Greek Homer Quotes & Sayings

The earliest Greek philosopher's criticized Homer's mythology because the gods resembled mortals too much and were just as egotistic and treacherous. — Jostein Gaarder

Troy has perished, the great city.
Only the red flame now lives there.
The dust is rising, spreading out like a great wing of smoke and all is hidden.
We now are gone, one here, one there.
And Troy is gone forever.
Farewell, dear city.
Farewell, my country, where my children lived.
There below, the Greek ships wait. — Homer

And overpowered by memory
Both men gave way to grief. Priam wept freely
For man - killing Hector, throbbing, crouching
Before Achilles' feet as Achilles wept himself,
Now for his father, now for Patroclus once again
And their sobbing rose and fell throughout the house. — Homer

The Odyssey was written by Homer, or another Greek of the same name. — Oscar Wilde

Once, in his first term, Cartwright had been bold enough to ask him why he was clever, what exercises he did to keep his brain fit. Healey had laughed.
"It's memory, Cartwright, old dear. Memory, the mother of the Muses ... at least that's what thingummy said."
"Who?"
"You know, what's his name, Greek poet chap. Wrote the Theogony ... what was he called? Begins with an 'H'."
"Homer?"
"No, dear. Not Homer, the other one. No, it's gone. Anyway. Memory, that's the key. — Stephen Fry

I took the sheep and cut their throats over the pit, and let the dark blood flow. Then there gathered the spirits of the dead, brides and unwed youths, old men worn out by labour, and tender maidens with hearts still new to sorrow. — Homer

It is in the face of all this visual chaos, so opposed to order and simplicity, that I suddenly, perhaps a little guiltily, recall my vow to simplify my life. When I made that promise I had in mind the image of the ancient Greek subsisting on a fragment of pungent cheese, coarse bread, a handful of sun-warmed olives, a little watered wine; a man who discussed the Good, the True, the Beautiful with grave delight, and piped clear music in a sylvan glade. But I feel the absence of hills clothed in myrtle and thyme; of the Great Mother, Homer's wine-dark sea. Good resolutions, it seems, require good scenery. — Guy Vanderhaeghe

Plato utterly condemns the poets for publishing trivial, false and indeed wicked stories about the gods, such as that they fight with each other, or are overcome by emotions like grief, anger, mirth. Reluctantly, he will not allow Homer in his Republic, and he is very angry with the tragic poets for spreading unworthy ideas of the Deity.

It may well be that there were inferior tragic poets who deserved Plato's strictures, but so far as concerns the tragic poets whom we know, Plato's attack is absurd. It is the attack of a severely intellectual philosopher who was also more of a poet than most poets have contrived to be; one who invented some of the profoundest and most beautiful of Greek myths. 'There is a long-standing quarrel', says Plato, 'between philosophy and poetry.' So there was, on the part of the philosophers, and most of all in Plato's own soul. — H.D.F. Kitto

She began to whisper something in my ear. It's the strangest thing about poetry - you can tell it's poetry, even if you don't speak the language. You can hear Homer's Greek without understanding a word, and you still know it's poetry. I've heard Polish poetry, and Inuit poetry, and I knew what it was without knowing. Her whisper was like that. I didn't know the language, but her words washed through me, perfect, and in my mind's eye I saw towers of glass and diamond; and people with eyes of the palest green; and, unstoppable, beneath every syllable, I could feel the relentless advance of the ocean. — Neil Gaiman

When I was 16, I was taught by a wonderful teacher who let me ignore the Greek syllabus and just read Homer. — Alice Oswald

As St. Faustina writes, "The miracles of mercy are impenetrable. Neither the sinner nor the just one will fathom them" (Diary, 1215). — Vinny Flynn

