The Iliad Quotes

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.

The Iliad

…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, ste...

The Iliad

Beauty! Terrible Beauty! A deathless Goddess-- so she strikes our eyes!

The Iliad

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

The Iliad

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.

The Iliad

There is nothing alive more agonized than man / of all that breathe and crawl across the earth.

The Iliad

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

The Iliad

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

The Iliad

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!

The Iliad

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.

The Iliad

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.

The Iliad

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—

The Iliad

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, streamin...

The Iliad

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!

The Iliad

Still, we will let all this be a thing of the past, though it hurts us, and beat down by constraint the anger that rises inside us. Now I am making an end of my anger. It does not become me, unrelentingly to rage on

The Iliad

Ah my friend, if you and I could escape this fray and live forever, never a trace of age, immortal, I would never fight on the front lines again or command you to the field where men win fame.

The Iliad

The sort of words a man says is the sort he hears in return.

The Iliad

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

The Iliad