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Jane Ellen Harrison QUOTES

Jane Ellen Harrison QUOTES

1 " Plutarch is by temperament, and perhaps also by the decadent time in which he lived, unable to see the good side of the religion of fear, unable to realize that in it was implicit a real truth, the consciousness that all is not well with the world, that there is such a thing as evil. Tinged with Orphism as he was, he took it by tis gentle side and never realized that it was this religion of fear, of consciousness of evil and sin and the need of purification, of which Orphism took hold and which it transformed to new issues. The cheerful religion of 'tendance' had in it no seed of spiritual development; by Plutarch's time, though he failed to see this, it had done its work for civilization. "

― Jane Ellen Harrison , Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion

2 " Nowadays it seems you learn only what is reasonable
and relevant. I went to Rome with a young
friend, educated on the latest lines, and who
had taken historical honours at Cambridge.
The first morning the pats of butter came
up stamped with the Twins. “ Good old
Romulus and Remus,” said I. “ Good old
who? ” said she. She had never heard of
the Twins and was much bored when I told
her the story; they had no place in “ con¬
stitutional history ”, and for her the old wolf
of the Capitol howled in vain: “ Great God!
I’d rather be ”! "

― Jane Ellen Harrison , Reminiscences of a Student's Life

3 " And then last, but oh, so utterly
first, came George Eliot. It was in the days
when her cult was at its height—thank heaven
I never left her shrine!—and we used to wait
outside Macmillan’s shop to seize the new
instalments of Daniel Deronda. She came
for a few minutes to my room, and I was
almost senseless with excitement. I had just
repapered my room with the newest thing in
dolorous Morris papers. Some one must have
called her attention to it, for I remember that
she said in her shy, impressive way, “Your
paper makes a beautiful background for your
face.” The ecstasy was too much, and I
knew no more. "

― Jane Ellen Harrison , Reminiscences of a Student's Life

4 " Then Ruskin came.
I showed him our small library. He looked
at it with disapproving eyes. “ Each book ”,
he said gravely, “ that a young girl touches
should be bound in white vellum.” I thought
with horror of the red moroccos and Spanish
leather that had been my choice. A few
weeks later the old humbug sent us his own
works bound in dark blue calf! "

― Jane Ellen Harrison , Reminiscences of a Student's Life

5 " Greek writers of the fifth century B.C. have a way of speaking of, an attitude towards, religion, as though it were wholly a thing of joyful confidence, a friendly fellowship with the gods, whose service is but a high festival for man. In Homer sacrifice is but, as it were, the signal for a banquet of abundant roast flesh and sweet wine; we hear nothing of fasting, of cleansing, and atonement. This we might perhaps explain as part of the general splendid unreality of the heroic saga, but sober historians of the fifth century B.C. express the same spirit. Thucydides is assuredly by nature no reveller, yet religion is to him in the main 'a rest from toil.' He makes Pericles say: 'Moreover we have provided for our spirit very many opportunities of recreation, by the celebration of games and sacrifices throughout the year. "

― Jane Ellen Harrison , Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion

6 " Life does not cease when you are old,
it only suffers a rich change. You go on
loving, only your love, instead of a burning,
fiery furnace, is the mellow glow of an
autumn sun. "

― Jane Ellen Harrison , Reminiscences of a Student's Life

7 " I like to live spaciously, but rather plainly, in large halls with great spaces and quiet libraries. I like to wake in the morning with the sense of a
great, silent garden round me. "

― Jane Ellen Harrison , Reminiscences of a Student's Life

8 " I mention these ritual dances, this ritual
drama, this bridge between art and life,
because it is things like these that I was all
my life blindly seeking. A thing has little
charm for me unless it has on it the patina
of age. Great things in literature, Greek
plays for example, I most enjoy when behind
their bright splendours I see moving darker
and older shapes. "

― Jane Ellen Harrison , Reminiscences of a Student's Life

9 " At his house I often met Henry James. I liked
to watch that ingenious spider weaving his
webs, but to me he had no appeal. "

― Jane Ellen Harrison , Reminiscences of a Student's Life

10 " A heroic society is almost a contradiction in terms. "

― Jane Ellen Harrison , Ancient Art And Ritual

11 " To be a heretic to-day is almost a human obligation. "

― Jane Ellen Harrison

12 " Language, after the purely emotional interjection, began with whole sentences, holophrases, utterances of a relation in which subject and object have not yet got their heads above water, but are still submerged in a situation. A holophrase utters a holopsychosis. Out of these holophrases emerge our familiar 'Parts of Speech' rightly so called for speech was before its partition. [...] Uneducated and impulsive people even to-day tend to show a certain holophrastic savagery. They not infrequently plunge into a statement of relations before they tell you who they are talking about. "

― Jane Ellen Harrison , Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos

13 " We seem to have come to a sort of impasse, the spirit of the dromenon is dead or dying, the spectators will not stay long to watch a doing doomed to monotony. "

― Jane Ellen Harrison , Ancient Art And Ritual

14 " When I first came to London I became a Life Member of the London Library. London life was
costly, but I felt that, if the worst came to the
worst, with a constant supply of books and a
small dole for tobacco, I could cheerfully
face the Workhouse. "

― Jane Ellen Harrison , Reminiscences of a Student's Life

15 " There was an odd rule throughout the College that no girl might buy a book. "

― Jane Ellen Harrison , Reminiscences of a Student's Life

16 " It is impiety to alter the myth of your local hero, it is impossible to recast the myth of your local dæmon—that is fixed forever—his conflict, his agon, his death, his pathos, his Resurrection and its heralding, his Epiphany. "

― Jane Ellen Harrison , Ancient Art And Ritual

17 " The dramas of Æschylus certainly, and perhaps also those of Sophocles and Euripides, were played not upon the stage, and not in the theatre, but, strange though it sounds to us, in the orchestra. "

― Jane Ellen Harrison , Ancient Art And Ritual

18 " When we say art is unpractical, we mean that art is cut loose from immediate action. "

― Jane Ellen Harrison , Ancient Art And Ritual

19 " We know from tradition that in Athens ritual became art, a dromenon became the drama, and we have seen that the shift is symbolized and expressed by the addition of the theatre, or spectator-place, to the orchestra, or dancing-place. "

― Jane Ellen Harrison , Ancient Art And Ritual

20 " An agon, or contest, or wrangling, there will probably be, because Summer contends with Winter, Life with Death, the New Year with the Old. A tragedy must be tragic, must have its pathos, because the Winter, the Old Year, must die. "

― Jane Ellen Harrison , Ancient Art And Ritual