Many are the wonders, none
is more wonderful than what is man.
This it is that crosses the sea
with the south winds storming and the waves swelling,
breaking around him in roaring surf.
He it is again who wears away
the Earth, oldest of gods, immortal, unwearied,
as the ploughs wind across her from year to year
when he works her with the breed that comes from horses.
The tribe of the lighthearted birds he snares
and takes prisoner the races of savage beasts
and the brood of the fish of the sea,
with the close-spun web of nets.
A cunning fellow is man. His contrivances
make him master of beasts of the field
and those that move in the mountains.
So he brings the horse with the shaggy neck
to bend underneath the yoke;
and also the untamed mountain bull·
and speech and winds wift thought
and the tempers that go with city living
he has taught himself, and how to avoid
the sharp frost, when lodging is cold
under the open sky
and pelting strokes of the rain.
He has a way against everything,
and he faces nothing that is to come
without contrivance.
Only against death
can he call on no means of escape;
but escape from hopeless diseases
he has found in the depths of his mind.
With some sort of cunning, inventive
beyond all expectation
he reaches sometimes evil
and sometimes good.
If he honors the laws of earth,
and the justice of the gods he has confirmed by oath,
high is his city; no city
has he with whom dwells his honor
prompted by recklessness.
He who is so, may he never
share my hearth!
may he never think my thoughts!

Sophocles, Antigone 332-75. (tr. Lattimore)

Everything becomes hateful when a man abandons his own nature and acts at variance with it.

ἅπαντα δυσχέρεια, τὴν αὑτοῦ φύσιν / ὅταν λιπών τις δρᾷ τὰ μὴ προσεικότα.

Sophocles, Philoctetes 902.

The following is about the ideal graduate of St. John’s College – gathered from old notes and I’m not certain of the source… It’s either by Stringfellow Barr or Christopher Nelson writing about Barr.

He will be able to think clearly and imaginatively, to read even difficult material with understanding and delight, to write well and to the purpose. For four years he will have consorted with great minds and shared their problems with growing understanding. He will be able to distinguish sharply between what he knows and what is merely his opinion. From his constant association with the first-rate, he will have acquired a distaste for the second-rate, the intellectually cheap and tawdry; but he will have learned to discover meaning in things that most people write off as vulgar. He will get genuine pleasure from using his mind on difficult problems. He is likely to be humorous; he will certainly not be literal-minded… .

He will not be a trained specialist in anything; but he will be in a better position to acquire such specialized training, whether in law, medicine, engineering, business or elsewhere, more quickly than it can be acquired by even the best American college graduates today. For he will know how to apply his mind to whatever he wishes to master… .

He will be eminently practical, not because he “took” practical courses in college, but because he will have acquired the rare intellectual capacity to distinguish means from end. He will have learned to locate the problem, resolve it into its parts, and find a relevant solution. He will, in short, be resourceful.

He will be concerned to exercise a responsible citizenship and he will be as much concerned with his political duties as with his political rights. He will cherish freedom, for himself and others … [together with] freedom from ignorance and passion and prejudice as well. For, in a quite genuine sense, he will himself be a free man.

He will know something of the world he graduates into, not in the sense merely of a current events contest; but because he will know the background and development of the political institutions and economic practices he confronts. He will even have means of understanding the movements in contemporary thought. And he will be familiar with the basic scientific concepts that underlie modern technology.

Not only will he be better prepared than his contemporaries to enter business or a professional school. Not only will he be better prepared to fulfill his obligations as a citizen. He should make a better friend, a better [spouse], a better [parent]; free men do. He will in short be better prepared to live; and when his hour comes, whether through illness or civil disaster or in an army trench, he will know better how to die; free men do.

[It is] Swinburne’s judgment that the Oresteia is probably ‘the greatest achievement of the human mind’.

Albin Lesky, A History of Greek Literature, (1963) 256.

[Do not] drive fear wholly out of the city. For who among mortals, if he fears nothing, is righteous?

καὶ μὴ τὸ δεινὸν πᾶν πόλεως ἔξω βαλεῖν. \ τίς γὰρ δεδοικὼς μηδὲν ἔνδικος βροτῶν;

Aeschylus, Eumenides 698-9.

The better one knows Greek, the more worthless he is.

ut quisque optime Graece sciret, ita esse nequissimum.

Cicero, De Oratore 2.265

But love your enemies and do good to them and lend money hoping for nothing in return … For He Himself is kind to the unthankful and the unjust.

Πλὴν ἀγαπᾶτε τοὺς ἐχθροὺς ὑμῶν καὶ ἀγαθοποιεῖτε καὶ δανίζετε μηδὲν ἀπελπίζοντες … ὅτι αὐτὸς χρηστός ἐστιν ἐπὶ τοὺς ἀχαρίστους καὶ πονηρούς.

Luke 6:35

The Persians teach their boys, beginning from five years to twenty, three things only: to hunt, to shoot, and to speak truth.

παιδεύουσι δὲ τοὺς παῖδας ἀπὸ πενταέτεος ἀρξάμενοι μέχρι εἰκοσαέτεος τρία μοῦνα, ἰχνεύειν καὶ τοξεύειν καὶ ἀληθίζεσθαι.

Herodotus 1.136

Guide your people with a rudder of justice; on an anvil of truth forge your tongue.

νώμα δικαίῳ / πηδαλίῳ στρατόν· αψευ- / δεῖ δὲ πρὸς ἄκμονι χάλχευε γλῶσσαν.

Pindar, Pythian 1.86-8 (tr. Henderson)

It is easier to give advice than to endure suffering.

ῥᾷον παραινεῖν ἤ παθόντα καρτερεῖν.

Euripides, Alcestis 1078