Alexander The Great Quotes

“One must live as if it would be forever, and as if one might die each moment. Always both at once.”
― Mary Renault, The Persian Boy

“A tomb now suffices him for whom the world was not enough.

[Alexander's tombstone epitaph]”
― Alexander the Great

“A horse must be a bit mad to be a good cavalry mount, and its rider must be completely so.”
― Steven Pressfield, The Virtues of War

“Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer’s 'Odyssey' as if it were the sweet body of a woman.”
― Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy

“Childhood is bound like the Gordian knot with my memories of the Black Sea, and I still feel its waters welling up within me today. Sometimes these waters are leaden, as grey as the military ships that sail on their curved expanses, and sometimes they are blue as pigmented cobalt. Then would come dusk, when I would sit and watch the seabirds waver to shore, flitting from open waters to the quiet empty vastlands in darkening spaces behind me, the same birds Ovid once saw during his exile, perhaps; and the same waters the Argonauts crossed searching for the fleece of renewal.

And out in the distance, invisible, the towering heights of Caucasus, where once-bright memories of the fire-thief have transmuted into something weird and many-faceted, and beyond these, pitch-black Karabakh in dolorous Armenia.”
― Paul Christensen, The Heretic Emperor

“They say Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. Though I have never led an army, I am a wanderer. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer’s 'Odyssey' as if it were the sweet body of a woman.”
― Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy

“He stood between death and life as between night and morning, and thought with a soaring rapture, 'I am not afraid.”
― Mary Renault, Fire from Heaven

“The mightiest kings have had their minions; Great Alexander loved Hephaestion, The conquering Hercules for Hylas wept; And for Patroclus, stern Achilles drooped. And not kings only, but the wisest men: The Roman Tully loved Octavius, Grave Socrates, wild Alcibiades.”
― Christopher Marlowe, Edward II

“Alexander the Great slept with
'The Iliad' beneath his pillow.
Though I’ve never led an army,
I am a wanderer. I cradle
'The Odyssey' nights while the
moon is waning, as if it were
the sweet body of a woman.”
― Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy

“As to the ancient historians, from Herodotus to Tacitus, we credit them as far as they relate things probable and credible, and no further: for if we do, we must believe the two miracles which Tacitus relates were performed by Vespasian, that of curing a lame man, and a blind man, in just the same manner as the same things are told of Jesus Christ by his historians. We must also believe the miracles cited by Josephus, that of the sea of Pamphilia opening to let Alexander and his army pass, as is related of the Red Sea in Exodus. These miracles are quite as well authenticated as the Bible miracles, and yet we do not believe them; consequently the degree of evidence necessary to establish our belief of things naturally incredible, whether in the Bible or elsewhere, is far greater than that which obtains our belief to natural and probable things.”
― Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

“In my opinion, at least, the splendid achievements of Alexander are the clearest possible proof that neither strength of body, nor noble blood, nor success in war even greater than Alexander's own... that none of these things, I say, can make a man happy, unless he can win one more victory in addition to those the world thinks so great---the victory over himself.”
― Arrian

“Alexander could transmit imagination as some other could transmit lust.”
― Mary Renault, Fire from Heaven

“We were not told how Alexander the Great was the last person in history to successfully 'pacify' what would become Afghanistan, over 2,000 years ago.”
― Jake Wood, Among You: The Extraordinary True Story of a Soldier Broken By War

“Why does Alexander the Great never tell us about the exact location of his tomb, Fermat about his Last Theorem, John Wilkes Booth about the Lincoln assassination conspiracy, Hermann Göring about the Reichstag fire? Why don’t Sophocles, Democritus, and Aristarchus dictate their lost books?”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“Non c'è conquista che abbia senso, non c'è guerra che valga la pena di combattere. Alla fine, l'unica terra che ci rimane è quella in cui verremo sepolti.”
― Valerio Massimo Manfredi

“The Golden Mean is for the weakling, it was not meant for the likes of Alexander the Great, Cyrus, Pharaohs, or Hitlers of the world”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity

“Why does Zeus send prodigies to earth? For the same reason he makes a comet streak across the sky. To show not what has been done, but what can be.”
― Steven Pressfield, The Virtues of War

“In Homers Ilias scheint Thetis jedenfalls keine Einwände gegen die Beziehung ihres Sohnes Achilles zu Patrokles gehabt zu haben. Und Königin Olympias von Makedonien (eine der mächtigsten Frauen der Antike, die angeblich ihren Mann ermorden ließ) hatte offenbar nichts dagegen, als ihr Sohn Alexander der Große seinen Geliebten Hephaestion zum Essen nach Hause brachte.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Whilst the food we eat nowadays has much to be grateful to the likes of Marco Polo, Alexander the Great and Vasco De Gama, who would have introduced the tangy flavours of South Africa’s Rainbow Cuisine on his way around the Cape of Good Hope to India, Arabic cuisine, with spices of cinnamon, cloves, saffron and ginger was a lot more enterprising than Western cooking at the time. The medley of colours that the spices offered the food had mystical meanings to the Arabs”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“About this time he had the sarcophagus and body of Alexander the Great brought forth from its shrine, and after gazing on it, showed his respect by placing upon it a golden crown and strewing it with flowers; and being then asked whether he wished to see the tomb of the Ptolemies as well, he replied, "My wish was to see a king, not corpses.”
― Suetonius, Augustus

“Men feared even the shade of Alexander, lest they encounter him again beneath the earth, for surely in that world, too, none would surpass him.”
― Steven Pressfield, The Virtues of War

“I have always been a soldier. I have known no other life. The calling of arms, I have followed from boyhood. I have never sought another.

I have known lovers, sired offspring, competed in games, and committed outrages when drunk. I have vanquished empires, yoked continents, been crowned as an immortal before gods and men. But always I have been a soldier.”
― Steven Pressfield, The Virtues of War

“Those who do not understand war believe it contention between armies, friend against foe. No. Rather friend and foe duel as one against an unseen antagonist, whose name is Fear, and seek, even entwined in death, to mount to that promontory whose ensign is honor.”
― Steven Pressfield, The Virtues of War

“Alexander and Caesar have had this in common: to be loved and wept by the conquered, and to perish by the hands of their own countrymen. Such men have no country; they belong to the world.”
― Jules Michelet, History of France

“ΑΝΙΚΗΤΩΝ ΑΠΤΕΤΑΙ ΟΥΔ' ΑΪΔΗΣ”
― Παρμενίωνας ο Μακεδόνας

“Where he (Alexander) came the inhabitants either accepted him with roses and wine, or fought and were beaten. He preferred the latter.”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods

“If he had wished, he could have annexed Denmark; and ended a thousand years of war and history. But Charles had no weaknesses; now and thereafter he was behaving out of a book. The first maxim of Alexanderism is never to stop; Charles continued.”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods

“Ockham stood so calmly through the outburst, watching hysteria drain the color from Carlyle's face. It made me think of Alexander, of his force, the human thunder of our Mediterranean sweeping through deserts, through empires, but India, calm, mighty India, fears nothing.”
― Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning

“Alexander the Great could not rest at home. He always wanted more, he always felt he deserved more. His father Phillip once told him, “My son, look for yourself another kingdom, Macedonia is too small for you.” The world was too small for Alexander.”
― Thomas Stark, God Is Mathematics: The Proofs of the Eternal Existence of Mathematics

“The living need the truth, before rumor pollutes it.”
― Mary Renault, Funeral Games