Homer Quotes

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. ~ Homer

τέτλαθι δή, κραδίη: καὶ κύντερον ἄλλο ποτ᾽ ἔτλης.
-
Be patient, my heart: for you have endured things worse than this before. ~ Homer

This, for Homer, is the tragedy of being human: to desire freedom, and be tortured by a sense of autonomy, and yet be imprisoned by forces beyond our control. ~ Kenan Malik

A shamefaced man makes a bad beggar. ~ Homer

All is lovely outside my house and inside my house and myself. ~ Winslow Homer

To-morrow we embark upon the boundless sea. ~ Homer

The hearts of great men can be changed. ~ Homer

When I was growing up, my parents asked me what I wanted to do, and I said that I wanted to live in Springfield. They were like, "Well, that's not how it works. There is an actor who play Homer, and someone who writes what Homer says." So, I was like, "Well, I want to write what Homer says." ~ Jonah Hill

With Cosette's garter, Homer would make the Iliad. He would put into his poem an old babbler like me, and he would call him Nestor. ~ Victor Hugo

Come, weave us a scheme so I can pay them back!
Stand beside me, Athena, fire me with daring, fierce
as the day we ripped Troy's glittering crown of towers down.
Stand by me - furious now as then, my bright-eyed one -
and I would fight three hundred men, great goddess,
with you to brace me, comrade-in-arms in battle! ~ Homer

When you get a walk-off homer, you get to do whatever you want. You need to be excited about it. You don't get too many of those, so you need to enjoy them when they come. ~ Albert Pujols

It's man's to fight, but heaven's to give success. ~ Homer

I have no interest at all in food and drink, but only in slaughter and blood and the agonized groans of mangled men ~ Homer

We live in a society of laws. Why do you think I took you to all those Police Academy movies? For fun? Well, I didn't hear anybody laughing, did you? ~ Homer

Fear and desire for pleasure. Aggressiveness comes out of fear, predominantly, and sexuality predominantly out of the other. But they mix in the middle. Anyway, both of these impulses can destroy order, which comes out of both drives, and which is another human need I haven't yet fit into my scheme. So both have to be controlled. But in fact, despite religious commands to the contrary, aggressiveness has never really been condemned. It's been exalted, from the Bible through Homer and Virgil right down to Humbert Hemingway. Have you ever heard of a John Wayne movie being censored? did you ever see them take war books off the bookstands? They leave the genitals off Barbie and Ken, but they manufacture every kind of war toy. Because sex is more threatening to us than aggression. There have been strict rules about sex since the beginning of written rules, and even before, if we can believe myth. I think that's because it's in sex that men feel most vulnerable. In war they can hype themselves up, or they have a weapon. Sex means being literally naked and exposing your feelings. And that's more terrifying to most men than the risk of dying while fighting a bear or a soldier. Look at the rules! You can have sex if you're married, and you have to marry a person of the opposite gender, the same color and religion, an age close to your own, of the right social and economic background, even the right height, for God's sake, or else everybody gets up in arms, they disinherit you or threa ~ Marilyn French

Always to be best, and distinguished above the rest. ~ Homer

So I didn't adopt Homer because he was cute and little and sweet, or because he was helpless and needed me. I adopted him because when you think you see something so fundamentally worthwhile in someone else, you don't look for the reasons - like bad timing or a negative bank balance - that might keep it out of your life. You commit to being strong enough to build your life around it, no matter what. In doing so, you begin to become the thing you admire. ~ Gwen Cooper

The bitter dregs of Fortune's cup to drain. ~ Homer

The Odyssey was written by Homer, or another Greek of the same name. ~ Oscar Wilde

A township where one primitive forest waves above, while another primitive forest rots below, - such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Make me tell you something else about reading. You see this? Every time you open this you get free. Freeness up in here and nobody even have to know you get free but you." ~Homer, The Book of Night Women ~ Marlon James

Homer is one of the men of genius who solve that fine problem of art - the finest of all, perhaps - truly to depict humanity by the enlargement of man: that is, to generate the real in the ideal. ~ Victor Hugo

There is truth in stories," said Arthur. "There is truth in one of your paintings, boy or in a sunset or a couplet from Homer. Fiction is truth, even if it is not a fact. If you believe only in facts and forget stories, your brain will live, but your heart will die. ~ Cassandra Clare

