Top 51 Odysseus's Quotes
#1. It's the quintessential Greek sport: harmonious, competitive, agonizing, nautical, and above all, intelligent. It combines Odysseus's brains and brawn and love of the sea with the tactical precision of the Spartan pikeman.
Barry S. Strauss
#2. The true artist plays mad with his soul, labors at the very lip of the volcano, but remembers and clings to his purpose, which is as strong as the dream. He is not someone possessed, like Cassandra, but a passionate, easily tempted explorer who fully intends to get home again, like Odysseus.
John Gardner
#3. I'd rather be like Odysseus than someone who was handed everything.
Mindy Kaling
#4. You'll come to learn a great deal if you study the Insignificant in depth
Odysseus Elytis
#5. I'm not ashamed of heroic ambitions. If man and woman can only dance upon this earth for a few countable turns of the sun ... let each of us be an Artemis, Odysseus, or Zeus ... Aphrodite to the extent of the will of each one.
Roman Payne
#6. This is why I write. Because poetry begins where death is robbed of the last word.
Odysseus Elytis
#7. Logic has rid us of the absurdity of our clothes. That's progress, no irony, only now we are cold. Hale and ill trade bodies with unusual willingness, while in midair souls tangle. The young start out disgusted and Poetry is left to the memo-writers.
Odysseus Elytis
#8. Odysseus was a great hero in the Trojan War. When he left Troy to sail home to Ithaca, he was lost at sea for ten years. He begged the brave and mighty Zeus for help, and kindly Zeus sent winds to take him home.
Kate McMullan
#9. I am not a hero, I am not Odysseus, there are no gods or goddesses guiding me. All I have is myself. And Hex's sword.
Francesca Lia Block
#10. For that matter, Odysseus himself might have borrowed a trick or two from the rabbit hero, for he is very old and was never at a loss for a trick to deceive his enemies.
Richard Adams
#11. His mind was a tapestry constantly weaving and unweaving with the dedication of Penelope for her Odysseus.
Thomm Quackenbush
#12. I'll be Odysseus. You be Achilles." "Achilles dies in the end." "Then learn from his mistakes.
Pierce Brown
#13. I too have been in the underworld, as was Odysseus, and I will often be there again; not only sheep have I sacrificed so as to beable to speak with a few dead souls, but neither have I spared my own blood as well.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#15. Willing or not, we are all hostages of the joy of which we deprive ourselves. Here springs love's pre-eternal sadness.
Odysseus Elytis
#16. Granted, in order to give selflessly, one often starts giving selfishly. As Tiresias said to Odysseus: "Honey ... you don't get through hell in a hurry"
Frederick Lenz
#17. There will be killing till the score is paid.
Homer
#18. He knew how to say many false things that were like true sayings.
Homer
#19. You are like Odysseus, who could go out onto the great sea, lose all his goods and his friends, come to the boundaries of death, and return still himself.
Gillian Bradshaw
#20. She sent him a warm and gentle wind, and Lord Odysseus was happy as he set his sails to catch the breeze. He sat beside the steering oar and used his skill to steer the raft.
Homer
#21. Odysseus is always slipping out, the man who has been everywhere, seen everything, done everything,
Adam Nicolson
#22. Arete is simply excellence and the striving for excellence in all things," said Odysseus. "Arete simply means the act of offering all actions as a sort of sacrament to excellence, of devoting one's life to finding excellence, identifying it when it offers itself, and achieving it in your own life.
Dan Simmons
#23. He is lost in Agamemnon and Odysseus' wily double meanings, their lies and games of power. They have confounded him, tied him to a stake and baited him. I stroke the soft skin of his forehead. I would untie him if I could. If he would let me.
Madeline Miller
#24. Wise Penelope! That's was Odysseus said to his wife when he got home. I don't think he ever told her he loved her. He probably knew the words would sound too small.
Hugh MacLennan
#25. Someone's war was slashing apart his delicate tapestry of companions. I was Odysseus, I understood the shifting and temporary vetoes of war. But he was a man who made friends with difficulty. He was a man who knew two or three people in his life, and they had turned out now to be the enemy.
Michael Ondaatje
#26. What could you possibly write at Gates of Hades?" Cadmus asked.
"Keep your spirits up." Lycon sheathed the dagger he'd used to chisel the trunk.