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

When it comes to the New Testament, we can be confident we are reading from accurate sources, because we have so many ancient copies to compare. For many ancient texts there are only a handful of manuscripts in existence. We have only nine or ten good copies of Julius Caesar's The Gallic Wars. The best-preserved, non-biblical ancient writing we have is Homer's Iliad, of which there are only 643 copies. Compare these numbers to the New Testament, which is based on nearly six thousand Greek manuscripts plus over nine thousand ancient copies in other languages. If that were not enough, even if all of these copies were lost, we could reconstruct all but eleven verses of the New Testament from ancient quotations of the Bible. — Douglas M. Beaumont

They grabbed a woman held in Death's grasp and shook and shook and forced Death to drop her — Pamela Erens

The Romans were a strong power before Virgil, but the Greeks had captured their imaginations. While Rome conquered physical Greece, Greek mythology had enveloped Rome. The Empire coul be confident in itself until a Roman poet matched Homer and harmonized Greek civilization with Roman ideals — John Mark Reynolds

The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad. Time does not make their voices fainter, on the contrary, it reinforces our sense of their truth-telling capacity. — Wendy Lesser

We need to ask ourselves what are we here for and what have we worked so hard to be here for. — Jonny Wilkinson

Sundance is a really special place. They're very protective of movies, especially lower-budget movies. — Marc Webb

The One who saved your soul longs to remake your heart. Let's fix our eyes on Jesus. Perhaps in seeing Him, we will see what we can become! — Max Lucado

I am a college-educated American. In all my years of formal schooling, I never read Plato or Aristotle, Homer or Virgil. I knew nothing of Greek and Roman history and barely grasped the meaning of the Middle Ages. Dante was a stranger to me, and so was Shakespeare. The fifteen hundred years of Christianity from the end of the New Testament to the Reformation were a blank page, and I knew only the barest facts about Luther's revolution. I was ignorant of Descartes and Newton. My understanding of Western history began with the Enlightenment. Everything that came before it was lost behind a misty curtain of forgetting. Nobody did this on purpose. Nobody tried to deprive me of my civilizational patrimony. But nobody felt any obligation to present it to me and my generation in an orderly, coherent fashion. Ideas have consequences - and so does their lack. — Rod Dreher

Odes were the compositions in which he took most delight, and it was long before he liked his Epistles and Satires. He told me what he read solidly at Oxford was Greek; not the Grecian historians, but Homer and Euripides, and now and then a little Epigram; that the study of which he was the most fond was Metaphysicks, but he had not read much, even in that way. — Samuel Johnson

It's the Greek letters chi and rho, found together on Constantine's military standard, the labarum." "I've seen the Chi-Rho above the main altar of nearly every Catholic church I've visited since I was a kid. But it represents the first two letters of 'Christ' - xristos in Greek." "You're right," Emily agreed. "But Xristos is an ancient word, meaning 'the anointed' or 'awaited' one; and it actually derives from Chronos, the god of Time. It goes back at least as far as Homer, who was said to have lived during the eighth century B.C. — Kenneth Atchity

Nature has color-coded groups of individuals so that statistically reliable predictions of their adaptability to intellectual rewarding and effective lives can easily be made and profitably used by the pragmatic man-in-the street. — William Shockley

Homer's epic does not tell of such seemingly essential events as the abduction of Helen, for example, nor of the mustering and sailing of the Greek fleet, the first hostilities of the war, the Trojan Horse, and the sacking and burning of Troy.
Instead, the 15,693 lines of Homer's Iliad describe the occurrences of a roughly two-week period in the tenth and final year of what had become a stalemated siege of Troy. — Caroline Alexander

As a text, the Quran is more than the foundation of the Islamic religion; it is the source of Arabic grammar. It is to Arabic what Homer is to Greek, what Chaucer is to English: a snapshot of an evolving language, frozen forever in time — Reza Aslan

There are 201 words in the Iliad and the Odyssey that occur only once in Homer and never again in the whole of Greek literature. — Adam Nicolson

Do not trust those in whom the compulsion to punish is strong. — Robert Green Ingersoll

Sarah, in the crush, was able to study Miss Lucas's face discreetly, she wondered what it was like to know that you were to be married, that you would have a home, an income, that you were set up for life. To have achieved all this simply by agreeing to put up with one particular man until he died. — Jo Baker

