Quotes by Homer

About Homer:

Homer is best known as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. He was believed by the ancient Greeks to have been the first and greatest of the epic poets. Author of the first known literature of Europe, he is central to the Western canon.
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Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks 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, ste...

Homer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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

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

Homer

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.

Homer

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

Homer

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

Homer

There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep.

Homer

The future happens. No matter how much we scream.

Homer

Author Bio

  • NameHomer
  • DescriptionAncient Greek epic poet, author of the Iliad and the Odyssey
  • ProfessionPoet