Iliad War Quotes & Sayings

The two greatest works of war mythology in the west ... are the Iliad and the Old Testament ... When we turn from the Iliad and Athens to Jerusalem and the Old Testament we find a single-minded single deity with his sympathies forever on one side. And the enemy, accordingly, no matter who it may be, is handled ... pretty much as though he were subhuman: not a "Thou" but an "It." — Joseph Campbell

Surely, by all convention, the Iliad will end here, with the triumphant return of its vindicated hero. But the Iliad is not a conventional epic, and at the very moment of its hero's greatest military triumph, Homer diverts his focus from Achilles to the epic's two most important casualties, Patroklos and Hektor: it is to the consequences of their deaths, especially to the victor, that all action of the Iliad has been inexorably leading. — Caroline Alexander

I can't live a normal life, I was raised by the streets. — Coolio

Feel the underlying meaning of the teachings that are espoused by me or anyone else. The word's don't mean much. Words are supposed to be catalysts for higher states of attention. That is where the action is. — Frederick Lenz

I seem to remember only centuries of heroic war, in which you were always heroes
epic on epic, Iliad on Iliad, and you always brothers in arms. Whether it was but recently (for time is nothing), or at the beginning of the world, I sent you out to war. I sat in the darkness, where there is not any created thing, and to you I was only a voice commanding valour and an unnatural virtue. You heard the voice in the dark, and you never heard it again. The sun in heaven denied it, the earth and sky denied it, all human wisdom denied it. And when I met you in the daylight I denied it myself ... But you were men. You did not forget your secret honour, though the whole cosmos turned an engine of torture to tear it out of you. — G.K. Chesterton

Although some Clinton biographers have been quick to label Alinsky a communist, he maintained that he never joined the Communist Party. — Bill Dedman

It's hard to write a war story without thinking about the 'Iliad.' Because the 'Iliad' knows everything about war. — Chang-rae Lee

I love my job. What would I retire to? — Richard Rogers

'Troy' is an adaptation of the Trojan War myth in its entirety, not 'The Iliad' alone. 'The Iliad' begins with the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon over the slave girl Briseis nine years into the war. The equivalent scene occurs halfway through my script. — David Benioff

There are no endings for any of us, happy or
otherwise, until we die. A fairy tale only ends
happily because that's the point where the
storyteller stops telling the story. — Lilly Gayle

After so many years even the fire of passion dies, and with it what was believed the light of the truth. Who of us is able to say now whether Hector or Achilles was right, Agamemnon or Priam, when they fought over the beauty of a woman who is now dust and ashes? — Umberto Eco

Everywhere in Homer's saga of the rage of Achilles and the battles before Troy we are made conscious at one and the same time of war's ugly brutality and what Yeats called its "terrible beauty." The Iliad accepts violence as a permanent factor in human life and accepts it without sentimentality, for it is just as sentimental to pretend that war does not have its monstrous ugliness as it is to deny that it has its own strange and fatal beauty, a power, which can call out in men resources of endurance, courage and self-sacrifice that peacetime, to our sorrow and loss, can rarely command. — Bernard Knox

Let us remind ourselves that it is ordinary people - men and women, boys and girls - that make the world a special place — Nelson Mandela

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

I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad. — Andre Dubus

Choose,' she says, reaching out towards him. 'Choose to which of us the apple most belongs... — Emily Hauser

The answer is simple: You are you, the person who will live with the consequences of what you do. No one else can be responsible, because no one else will experience the consequences of your actions as you will. — Harry Browne

I draw a weekly comic strip called Life in Hell, which is syndicated in about 250 newspapers. That's what I did before The Simpsons, and what I plan to do for the rest of my life. — Matt Groening

This, the only occasion in the Iliad when furious Achilles smiles serves as a bittersweet reminder of the difference real leadership could have made to the events of the Iliad. Agamemnon's panicked prize-grabbing in Book One and even Nestor's rambling "authority" pale beside Achilles' instinctive and absolute command of himself and the dangers of this occasion. — Caroline Alexander

'The Iliad' is about a war 1,200 years ago that solved nothing and achieved nothing. Most of our wars achieve very little. But whatever agenda I have gets buried in a work this great. If you're being honest, you realize that, as an artist, you're not a policy maker. — Denis O'Hare

Humans appeared on a watery rock spinning around a ball of flames suspended in the middle of an endless ocean of nothing, and yet you still don't believe in a miracle like love? — Seth King

I've always felt, with 'The Iliad,' a real frustration that it's read wrong. That it's turned into this public school poem, which I don't think it is. That glamorising of war, and white-limbed, flowing-haired Greek heroes - it's become a cliched, British empire part of our culture. — Alice Oswald

I'm the Waiter, you know! — P.L. Travers

Someone who accepts that in the world as currently divided war can become inevitable, and even just, might reply that the photographs supply no evidence, none at all, for renouncing war - except to those form whom the notions of valor and sacrifice have been emptied of meaning and credibility. The destructiveness of war - short of total destruction, which is not war but suicide - is not in itself an argument against waging war unless one thinks (as few people actually do think) that violence is always unjustifiable, that force is always and in all circumstances wrong - wrong because, as Simone Weil affirms in her sublime essay on war, "The Iliad, or The Poem of Force" (1940), violence turns anybody subjected to it into a thing. No, retort those who in a given situation see no alternative to armed struggle, violence can exalt someone subjected to it into a martyr or hero. — Susan Sontag

I'm so lazy as far as liking to get up, go to the office in my pajamas, get dressed about noon. And I hate flying. So I have this really laid-back, good lifestyle, and it's hard to nudge me out of it. — Barbara Park

I would suppose I learned how to write when I was very young indeed. When I read a child's book about the Trojan War and decided that the Greeks were really a bunch of frauds with their tricky horses and the terrible things they did, stealing one another's wives, and so on, so at that very early age, I re-wrote the ending of the Iliad so that the Trojans won. And boy, Achilles and Ajax got what they wanted, believe me. And thereafter, at frequent intervals, I would write something. It was really quite extraordinary. Never of very high merit, but the daringness of it was. — James A. Michener

Iliad's subject is not war or its wickedness but a crisis in how to be. — Adam Nicolson

Scripture is a guide for conduct as well as the source of doctrine. Seven times in the book of Revelation we read this phrase: "He who has an ear, let him hear" (2:7, 11, 17, 29; 3:6, 13, 22). What we read in this book should govern our conduct. — David Jeremiah

I'd rather direct than produce. Any day. And twice on Sunday. — Steven Spielberg

The greatest man is he who forms the taste of a nation; the next greatest is he who corrupts it. — Joshua Reynolds