Do not suppose, however, that I intend to urge a diet of classics on anybody. I have seen such diets at work. I have known people who have actually read all, or almost all, the guaranteed Hundred Best Books. God save us from reading nothing but the best. — Robertson Davies

People buy pathetic substitutes for community - sound waves in a speaker, particles bombarding a screen - all pretending to be friends or the folks next door. The vacuum they leave when the screen goes dark, when the recording ends, is filled with a loneliness worse than ever before." "What's the answer?" "Flesh and blood touching flesh and blood. Life touching life. Yours, mine, everybody's. — Tony Hendra

Just are the ways of heaven; from Heaven proceed
The woes of man: Heaven doom'd the Greeks to bleed. — Homer

Go to meet destiny halfway and destiny will come to your assistance. — Svetlana Alliluyeva

I had received some minor indie label interest when I was 14 after I was in a schools music competition thing in NZ called 'Rockquest', but I knew it wasn't the right time and that I wasn't good enough and needed to concentrate on school. — Brooke Fraser

Upon my word, just see how mortal men always put the blame on us gods! We are the source of evil, so they say - when they have only their own madness to think if their miseries are worse than they ought to be. — Homer

The first printed Greek Homer had appeared in 1488, in Florence, published by an Athenian, Demetrius Chalcondyles, — Adam Nicolson

Phidias and the achievements of Greek art are foreshadowed in Homer: Dante prefigures for us the passion and colour and intensity of Italian painting: the modern love of landscape dates from Rousseau, and it is in Keats that one discerns the beginning of the artistic renaissance of England. Byron was a rebel and Shelley a dreamer; but in the calmness and clearness of his vision, his perfect self-control, his unerring sense of beauty and his recognition of a separate realm for the imagination, Keats was the pure and serene artist, the forerunner of the pre-Raphaelite school, and so of the great romantic movement of which I am to speak. — Oscar Wilde

The Lord gives and the Lord takes away, as it pleases him, for he can do all things. — Homer

I believe ... that the petal of a flower or a tiny worm on the path says far more, contains far more than all the books in the library. One cannot say very much with mere letters and words. Sometimes I'll be writing a Greek letter, a theta or an omega, and tilt my pen just the slightest bit; suddenly the letter has a tail and becomes a fish; in a second it evokes all the streams and rivers of the world, all that is cool and humid, Homer's sea and the waters on which Saint Peter wandered; or becomes a bird, flaps its tail, shakes out its feathers, puffs itself up, laughs, flies away. You probably don't appreciate letters like that, very much, do you, Narcissus? But I say: with them God wrote the world. — Hermann Hesse

Praise me not too much,
Nor blame me, for thou speakest to the Greeks
Who know me. — Homer

There is no substitute for victory" Oscar Wilde
"I didn't say that--wouldn't have. Maybe it was Vince Lombardi" O.W.

"Not I, either. Try Count von Schlieffen" Vince Lombardi

"What's the big deal. I said it---I think. Doh!" Homer Simpson

"Imposter. 'Twas I." Homer the original (Greek guy) — James J. Bloom

I have a confession to make. The love affair of my life has been with the Greek language. I have now reached the age when it has occurred to me that I may have read some books for the last time. I suddenly thought that there are books I cannot bear not to read again before I die. One that stands out a mile is Homer's Iliad. — William Golding

The shrimp's protein and ours are not exactly the same, but they're so
similar that if you turned up in court and tried to convince a judge that your
version was not a badly concealed plagiarism, you'd be very unlikely to win.
In fact, you'd be a laughing stock, for rhodopsin is not restricted to vent shrimp
and humans but is omnipresent throughout the animal kingdom.... Trying to persuade a judge that your rhodopsin is not plagiarised
would be like trying to clajm that your television set is fundamentally different
from everyone else's, just because it's bigger or has a flat screen. — Nick Lane