Quotes About Homer

Homer, whose own language was certainly heroic, in five passages from his two poems [437] mentions a more ancient language and calls it "the language of the gods.

I have always been a huge sports fan, but more of the pedestrian and 'homer' sort.

All literature up to today is sexist. The Muses never sang to the poets about liberated women. It's the same old chanson from the Bible and Homer through Joyce and Proust.

The oldest written poem was by the Greek, Homer. His poem, The Iliad, tells the story of the siege of Troy, a story of the heroes who fought to the death to get Helen back to her hubby, King Menelaus.

Gladstone's was neither the first nor the last of great minds to be led astray by religious fervor, but in the case of his Studies on Homer, his convictions took the particular unfortunate turn of trying to marry Homer's pagan pantheon with the Christian creed. ... The Times was not amused: "Perfectly honest in his intentions, he takes up a theory, and no matter how ridiculous it is in reality, he can make it appear respectable in argument. Too clever by half!

And he showed, using methods which would today be considered exemplary applications of systematic textual analysis but which one of his contemporary critics derided as the bean-counting mentality of "a born Chancellor of the Exchequer," that this vagueness in Homer's color descriptions was the rule, not the exception.

Homer would scuttle up the side of my denim-clad leg (to this day, there's nothing he loves climbing so much as a pair of jeans)

A whole generation was raised to learn about comedy from 'The Simpsons.' To get to be in a booth with Homer and Marge and be in Springfield - it was unimaginable the emotions that I felt.

One of my favorite episodes was the one in which Homer grew hair. That was a very unique episode, since there was a gay secretary, but that wasn't even the issue of the show-the issue was Homer's image changing because he had hair.

What mighty woes To thy imperial race from woman rose.

Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer's 'Odyssey' as if it were the sweet body of a woman.

Homer makes us hearers, and Virgil leaves us readers Alexander Pope

I even feel guilty if I'm reading a novel, because I think I should be reading Homer again. I don't really know what free time is, because I don't have something to measure it against.

Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, is now one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as aesthetic pleasure of the first order.

Cumulatively, the sheer volume of papyrus and parchment under-girding sacred Scripture dwarf that of any other work in classical history. Consider, for example, Homer's Iliad, Bible to the ancient Greeks. While its manuscript numbers are singularly impressive—650 copies—this pales by comparison to the almost 6,000 Greek manuscript fragments undergirding the New Testament.

Partly as a result of vivid allegorical readings of Homer, the grotto of the nymphs in the Odyssey gets cosmologically extended in meaning, as in the De antro nympharum of Plotinus's student Porphyry, where cos- mos and cave exist for each other. The one is the symbolon of the other, and man is the tertium, who is prevented by temptation and gentle force from reaching his cave-transcending destiny.

Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.

Feeling its power, one Civil War paper trumpeted that Milton and Homer were for another age but for this one was the New York Herald.

Bacon wanted to reach a similar conclusion without doing the painstaking philological analysis at the heart of this critical endeavour. She was content to insist, rather than demonstrate, that Shakespeare was as much a myth as Homer or Jesus.

The language of Homer lay still further off. Imagine a twenty-first-century Texan reading Chaucer.

To Homer, libraries were holy places like churches, and the priestly librarians a blessed race, a saving remnant in a world of sin. Whenever God grew impatient and decided to destroy the world he remembered the librarians and stayed his hand.

You know, the one with all the well meaning rules that don't work out in real life, uh, Christianity.

Homer is right: "Bad is the lordship of many; let one be your ruler and master." For such a man law would be rather an instrument than a limit: "for men of eminent ability there is no law—they are themselves a law.

But the tale or narrative set in the past may have its particular time-free value; and the candid reader will not misunderstand me, will not suppose that I intend any preposterous comparison, when I observe that Homer was farther removed in time from Troy than I am from the Napoleonic wars; yet he spoke to the Greeks for 2,000 years and more.