Quotes from Homer

Sing, goddess, of Achilles' ruinous anger Which brought ten thousand pains to the Achaeans, And cast the souls of many stalwart heroes To Hades, and their bodies to the dogs And birds of prey.

It has been an easy, and a popular expedient of late years, to deny the personal or real existence of men and things whose life and condition were too much for our belief.

For of all creatures that breathe and creep about on the earth, there is none so miserable as man.

Must you have battle in your heart forever? The bloody toil of combat? Old contender, will you not yield to the immortal gods? That nightmare cannot die, being eternal evil itself – horror, and pain, and chaos; there is no fighting her, no power can fight her. All that avails is flight.

It was the gray sea that bore you and the towering rocks, so sheer the heart in you is turned from us.

Miserable mortals who, like leaves, at one moment flame with life, eating the produce of the land, and at another moment weakly perish

The belly's a shameless dog, there's nothing worse.      Always insisting, pressing, it never lets us forget Ã¢â'¬â€      destroyed as I am, my heart racked with sadness,      sick with anguish, still it keeps demanding,      Ã¢â'¬ËœEat, drink!' It blots out all the memory      of my pain, commanding, 'Fill me up!

Vain is your boast in that you have scratched the sole of my foot... A worthless coward can inflict but a light wound. When I wound a man, though I but graze his skin, it is another matter, for my weapon will lay him low. His wife will tear her cheeks out for grief and his children will be fatherless: there he will rot, reddening the earth with his blood, and vultures, not women, will gather round him.

Why, pray, must the Argives needs fight the Trojans? What made the son of Atreus gather the host and bring them? Was it not for the sake of Helen? Are the sons of Atreus the only men in the world who love their wives? Any man of common right feeling will love and cherish her who is his own, as I this woman, with my whole heart

For lo? my words no fancied woes relate; I speak from science and the voice of fate.

Mistress; please: are you divine, or mortal?

Hyrtacides pummeled his thighs and groaned and bit his lip and said: O Father Zeus, you, even you, turn out to be a liar. [bk.12]

Grief wrapped around her, eating at her heart. The house was full of chairs but she could not bear to sit upright.

He had better beware our wrath, great man though he is. What is he doing in his fury but insulting senseless clay?

and Terror and Rout and relentless Strife stormed too, sister of manslaughtering Ares, Ares' comrade-in-arms— Strife, only a slight thing when she first rears her head but her head soon hits the sky as she strides across the earth. Now Strife hurled down the leveler Hate amidst both sides, wading into the onslaught, flooding men with pain.

We who are gods forever have to endure the most horrible hurts, by each other's hatred, as we try to give favor to mortals.

Aphrodite forever stands by her man and drives the spirits of death away from him.

Weapons themselves can tempt a man to fight.

Then in anger divine Aphrodite addressed her: "Do not provoke me, wicked girl, lest I drop you in anger, and hate you as much as I now terribly love you, and devise painful hostilities, and you are caught in the middle of both, Trojans and Danaans, and are destroyed by an evil fate." So she spoke; and Helen born of Zeus was frightened; and

Endure, my heart; yea, a baser thing thou once didst bear

Oh for shame, how the mortals put the blame on us gods, for they say evils come from us, but it is they, rather, who by their own recklessness win sorrow beyond what is given...

These were the colloquies in heaven.

The man does better who runs from disaster than he who is caught by it.

contemplating the incidents in their lives or condition which tradition has handed down to us