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Homer Quotes

Homer (Ancient Greek: Ὅμηρος) 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.

Also known as: Homer's Odyssey, Homeric

Random Homer quote

287 quotes

For all on a razor's edge it stands.

The sex is ever to a soldier kind.

For when two
Join in the same adventure, one perceives
Before the other how they ought to act;
While one alone, however prompt, resolves
More tardily and with a weaker will.

A generous friendship no cold medium knows,
Burns with one love, with one resentment glows;
One should our interests and our passions be,
My friend must hate the man that injures me.

For a man will not have strength to fight his way forward all day
long until the sun goes down if he is starved for food.

Iliad (-750)

But a man's life breath cannot come back again—
no raiders in force, no trading brings it back,
once it slips through a man's clenched teeth.

Iliad (-750)

Sleep, universal king of gods and men.

Iliad (-750)

To some the powers of bloody war belong,
To some, sweet music, and the charm of song;
To few, and wondrous few, has Jove assigned
A wise, extensive, all-considering mind.

Iliad (-750)

Both gods knotted the rope of strife and leveling war,
strangling both sides at once by stretching the mighty cable,
never broken, never slipped, that snapped the knees of thousands.

Iliad (-750)

As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity.
The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber
Burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning.
So one generation of men will grow while another dies.

Iliad (-750)

Lay ye down the golden chain
From Heaven, and pull at its inferior links
Both Goddesses and Gods.

Helenus, with his heavy Thracian blade
Smiting the temples of Deipyrus,
Dash'd off his helmet.

Yet while my Hector still survives, I see
My father, mother, brethren, all in thee.

Heav'd on Olympus tottering Ossa stood;
On Ossa, Pelion nods with all his wood.

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.

Iliad (-750)

My hour at last has come;
Yet not ingloriously or passively
I die, but first will do some valiant deed,
Of which mankind shall hear in after time.

And nigh to him came Achilles, the peer of Enyalius, warrior of the waving helm, brandishing over his right shoulder the Pelian ash, his terrible spear.

(Orion) A hunter of shadows, himself a shade.

Accept these grateful tears! for thee they flow,
For thee, that ever felt another's woe!

Alike the idlers and the active die.

Iliad (-750)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Homer (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.