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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“I am acting, then," continued Alexander, "only on the defensive. The gods, who always favor the right, have given me the victory. I am now monarch of a large part of Asia, and your sovereign king. If you will admit this, and come to me as my subject, I will restore to you your mother, your wife, and your child, without any ransom. And, at any rate, whatever you decide in respect to these proposals, if you wish to communicate with me on any subject hereafter, I shall pay no attention to what you send unless you address it to me as your king.”
― Jacob Abbott, Alexander the Great

“Even in times of the most entrenched rationalism, there lives in every man a little Alexander who never managed to conquer his Eudaimon Arabia.”
― Thorkild Hansen, Arabia Felix The Danish Expedition

“The legend is a fiction, but it illustrates the character of Alexander. Such legends are not related of Genghis Khan, or of Tamerlane by the people whom they conquered.”
― William Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man

“You have something in your eyes that men cannot steal. Guard your destiny, great king.”
― Omer Farid, The Incarnate

“The prince, unable to conceal his pain,
Gazed on the fair
Who caused his care,
And sigh’d and look’d, sigh'd and look’d,
Sigh’d and look’d, and sigh’d again:
At length with love and wine at once opprest
The vanquish'd victor sunk upon her breast.”
― John Dryden, Alexander's Feast Macflecknoe

“India is a highly civilized nation - a nation which developed a rich culture much earlier than any nation of Europe, and has never lost it.

India was the first and only nation that proved too powerful for Alexander the Great. It was India that stopped his advance and compelled him to turn back in his career of world conquest.

India gave to the world two out of six of its greatest Historic religions.

Of the six greatest Epic Poems of the world India produced two. India gave to mankind - Kalidasa.

India contributed enormously to the origin and advancement of Civilization by giving to the world its immensely important decimal system, which is the foundation of modern mathematics and much modern science.

India early created the beginning of nearly all of the sciences, some of which she carried forward to remarkable degrees of development, thus leading the world. India has produced great literature, great arts, great philosophical systems, great religions, and great men in every department of life - rulers, statesmen, financiers, scholars, poets, generals, colonizers, ship-builders, skilled artisans and craftsmen of every kind, agriculturists, industrial organizers and leaders in far-reaching trade and commerce by land and sea.

For 2,500 years India was pre-eminently the intellectual and spiritual teacher of Asia, which means of half the human race.”
― Jabez Thomas Sunderland

“Longing performs all things.”
― Mary Renault