Book//mark – The Iliad | Homer, 8th century BC
“As on the peaks of a mountain the south wind scatters the thick mist, no friend to the shepherd, but better than night for the robber, and a man can see before him only so far as a stone cast, so beneath their feet the dust drove up in a stormcloud of men marching, who made their way through the plain in great speed.”
“Any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed.
You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.”
“The roaring seas and many a dark range of mountains lie between us.”
“What are the children of men, but as leaves that drop at the wind’s breath?”
“It was the gray sea that bore you and the towering rocks,
so sheer the heart in you is turned from us.”
“His descent was like nightfall.”
“Beauty! Terrible Beauty!
A deathless Goddess– so she strikes our eyes!”
“let not forgetfulness take you, after you are released from the kindly sweet slumber.”
“To form correct views of individuals we must regard them as forming parts of a great
whole — we must measure them by their relation to the mass of beings by whom they
are surrounded, and, in contemplating the incidents in their lives or condition which
tradition has handed down to us, we must rather consider the general bearing of the
whole narrative, than the respective probability of its details.”
“Oceanus, the genesis of all…”
“So the immortals spun our lives that we, we wretched men
live on to bear such torments – the gods live free of sorrows.
-Achilles to Priam”
“The heart in his rugged chest was pounding, torn”
“The tongue of a man is a twisty thing, there are plenty of words there of every kind,
the range of words is wide, and their variance. The sort of thing you say is the thing that
will be said to you.”
“he was standing on the stern of his huge-hollowed vessel looking out over
the sheer war work and the sorrowful onrush.”
“of all creatures that breathe and move on earth
none is more to be pitied than a man.”
“reading of birds could not keep off dark destruction”
“Your arrows for my tears.”
“The god of war is impartial: he hands out death to the man who hands out death.”
“How I wish that discord could be banished from the world of gods and men, and
with it anger, insidious as trickling honey, anger that makes the wisest man flare up
and spreads like smoke through his whole being”
“It is the height of folly to be wise too late.”
“Man, supposing you and I, escaping this battle, would be able to live on forever, ageless,
immortal, so neither would I myself go on fighting in the foremost 325 nor would I urge
you into the fighting where men win glory. But now, seeing that the spirits of death stand
close about us in their thousands, no man can turn aside nor escape them, let us go on
and win glory for ourselves, or yield it to others.”
Homer, The Iliad, c 8th century BC
