The ancient writers tell of the peculiar "melting" glance of his eyes, or of the way in which, as Plutarch says, his body seemed to glow. They are evidently trying to describe something which they found it difficult to express. He also grew up, to the delight of Philip, serious-minded, untiring, passionately keen to succeed in any difficult task, and yet more keen the more difficult it was.
He was a great reader, too. He had been early caught by the glamour of the Tale of Troy, like most Greek boys; and he never grew weary of it. As far as the Oxus and the Indus, he carried with him his personal copy of the Iliad...
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A. R. Burn, in Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Empire (1948), p.11Alexander the Great
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The layman always means, when he says "reality" that he is speaking of something self-evidently known; whereas to me it seems the most important and exceedingly difficult task of our time is to work on the construction of a new idea of reality.
Wolfgang Pauli
Many of the Christian writers grew up in communities where the teaching of the Stoics was all-pervasive in cultured circles. Through this philosophy they became familiar with the concept that "reason pervades all things like a fiery essence, and that the soul of man is a spark from this universal reason." Philo, chief exponent of the Alexandrian school of Judaism, who lived during the period 30 B.C.-50 A.D., was another channel through which Greek ideas flowed into the early [Christian] church. Philo attempted to combine Hebrew religion and Greek philosophy. He gave great impetus to the tendency to allegorize the Old Testament and to derive from it highly speculative ideas which became universal among Christian theologians. Philo's interpretation of the Greek term "Logos" profoundly affected Christian thought.
Philo
"Thinking is easy," said Goethe, "acting is difficult, and to put one's thought into action is the most difficult thing in the world." And Tolstoy: "It is easier to produce ten volumes of philosophical writing than to put one principle into practice."
Andre Maurois
Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.
Gore Vidal
When I was asked to talk about the Obscurity of the Modern Poet I was delighted, for I have suffered from this obscurity all my life. But then I realized that I was being asked to talk not about the fact that people don’t read poetry, but about the fact that most of them wouldn’t understand it if they did: about the difficulty, not the neglect, of contemporary poetry. And yet it is not just modern poetry, but poetry, that is today obscure. Paradise Lost is what it was; but the ordinary reader no longer makes the mistake of trying to read it — instead he glances at it, weighs it in his hand, shudders, and suddenly, his eyes shining, puts it on his list of the ten dullest books he has ever read, along with Moby-Dick, War and Peace, Faust, and Boswell’s Life of Johnson. But I am doing this ordinary reader an injustice: it was not the Public, nodding over its lunch-pail, but the educated reader, the reader the universities have trained, who a few weeks ago, to the Public’s sympathetic delight, put together this list of the world’s dullest books.
Since most people know about the modern poet only that he is obscure—i.e., that he is difficult, i.e., that he is neglected — they naturally make a causal connection between the two meanings of the word, and decide that he is unread because he is difficult. Some of the time this is true: the poet seems difficult because he is not read, because the reader is not accustomed to reading his or any other poetry.Randall Jarrell
Alexander the Great
Alexander, Cecil Frances
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