Adam Nicolson Quotes

#1. T's [King James Bible] subject is majesty, not tyranny, and it's political purpose was unifying and enfolding, to elide the kingliness of God with the godliness of kings, to make royal power and divine glory into one invisible garment which could be wrapped around the nation as a whole.

Adam Nicolson

#2. There are 201 words in the Iliad and the Odyssey that occur only once in Homer and never again in the whole of Greek literature.

Adam Nicolson

#3. The place has entered me...it has coloured my life like a stain.

Adam Nicolson

#4. A puritan is such a one as loves God with all his soul, but hates his neighbor with all his heart.

Adam Nicolson

#5. The earliest complete Odyssey to have survived is from the late tenth century, now in Michelangelo's Laurentian Library in Florence,

Adam Nicolson

#6. The first printed Greek Homer had appeared in 1488, in Florence, published by an Athenian, Demetrius Chalcondyles,

Adam Nicolson

#7. There will be no peace until the violence is done. Peace is inaccessible without the violence, because violence is righteousness in action.

Adam Nicolson

#8. For which he had to pay "1 panegyrick poem every year." That is Homeric rent.

Adam Nicolson

#9. In those days, now it was in those days, In those nights, now it was in those nights, In those years, now it was in those years

Adam Nicolson

#10. The 19th century had chosen only to remember the happy warrior. The 20th century only the blood come gargling. Both are essential to any understanding of Trafalgar.

Adam Nicolson

#11. A poet who knew that a war leader in his speech on the eve of battle will be both a man of civilization and its raging opposite.

Adam Nicolson

#12. These are the two possibilities for human life.

Adam Nicolson

#13. The Enquiry in England,' Blake said, 'is not whether a man has talents and genius, but whether he is passive and polite and a virtuous ass and obedient to noblemen's opinions in arts and science.

Adam Nicolson

#14. 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.

Adam Nicolson

#15. Recognizing that I had understood something that evening: the banality of one's own death, so much less terrible than the death of someone you love;

Adam Nicolson

#16. For them, and for Homer, impermanence is life's central sorrow and the source of its most lasting pain.

Adam Nicolson

#17. The first objects to be designed with the sole purpose of killing another person.

Adam Nicolson

#18. One eighteenth-century bard was given a lovely estate in Harris by his MacLeod chief,

Adam Nicolson

#19. Odysseus is always slipping out, the man who has been everywhere, seen everything, done everything,

Adam Nicolson

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

Adam Nicolson

#21. in 1944 the Germans executed brutal, slaughtering attacks on the people of mountain Crete.

Adam Nicolson

#22. As the generation of leaves, so too is the generation of men. And as for leaves, the winds scatter some on the earth, But the new wood puts forth others, and spring comes again. So it is with men: as one generation is born, another dies.

Adam Nicolson

#23. Iliad's subject is not war or its wickedness but a crisis in how to be.

Adam Nicolson