Quotes About Virgil

unlike Virgil, Homer is no part of the classical age, has no truck with judicious distinction or the calm management of life and society. He precedes that order, is a preclassic, immoderate, uncompromising, never sacrificing truth for grace.

Great Authors—Classification—The World's Best Books. The Bible is the world's greatest book. Apart from its character as a work of divine revelation, it is the most perfect literature extant. Leaving out the Bible the three greatest works are those of Homer, Dante and Shakespeare. These are closely followed by the works of Virgil and Milton.

As Virgil tells us in The Aeneid, fama, malum qua non aliud velocius ullum. There is no evil swifter than a rumor.

There are some who believe the poem can be a guide, a Virgil, can be a window into a way of being. Do I believe this? Does anyone believe this anymore?

Thou [Virgil] art my master and my author, thou art he from whom alone I took the style whose beauty has done me honor.

"Why is thy mind so entangled," said the Master [Virgil], "that thou slackenest thy pace? What is it to thee what they whisper there? Come after me and let the people talk. Stand like a firm tower that never shakes its top for blast of wind."

Love conquers all; let us too yield to love." VIRGIL, ECLOGUES, X

Perpetual spring, the flare of adventure in the blood, the impulse of men who packed Virgil with their bean-bags on the overland journey, conspired~ to make San Francisco a city of artists.

Reviewing music or reviewing anything is a writing job. It's nice if you are experienced in the field you are writing about, but writing is what you are doing.

The greatest poet who ever wrote about rowing is Virgil, the greatest historian is Thucydides, but the greatest imagination ever to turn its attention to the sport is that of painter, Thomas Eakins.

He eyed in the far corner of the room the carton of books they'd schlepped across the pond(ocean) They were both fearful of being stuck without a decent book, and who knew they would find everything from Virgil to Synge on the shelves of a fishing lodge?

THE ERINYES (the FURIES) are placed by Virgil in the underworld, where they punish evildoers. The Greek poets thought of them chiefly as pursuing sinners on the earth. They were inexorable, but just. Heraclitus says, "Not even the sun will transgress his orbit but the Erinyes, the ministers of justice, overtake him." They were usually represented as three: Tisiphone, Megaera, and Alecto.

Of poets I put Virgil first - he was greatest.

Curst greed of gold, what crimes thy tyrant power has caused.

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?

In a shadowy place something white flew up. It was a heron, and it went away over the dark treetops. William Wallace followed it with his eyes and Brucie clapped his hands, but Virgil gave a sigh, as if he knew that when you go looking for what is lost, everything is a sign. (The Wide Net)

Princeton applicants had to know Virgil, Cicero's orations, and Latin grammar and also had to be 'so well acquainted with Greek as to render any part of the four Evangelists in that language into Latin or English.

Two mountains in Greece, you see: Virgil refers to piling Pelion upon Ossa as a metaphor for adding one very large thing to another—going too far, in other words.

Truly Virgil was right: love was a form of sickness. It altered people, made them behave in strange and irrational ways.

The scholiast who annotated Virgil was wrong. Understanding is what wearies us most of all. To live is to not think.

Omnia vincit amor. Love conquers all things. —VIRGIL

Shakespeare is both my door knocker and the owner of the domains to which the knock admits me, at once my Virgil opening the gates of hell and heaven, and the devil, and God, and I say this as a person who believes in neither God nor the devil, I believe only in Virgil…

Here was a man who was trapped in a thicket of fear and confusion, powerless to escape. Dante's verse captured the feeling of my own depression and anxiety precisely. Wild animals blocked the man's path at every turn. Suddenly the shade of a great poet of antiquity, Virgil, appears before the man and promises to show him the hard road to a good place—but first the man has to trust him.

Somewhere along the line, it occurred to him that he hadn't spoken to Virgil Flowers. He'd probably taken the day off, and knowing Flowers, he'd done it in a boat. The thing about Flowers was, in Lucas's humble opinion, you could send him out for a loaf of bread and he'd find an illegal bread cartel smuggling in heroin-saturated wheat from Afghanistan. Either that, or he'd be fishing in a muskie tournament, on government time. You had to keep an eye on him.