It's the Greek letters chi and rho, found together on Constantine's military standard, the labarum." "I've seen the Chi-Rho above the main altar of nearly every Catholic church I've visited since I was a kid. But it represents the first two letters of 'Christ' - xristos in Greek." "You're right," Emily agreed. "But Xristos is an ancient word, meaning 'the anointed' or 'awaited' one; and it actually derives from Chronos, the god of Time. It goes back at least as far as Homer, who was said to have lived during the eighth century B.C. ~ Kenneth Atchity

The way I see it, if everybody ran from bad things instead of trying to stop them, bad things would be all there is. ~ Homer Hickam

If a man wants to be an artist, he should never look at pictures. ~ Winslow Homer

In this night too, in this night of his mortal eyes into which he was now descending, love and danger were again waiting ...
a murmur of glory and hexameters, of men defending a temple the gods will not save, and of black vessels searching the sea for a beloved isle;
the murmor of the Odysseys and Iliads it was his destiny to sing and leave echoing concavely in the memory of man.
These things we know, but not those he felt descending into the last shade of all. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

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

One who contends with immortals lives a very short life. ~ Homer

Agitators were dispatched to Coalwood in droves and, very soon, wildcat strikes were hitting the mine every ~ Homer Hickam

The sort of words a man says is the sort he hears in return. ~ Homer

The Trojan War without Homer was nothing more than a battle over trade routes. ~ B.W. Powe

There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep. ~ Homer

...as long as we have the choice to read what we want, I suspect Twain and Homer and the rest will always be with us. The stoutest old writers ebb and flow in popularity; tastes and political correctness and educational trends also ebb and flow, and we have a tendency to embrace the short view because it makes better news stories. So the joy of literature may not be at a high water mark right now, and yet you can walk into the Target store of your choice and pick up Catcher in the Rye. Beauty floats, I guess, along with sorrow and hope. (http://www.wab.org/events/allofroches...) ~ Leif Enger

Tell me, O muse, of travellers far and wide ~ Homer

As learnèd commentators view
In Homer more than Homer knew. ~ Jonathan Swift

... and they limp and halt, they're all wrinkled, drawn, they squint to the side, can't look you in the eyes, and always bent on duty, trudging after Ruin, maddening, blinding Ruin. But Ruin is strong and swift - She outstrips them all by far, stealing a march, leaping over the whole wide earth to bring mankind to grief. ~ Homer

The best things beyond their measure cloy. ~ Homer

A boy without mischief is like a bowling ball without a liquid center. ~ Homer

We do not need the praises of a Homer, or of anyone else whose words may delight us for the moment, but the estimation of facts will fall short of what is really true. ~ Pericles

She must be strong enough to hold the memory of her husband, to sing his song in her heart until she joined him in the Underworld. ~ Janell Rhiannon

I'm not a bath man myself. More of a cologne man. ~ Homer

It is the experience of those who have had to do with the various peoples of the Far East that it is easier to understand the Korean and get close to him than it is to understand either the Japanese or the Chinese. ~ Homer B. Hulbert

Boy, those Germans have a word for everything! ~ Homer

Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians, hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting 5 of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished ~ Homer

The lord of distant archery, Apollo,
answered:
Lord of earthquake, sound of mind
you could not call me if I strove with you
for the sake of mortals, poor things that they are.
Ephemeral as the flamelike budding leaves,
men flourish on the ripe wheat of the grainland,
then in spiritless age they waste and die. ~ Homer

I liked to call myself a poet and had affected a habit of reading classical texts (in translation, of course – I was a lazy student). I would ride the Greyhound for thirty-six hours down from the Midwest to Leechfield, then spend days dressed in black in the scalding heat of my mother's front porch reading Homer (or Ovid or Virgil) and waiting for someone to ask me what I was reading. No one ever did. People asked me what I was drinking, how much I weighed, where I was living, and if I had married yet, but no one gave me a chance to deliver my lecture on Great Literature. ~ Mary Karr

Bird life aplenty is found in the sunny air, not all of it significant. ~ Homer

If you are very valiant, it is a god, I think, who gave you this gift. ~ Homer

Man is the vainest of all
creatures that have their being upon earth. As long as heaven
vouchsafes him health and strength, he thinks that he shall come to
no harm hereafter, and even when the blessed gods bring sorrow upon
him, he bears it as he needs must, and makes the best of it; for
God Almighty gives men their daily minds day by day. I know all
about it, for I was a rich man once, and did much wrong in the
stubbornness of my pride, and in the confidence that my father and
my brothers would support me; therefore let a man fear God in all
things always, and take the good that heaven may see fit to send
him without vainglory. ~ Homer

It is unfortunate for us, that, of some of the greatest men, we know least, and talk most. ~ Homer

