Homer Quotes

reputed author of the Iliad and the Odyssey

Add quote

Homer (Ancient Greek: Ὅμηρος) is best known as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. He was believed by the ancient Greeks to have been the first and greatest of the epic poets. Author of the first known literature of Europe, he is central to the Western canon.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Native Name: Ὅμηρος

Alternative Names: Homerus • Homeros • Mæonides

From Wikidata (CC0)

Showing quotes in randomized order to avoid selection bias. Click Popular for most popular quotes.

There is nothing more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends.

The gods don't hand out all their gifts at once,
not build and brains and flowing speech to all.

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

It is hateful to me to tell a story over again, when it has been well told.

Even the bravest cannot fight beyond his power

All ways of dying are hateful to us poor mortals,
true, but to die of hunger, starve to death—
that's the worst of all.

Is he not sacred, even to the gods, the wandering man who comes in weariness?

Cursed is the man, and void of law and right,
Unworthy property, unworthy light,
Unfit for public rule, or private care,
That wretch, that monster, that delights in war:
Whose lust is murder, and whose horrid joy
To tear his country, and his kind destroy!

And overpowered by memory
Both men gave way to grief. Priam wept freely
For man - killing Hector, throbbing, crouching
Before Achilles' feet as Achilles wept himself,
Now for his father, now for Patroclus once again
And their sobbing rose and fell throughout the house.

Now down in the Ocean sank the fiery light of day,
drawing the dark night across the grain-giving earth.

Yea, and if some god shall wreck me in the wine-dark deep,
even so I will endure…
For already have I suffered full much,
and much have I toiled in perils of waves and war.
Let this be added to the tale of those.

Νεκύων ἀμενηνὰ κάρηνα.

The Iliad of Homer, trans. Andrew Lang, Walter Leaf and Ernest Myers (1883)

Sleep, delicious and profound, the very counterfeit of death

he took a cable which had been service on a blue-bowed ship, made one end fast to a high column in the portico, and threw the other over the round-house, high up, so that their feet would not touch the ground. As when long-winged thrushes or doves get entangled in a snare . . . so the women's heads were held fast in a row, with nooses round their necks, to bring them to the most pitiable end. For a little while their feet twitched, but not for very long.