Cadmus shook his head. "Idiot.
Sulari Gentill
#27. Was it possible - was it at all possible that she could come out of her most desperate choice with a man as clever as Odysseus who looked like Achilles and made love like Paris ... ?
Sherry Thomas
#28. Forced relations between two things that superficially appear foreign create a new, instantaneous state. Authentic poetry asks nothing more. A kinship completely nonexistent moments ago was created by the poet's authority, just as it might have been created in life by the authority of chance.
Odysseus Elytis
#29. The splendor of youth is, to a point, the splendor of error. Jealous the old, who have everything previewed! The nightingale will never come sing over your wisdom. It won't, darlin', it won't.
Odysseus Elytis
#30. They leaned towards him, like flowers to the sun, drinking in his luster. It was as Odysseus had said: he had light enough to make heroes of them all.
Madeline Miller
#31. Would ride into fire. For Odysseus that whip was pride.
David Gemmell
#32. I think that was E.T.'s central appeal, personally. E.T. is this metaphorical journey, this strange Odysseus from another world, who just wants to go home. Obviously, home must've been better!
Frederick Lenz
#33. There is nothing nobler or more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife ...
Homer
#34. Odysseus had twenty years to shed his battle skin. My grandfather left the battlefield in France and rode home in a ship that crawled across the ocean slowly so he could catch his breath. I get on a plane in hell and get off, hours later, at home.
Laurie Halse Anderson
#36. In a time of disorder [Laertes] has returned to the care of the earth, the foundation of life and hope. And Odysseus finds him in an act emblematic of the best and most responsible kind of agriculture: an old man caring for a young tree. (pg. 123, The Body and the Earth)
Wendell Berry
#37. ODYSSEUS I cannot recommend a rigid spirit.
Sophocles
#38. Odysseus managed to return in secret and slaughter them all - your basic happy homecoming.
Rick Riordan
#39. . . . But if he is truly
Odysseus, home at last, make no mistake:
we two will know each other, even better -
we two have secret signs,
known to us both but hidden from the world.
Homer
#40. Homeric mind is ingenuity, practical intelligence. There is no Rodin-like deep thinking, no mathematical or philosophical speculation. Odysseus thinks with his hands.
Camille Paglia
#41. On these sands and in the clefts of the rocks, in the depths of the sea, in the creaking of the pines, you'll spy secret footprints and catch far-off voices from the homecoming celebration. This land still longs for Odysseus.
Homer
#42. But you must know that only he who fights the darkness within will the day after tomorrow have his own share in the sun.
Odysseus Elytis
#43. The Gods hate hubris in a man almost more than any trait. Remember the boastful words of Odysseus to Poseidon after the fall of Troy? He paid for it with ten years of his life, and the lives of all his men. Retract your boast before something bad happens!
Gary Corby
#44. But when he spoke, that great voice of his poured out of his chest in words like the snowflakes of winter, and then no other mortal could in debate contend with Odysseus. Nor did we care any longer how he looked.
Homer
#45. SIREN, n. One of several musical prodigies famous for a vain attempt to dissuade Odysseus from a life on the ocean wave. Figuratively, any lady of splendid promise, dissembled purpose and disappointing performance.
Ambrose Bierce
#46. What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another. We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory ... We are men only, a brief flare of the torch.
Madeline Miller
#47. The urge to fall [in love] was utterly new and made her [Athena] dizzy. He [Odysseus] could catch her and hold her up. She knew he could.
If this is how Aphrodite feels every day, it's no wonder she's such an idiot.
Kendare Blake
#48. Odysseus and his soldiers to certain destruction. Odysseus
Julie Garwood
#49. They no longer wanted to entice anyone; all they wanted was to catch a glimpse for as long as possible of the reflected glory in the great eyes of Odysseus
Franz Kafka
#50. Still, he'd kept up his membership in the Gun Club. Had taken the girls hunting every chance he could. And still went everywhere with Odysseus - having retired Penelope the day they were married, for Georgie was now closest to his heart.
Deeanne Gist
#51. Coincidence, when raised to a symbol, occurs with mathematical precision at the most crucial moment, even for the squarest of minds. A moment the rest of us call higher will, Fate's gesture, something like that.
Odysseus Elytis
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