Quotes About Homer

There's no men like that nowadays. This is a degenerate age, Miss Shirley." "Homer said the same thing eight hundred years, B.C.," smiled Anne.

There is an astonishing imagination, even in the science of mathematics. ... We repeat, there was far more imagination in the head of Archimedes than in that of Homer.

It is my experience that the short path to the simple and precise English needed by a man of science lies thorough the tongues of Homer and Vergil.

For I am yearning to visit the limits of the all-nurturing Earth, and Oceans, from whom the gods are sprung.

The first printed Greek Homer had appeared in 1488, in Florence, published by an Athenian, Demetrius Chalcondyles

Most people read Homer in those stupid eighteenth-century translations," Gautier said calmly. "They make him sound like Marie-Antoinette nibbling biscuits in the Tuileries. But if you read him in Greek you can see he's a monster, his people are monsters. The whole thing is like a dinner party for barbarians. They eat with their fingers. They put mud in their hair when they are upset. They spend half the time painting themselves.

Until the twentieth century, no one had any idea that Homer might have existed in this strange and immaterial form. It was the assumption that Homer, like other poets, wrote his poetry. Virgil, Dante and Milton were merely following in his footsteps. The only debate was over why these written poems were in places written so badly. Why had he not written them better?

say, 'There never was such a person as Homer,'" the English essayist Thomas De Quincey joked in 1841.

For them, and for Homer, impermanence is life's central sorrow and the source of its most lasting pain.

Wine was one of the first signs of civilization to appear in the life of human beings," he said. "It is in the Bible, it is in Homer, it shines through all the pages of history, participating in the destiny of ingenious men. It gives spirit to those who know how to taste it, but it punishes those who drink it without restraint.

From May 1717 to April 1718, Voltaire sat comfortably in the infamous prison insulting the Regent and reading Homer.

My emotional range is limited. I can't do grief, but rage is my friend. For instance, I hate death by sickness. It is nothing like Homer, the Old Testament, and Tolkien led me to expect. It is not noble and awe-inspiring. No one delivers a final soliloquy. It is as abrupt and banal as the flicking of a switch.

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

We don't know enough, we'll never know. Oh happy Homer, taking the stars and the Gods for granted.

Like Twain, Walt Whitman was mesmerized by Grant and grouped him with George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the quartet of greatest Americans. "In all Homer and Shakespeare there is no fortune or personality really more picturesque or rapidly changing, more full of heroism, pathos, contrast," he wrote.

No, ogni uomo nobile e saggio ama la sua donna e ne ha cura come io con tutto il cuore amavo la mia, e non importava se era una schiava di guerra. (Achille, da Omero, Iliade)

Riusciremo, prima o poi, a portar via Achille da quella micidiale guerra. E non saranno la paura né l'orrore a riportarlo a casa. Sarà una qualche, diversa, bellezza, più accecante della sua, e infinitamente più mite. (Postilla di Omero, Iliade)

'Theogony' should be read before the great Homeric epics because it gives an account of the cosmology that is taken for granted by Homer. It does for paganism what the Old Testament attempted to do for monotheism.

The blade itself incites to deeds of violence." —Homer

Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick, Tick, tick, tick, what little iambics, While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines.

Vain labour for me — vain labour almost for the grave English language — to do justice to the sparkling paradoxes that flew from lip to lip. The favourite theme was the superiority of the moderns to the ancients. Condorcet on this head was eloquent, and to some, at least, of his audience, most convincing. That Voltaire was greater than Homer few there were disposed to deny. Keen was the ridicule lavished on the dull pedantry which finds everything ancient necessarily sublime.

Homer and Sylla, History of Interest Rates, p. 191.

The eastern half of the empire spoke Greek and boasted a culture that went back to Homer.

To many, Homer may appear lazy and a loser, but he's just much misguided. He's boorish, sure, but well meaning and, I guess, the one thing we have in common is the pursuit of lousy diets.