Zeus Quotes (6 quotes)
I know that I am mortal by nature, and ephemeral; but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies I no longer touch earth with my feet: I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia, food of the gods.
— Ptolemy
Epigram. Almagest. In Owen Gingerich, The Eye of Heaven: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler (1993), 4.
Nothing is there beyond hope
Nothing that can be sworn impossible
Nothing wonderful, since Zeus,
Father of the Olympians
Made night from mid-day
Hiding the bright sunlight
And sore fear came upon men.
[Perhaps written having seen the eclipse of 6 Apr 648 BC.]
Nothing that can be sworn impossible
Nothing wonderful, since Zeus,
Father of the Olympians
Made night from mid-day
Hiding the bright sunlight
And sore fear came upon men.
[Perhaps written having seen the eclipse of 6 Apr 648 BC.]
Quoted in B S Shylaja, Eclipse (1999), 16.
Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor—but they have few followers now.
Childhood's End: a novel (reissue 1987), 15.
The dice of God are always loaded.
[A fragment from a lost play of Sophocles, “Ever the dice of Zeus fall well.”]
[A fragment from a lost play of Sophocles, “Ever the dice of Zeus fall well.”]
A colloquial translation, presumably ironic, from the original Greek phrase (preceding it), as given in 'Compensation', collected in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1903), 102. The more literal translation of the original Greek is discussed in the added Notes section by Joseph Slater in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: First Series, Essays (1979), 234. Fragment translation from Paul Shorey, 'The Influence of Classics on American Literature', The Chautauquan (1906), 43, 129.
The goddess of learning is fabled to have sprung full-grown from the brain of Zeus, but it is seldom that a scientific conception is born in its final form, or owns a single parent. More often it is the product of a series of minds, each in turn modifying the ideas of those that came before, and providing material for those that came after. The electron is no exception.
'Electronic Waves', Nobel Lecture (7 Jun 1938). Nobel Lectures: Physics 1922-1941 (1998), 397.
The Universe, that is the All, is made neither of gods nor of men, but ever has been and ever will be an eternal living Fire, kindling and extinguishing in destined measure, a game which Zeus plays with himself.
Translation as an epigraph in Ludwig Büchner, Force and Matter: Or, Principles of the Natural Order of the Universe (1891), 1. Various alternate translations can be found, including: “The unchanging order of all things was made neither by a god nor a man, but it has always been, is, and will be, the living fire, which is kindled arid extinguished in regular succession.” In K. O. Müller, History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (1840), Vol. 1, 245.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
