing, take up his time with it so that his true voice cannot sound even in secret -- there, I have seen is slavery.
eye care tests
Power is the test. Some, once they have it, are content to buy the show of liking, and punish those who withhold it; then you have a despot. But some keep a true eye for how they seem to others, and care about it, which holds them back from much mischief.