Homer Greece Quotes & Sayings

Homer's Iliad was the cultural encyclopedia of pre-literate Greece, the didactic vehicle that provided men with guidance for the management of their spiritual, ethical, and social lives. — Marshall McLuhan

You, why are you so afraid of war and slaughter? Even if all the rest of us drop and die around you, grappling for the ships, you'd run no risk of death: you lack the heart to last it out in combat - coward! — Homer

Let him submit to me! Only the god of death is so relentless, Death submits to no one - so mortals hate him most of all the gods. Let him bow down to me! I am the greater king, I am the elder-born, I claim - the greater man. — Homer

... There is the heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover's whisper, irresistible - magic to make the sanest man go mad. — Homer

Why so much grief for me? No man will hurl me down to Death, against my fate. And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you - it's born with us the day that we are born. — Homer

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

Come then, put away your sword in its sheath, and let us two go up into my bed so that, lying together in the bed of love, we may then have faith and trust in each other. — Homer

But it is fit that the Past should be dark; though the darkness is not so much a quality of the past as of tradition. It is not adistance of time, but a distance of relation, which makes thus dusky its memorials. What is near to the heart of this generation is fair and bright still. Greece lies outspread fair and sunshiny in floods of light, for there is the sun and daylight in her literature and art. Homer does not allow us to forget that the sun shone,
nor Phidias, nor the Parthenon. — Henry David Thoreau

[A historian] will more seriously deplore the loss of the Byzantine libraries, which were destroyed or scattered in the general confusion: one hundred and twenty thousand manuscripts are said to have disappeared; ten volumes might be purchased for a single ducat; and the same ignominious price, too high perhaps for a shelf of theology, included the whole works of Aristotle and Homer, the noblest productions of the sciences and literature of ancient Greece. — Edward Gibbon

Few footprints of the great remain in the sand before the ever-flowing tide. Long ago it washed out Homer's. Curiosity follows him in vain; Greece and Asia perplex us with a rival Stratford-upon-Avon. The rank of Aristophanes is only conjectured from his gift to two poor players in Athens. The age made no sign when Shakespeare, its noblest son, passed away. — Robert Aris Willmott

Like that star of the waning summer who beyond all stars rises bathed in the ocean stream to glitter in brilliance. — Homer

Like a girl, a baby running after her mother, begging to be picked up, and she tugs on her skirts, holding her back as she tries to hurry off - all tears, fawning up at her, till she takes her in her arms ... That's how you look, Patroclus, streaming live tears. — Homer

Greece, sound, thy Homer's, Rome thy Virgil's name, But England's Milton equals both in fame. — William Cowper

That is the god's work, spinning threads of death through the lives of mortal men, and all to make a song for those to come ... — Homer

But now, as it is, sorrows, unending sorrows must surge within your heart as well - for your own son's death. Never again will you embrace him stiding home. My spirit rebels - I've lost the will to live, to take my stand in the world of men - — Homer

And his good wife will tear her cheeks in grief, his sons are orphans and he, soaking the soil red with his own blood, he rots away himself - more birds than women flocking round his body! — Homer

You, you insolent brazen bitch - you really dare to shake that monstrous spear in Father's face? — Homer

... but there they lay, sprawled across the field, craved far more by the vultures than by wives. — Homer

Ruin, eldest daughter of Zeus, she blinds us all, that fatal madness - she with those delicate feet of hers, never touching the earth, gliding over the heads of men to trap us all. She entangles one man, now another. — Homer

... and they limp and halt, they're all wrinkled, drawn, they squint to the side, can't look you in the eyes, and always bent on duty, trudging after Ruin, maddening, blinding Ruin. But Ruin is strong and swift - She outstrips them all by far, stealing a march, leaping over the whole wide earth to bring mankind to grief. — Homer