At 20, I realized that I could not possibly adjust to a feminine role as conceived by my father and asked him permission to engage in a professional career. In eight months I filled my gaps in Latin, Greek and mathematics, graduated from high school, and entered medical school in Turin.

I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush.

Looking the way I look, whenever anybody's looking for a light brown funny guy, I get the call... I'm 100 percent Greek, but I look like I could be Indian or Middle Eastern or Hispanic. If it's ethnic, they'll try and put me in it.

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

No amount of debt restructuring, even debt forgiveness, will help the Greeks achieve real prosperity. What they need is not short-term relief but, rather, a long-term cure.

There would be no need for love if perfection were possible. Love arises from our imperfection, from our being different and always in need of the forgiveness, encouragement and that missing half of ourselves that we are searching for, as the Greek myth tells us, in order to complete ourselves.

I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts.

There is a misleading, unwritten rule that states if a quote giving advice comes from someone famous, very old, or Greek, then it must be good advice.

This was nostalgia in the literal Greek sense: the pain of not being able to return to one's home and family.

You are about to have your first experience with a Greek lunch. I will kill you if you pretend to like it.

My mom used to say that Greek Easter was later because then you get stuff cheaper.

Right now I'd love to be sitting on a Greek island somewhere because of being Greek American, eating great octopus salad and some fantastic lamb. Or sipping a little ouzo. I think the Mediterranean diet is one of the healthiest... Lots of nuts, vegetables, fruits, fresh fish, lean meats, yogurt.

That's always a cool thing to be the voice of what the eyes are seeing. It gives you the role of the Greek chorus and that's always fun to do.

What I wish I had, is that I wish I was a little more Greek, in that I wish I could lose my North American driven attitude and that I could be a little bit more poetic and laissez faire.

Proportions are what makes the old Greek temples classic in their beauty. They are like huge blocks, from which the air has been literally hewn out between the columns.

I have discovered that if you take all the places of Greek myths, those specific locales turn out to be abundant fossil sites, but there is also a lot of natural knowledge embedded in those myths, showing that Greek perceptions about fossils were pretty amazing for prescientific people.

Art is a way of penetrating and going deep into our unconscious and creating amazing worlds - as the Greeks did, if you like, as did Ovid with his stories and his fantasies.

For breakfast, I make an amazing protein shake with fruit, Greek yogurt, protein powder, flaxseed oil and honey. It's a nice way to get a healthy start and a little bit of sweetness, too.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

"Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called

In Arabic to say, for example, "Wisdom is precious," you could repeat the feminine pronoun: al-hikmah hiya tham?nah, literally "Wisdom, she is precious." It is stated by some S?f? Sheikhs (Masters) that S?f?sm originally was named Sophia, which connects S?f?sm with the Christian Gnostic tradition, in which Wisdom is personified as a woman, the divine Sophia. The physical mother of Jesus was an external image of manifestation of the Virgin Sophia, the word 'Sophia' stemming from Sophos (wisdom). The Gnostics, whose language was Greek, identified the Holy Spirit with Sophia, Wisdom; and Wisdom was considered female.

Creation is thus God's presence in creatures. The Greek Orthodox theologian Philip Sherrard has written that "Creation is nothing less than the manifestation of God's hidden Being." This means that we and all other creatures live by a sanctity that is inexpressibly intimate, for to every creature, the gift of life is a portion of the breath and spirit of God. (pg. 308, Christianity and the Survival of Creation)

It was a subtle refinement of God to learn Greek when he wished to write a book ? and that he did not learn it better.

Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: 'You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not.