Never throw a butcher knife in anger. ~ Homer

I promise I'll do anything for you, especialy if it's easy.
Homer Simpson ~ Matt Groening

The single best augury is to fight for one's country. ~ Homer

In poetry there are two giants, rough Homer and fine Shakespere. In music likewise we have two giants, Beethoven, the thinker, and the superthinker Berlioz. ~ Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky

There's a plan. If you're willing to fight it hard enough, you can make it detour for a while, but you're still going to end up wherever God wants you to be. G ~ Homer Hickam

Not like Homer would I write,
Not like Dante if I might,
Not like Shakespeare at his best,
Not like Goethe or the rest,
Like myself, however small,
Like myself, or not at all. ~ William Allingham

When he and Wally stopped laughing, Homer said, 'I've never seen the ocean, you know.'
'Candy, did you hear that?' Wally asked, but Candy had released herself with her brief laughter and she was sound asleep. 'You've never seen the ocean?' Wally asked Homer.
'That's right,' said Homer Wells.
'That's not funny,' said Wally seriously.
'Right,' Homer said.
A little later, Wally said, 'You want to drive for a while?'
'I don't know how to drive,' Homer said.
'Really?' Wally asked. And later still – it was almost midnight – Wally asked, 'Uh, have you ever been with a girl – made love to one, you know?' But Homer Wells had also felt released: he had laughed out loud with his new friends. The young but veteran insomniac had fallen asleep. Would Wally have been surprised to know that Homer hadn't laughed out loud with friends before, either? ~ John Irving

Rather I'd choose laboriously to bear A weight of woes, and breathe the vital air, A slave to some poor hind that toils for bread, Than reign the sceptred monarch of the dead. ~ Homer

Across the gulf of centuries, the blind smile of Homer is turned upon our age. Along the echoing corridors of time, the roar of the rockets merges now with the creak of the wind-taut rigging. For somewhere in the world today, still unconscious of his destiny, walks the boy who will be the first Odysseus of the Age of Space. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

If you're a pitcher, and you're pitching and you strike me out and you start celebrating on the mound and showing me off, whenever I get a hit off you, I'm going to go and celebrate, and you shouldn't get mad. If you're a pitcher and strike me out and show me respect and you don't show me up, when I get a homer or a hit, I'm not going to show you up. That's what I believe. ~ Bengie Molina

When will people learn? Democracy doesn't work!
(Homer Simpson) ~ Matt Groening

An irresistible sleep fell deeply on his eyes, the sweetest, soundest oblivion, still as the sleep of death itself ... ~ Homer

I'm a people person ... who drinks. ~ Homer

Let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter. ~ Homer

When I write what publishers call 'fantasy' I am writing in what I think is the most important tradition of fiction: starting with Homer and up through Shakespeare and Milton, the most important themes to tackle are those of the mythopoeic domain, tales of the body and mind seen through a temperament and a cosmos divorced from current reality so what is said can be more clear. ~ Janet Morris

You shall see rude and sturdy, experienced and wise men, keeping their castles, or teaming up their summer's wood, or chopping alone in the woods, men fuller of talk and rare adventure in the sun and wind and rain, than a chestnut is of meat; who were out not only in '75 and 1812, but have been out every day of their lives; greater men than Homer, or Chaucer, or Shakespeare, only they never got time to say so; they never took to the way of writing. Look at their fields, and imagine what they might write, if ever they should put pen to paper. Or what have they not written on the face of the earth already, clearing, and burning, and scratching, and harrowing, and plowing, and subsoiling, in and in, and out and out, and over and over, again and again, erasing what they had already written for want of parchment. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Life is largely a matter of expectation. ~ Homer

[B]ut it is only what happens, when they die, to all mortals.
The sinews no longer hold the flesh and the bones together,
and once the spirit has let the white bones, all the rest
of the body is made subject to the fire's strong fury,
but the soul flitters out like a dream and flies away. ~ Homer

So when a man surrenders to the sound of music and lets its sweet, soft, mournful strains, which we have just described, be funnelled into his soul through his ears, and gives up all his time to the glamorous moanings of song, the effect at first on his energy and initiative of mind, if he has any, is to soften it as iron is softened in a furnace, and made workable instead of hard and unworkable: but if he persists and does not break the enchantment, the next stage is that it melts and runs, till the spirit has quite run out of him and his mental sinews (if I may so put it) are cut, and he has become what Homer calls "a feeble fighter". ~ Plato

So peaceful shalt thou end thy blissful days, And steal thyself from life by slow decays. ~ Homer

