Important Quotations Explained
My poor friend, give up this angry mood of yours and look for means of getting yourself free of trouble. Maybe what I say seems to you both old and commonplace; but this is what you pay, Prometheus, for that tongue of yours which talked so high and haughty: you are not yet humble, still you do not yield to your misfortunes, and you wish, indeed, to add some more to them; now, if you follow me as a schoolmaster you will not kick against the pricks, seeing that he, the King, that rules alone, is harsh and sends accounts to no one's audit for the deeds he does.
Then beneath the earth those hidden blessings for man, bronze, iron, silver and gold—who can claim to have discovered before me? No one, I am sure, who wants to speak to the purpose. In one short sentence understand it all: every art of mankind comes from Prometheus.
Kindness that cannot be requited, tell me, where is the help in that, my friend? What succor in creatures of a day? You did not see the feebleness that draws its breath in gasps, a dreamlike feebleness by which the race of men is held in bondage, a blind prisoner. So the plans of men shall never pass the ordered law of Zeus.
Time in its aging course teaches all things.
There is not a torture or an engine wherewithal Zeus can induce me to declare these things, till he has loosed me from these cruel shackles. So let him hurl his smoky lightning flame, and throw in turmoil all things in the world with white-winged snowflakes and deep bellowing thunder beneath the earth: me he shall not bend by all this to tell him who is fated to drive him from his tyranny.