There will be killing till the score is paid. ~ Homer

Why, you could wake up dead tomorrow ~ Homer

I live an idle burden to the ground. ~ Homer

Now deep in ocean sunk the lamp of light, And drew behind the cloudy vale of night. ~ Homer

On his bedside table, between the reading lamp and the telephone, was his battered copy of David Copperfield. Homer didn't have to open the book to know how the story began. "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show," he recited from memory. ~ John Irving

When I was 16, I was taught by a wonderful teacher who let me ignore the Greek syllabus and just read Homer. ~ Alice Oswald

Nurse Angela, with her love of cats and orphans, once remarked of Homer Wells that the boy must adore the name she gave him because he fought so hard not to lose it. ~ John Irving

Uncontrollable laughter arose among the blessed gods. ~ Homer

I didn't lie! I just created fiction with my mouth! ~ Homer

I'm not popular enough to be different ~ Homer Simpson

Two friends, two bodies with one soul inspired. ~ Homer

The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad. Time does not make their voices fainter, on the contrary, it reinforces our sense of their truth-telling capacity. ~ Wendy Lesser

The armies massing ... crowding thick-and-fast
as the swarms of flies seething over the shepherds' stalls
in the first spring days when the buckets flood with milk-
so many long-haired Achaeans swarmed across the plain
to confront the Trojans, fired to smash their lines ~ Fagles Robert

I regret very much that I have painted a picture that requires any description. ~ Winslow Homer

Nothing in the world is so incontinent as a man's accursed appetite. ~ Homer

We stepped to the window. Off to one side there was thunder, and the splendid rain was trickling down upon the land; the most refreshing fragrance rose up to us from the rich abundance of the warm atmosphere. She stood leaning on her elbows, with her gaze searching the countryside; she looked up to heaven and at me; I saw her eyes fill with tears, and she laid her hand on mine, saying, "Klopstock!" I recalled at once the glorious ode she had in mind, and became immersed in the stream of emotions which she had poured over me by uttering this symbolic name. I could not bear it, I bent down over hand and kissed it amid tears of the utmost rapture. And looked into her eyes again - noble poet! Would that you had seen your apotheosis in that gaze, and would that your name, so often profaned, would never reach my ears from any other lips. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

We got a little rule back home: If it's brown, drink it down. If it's black, send it back. ~ Homer

Oh, Homer! You don't have to play dumb anymore! You're not at school now. ~ John Marsden

Bursts as a wave that from the clouds impends, And swell'd with tempests on the ship descends; White are the decks with foam; the winds aloud Howl o'er the masts, and sing through every shroud: Pale, trembling, tir'd, the sailors freeze with fears; And instant death on every wave appears. ~ Homer

Literature, after all, from Homer onwards, is littered with the recounting of deaths and with the fascination for death, and in this it only expresses what we all repeatedly dwell on but do not necessarily or readily voice. So far as death goes, I don't claim any oddity. There is only one sea: I'm in the same boat as everyone else. And that seems, more generally, to be the position that every novelist, unless they are possessed of a peculiar arrogance, should take: I am mortal too, I am human too. I too, like you, share life's joys, pains, confusions. We're all in the same boat. ~ Graham Swift

This was all evidence of the tradition at work, of Homer being more interested in epic music than its meaning. ~ Adam Nicolson

Look now how mortals are blaming the gods, for they say that evils come from us, but in fact they themselves have woes beyond their share because of their own follies. ~ Homer

There is a peculiar pathos in the extinction of a nation. ~ Homer B. Hulbert

All men have need of the gods. ~ Homer

The motives of the writer form as important an ingredient in the analysis or his history, as the facts he records. Probability is a powerful and troublesome test; and it is by this troublesome standard that a large portion of historical evidence is sifted. ~ Homer

The business of wretches is wretched even in guarantee giving. ~ Homer

Desire overwhelmed me once she had gone. But it was not a desire for Homer. I had to return to the library. I could already smell the books' muskiness and in my mind turned over pages with as many differing textures as a forest; pages that were brittle and fragile which had to be coaxed to turn; pages that were soft and scented, presenting their words as if the were a gift in the palm of a hand, and pages that fell open heavily of their own accord as if weighted by the importance of their message. But more than anything else I was compelled by their mystery, by all the stories they had yet to tell me.
'I have to go to the library, Homer. I have to be with the books. ~ Christine Aziz

I've finally tapped into that spirit of self-destruction that makes rock-n-roll the king of music! ~ Homer

Ingersoll is with Homer and Tully and Shakespeare and Burns. ~ William Stewart Ross