Top 100 The Epic Quotes
#1. If we think of the novel and the epic ... The difference lies in the fact that the important thing about the epic is a hero
a man who is a pattern for all men. While, as Mencken pointed out, the essence of most novels lies in the breaking down of a man, in the degeneration of character.
Jorge Luis Borges
#2. The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.
Victor Hugo
#3. The epic disappeared along with the age of personal heroism; there can be no epic with artillery.
Ernest Renan
#4. Sci-fi films are the epic films of the day because we can no longer put 10,000 extras in the scene - but we can draw thousands of aliens with computers.
William Shatner
#5. We must help men and women see the epic in the ordinary details of life.
Matt Chandler
#6. Give lettered pomp to teeth of Time, So "Bonnie Doon" but tarry; Blot out the epic's stately rhyme, But spare his "Highland Mary!"
John Greenleaf Whittier
#7. I said to myself as Junction Point embarked on the Epic Mickey journey that, worst case, we'd be 'a footnote in Disney history.' Looking back on it, I think we did far better than that.
Warren Spector
#8. The Epic?" Raylynn raised her eyebrows. "You actually read through it?" "Of course." Vhalla couldn't fathom who wouldn't finish a book once they'd started.
Elise Kova
#9. While the characters drive the epic story of Robotech, it's the robotic mecha that capture the imagination.
Tommy Yune
#10. Primitive times are lyrical, ancient times epical, modern times dramatic. The ode sings of eternity, the epic imparts solemnity tohistory, the drama depicts life. The characteristic of the first poetry is ingeniousness, of the second, simplicity, of the third, truth.
Victor Hugo
#11. Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.
Ernest Hemingway,
#12. We took Beowulf, the epic poem in Old English, and put it right together with John Gardner's contemporary retelling. If you bring it into today, we really feel that it has something very fresh to say now.
Julie Taymor
#13. The epic story of the West is the development in the 19th century of a mass prosperity the world had never seen and its near-disappearance in one nation after another in the 20th.
Edmund Phelps
#14. A third characteristic is the deliberate multi-styled and heterovoiced nature of all these genres. They reject the stylistic unity (or better, the single-styled nature) of the epic, the tragedy, high rhetoric, the lyric.
Mikhail Bakhtin
#15. In eternity this world will be like Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.
Marilynne Robinson
#16. If Roman Godfrey was a riddle, Shelley was the epic fornication of mystery and enigma
Brian McGreevy
#17. The epic implications of being human end in more than this: We start our lives as if they were momentous stories, with a beginning, a middle and an appropriate end, only to find that they are mostly middles.
Anatole Broyard
#18. Maybe learning how to be out in the big world isn't the epic journey everyone thinks it is. Maybe that's actually the easy part. The hard part is what's right in front of you. The hard part is learning how to hold the title to your very existence, to own not only property, but also your life.
Meghan Daum
#19. The epic poet has behind him a tradition of matter and a tradition of style; and that is what every other poet has behind him too; only, for the epic poet, tradition is rather narrower, rather more strictly compelling.
Lascelles Abercrombie
#20. She thought, Ours is one of the epic loves of our generation. Possibly of all time. Who cares if no one sees it, walking by? This story is s a love song. Who cares if history won't remember?
Lydia Netzer
#21. When the responses elicited by the Epic of Evolution are gathered together several religious principles emerge that I can believe, serve as a framework for a global Ethos.
Ursula Goodenough
#22. The epic explosion of praise for our blessings in Christ (Ephesians 1:1-14) deepens our appreciation of God's almighty rule;
Richard Coekin
#23. The beautiful thing about 'The Strain Trilogy' is the ability to move from gore to high fable to creeping dread to domestic drama to unbearable suspense to the uncanny and on and on. The epic journey is designed to support these swings in mood, and that complements my tastes, which are wide-ranging.
Chuck Hogan
#24. The fact that The Bridge contains folk lore and other material suitable to the epic form need not therefore prove its failure as a long lyric poem, with interrelated sections.
Hart Crane
#25. As the Epic Film, Noah, debuts this weekend, those of you who have read Samrajni of Pemako know about the Noah subplot in the novel.
Yes, Safiya, the protagonist is distantly related to Noah...
Roy C. Marien
#26. I have a tendency to do the epic kind of long shot and put in everything that you need to know. And that's by design; that's the kind of approach I take to it.
Jim Lee
#27. Technology may have shrunk the epic journey to a couple of short car rides and regional jet legs - four states and twelve hundred miles traversed in an afternoon - but true quests aren't measured in time or distance anyway, so much as in hope.
Jess Walter
#28. And now may the blessing of God rest upon all men. I have told unto them the Epic of Kings, and the Epic of Kings is come to a close, and the tale of their deeds is ended.
Ferdowsi
#29. What have you known of loss
That makes you different from other men?
- The Epic of Gilgamesh
Aga Shahid Ali
#30. Actually, I always dreamed about getting a gold medal in the 100-meter freestyle in Olympic swimming. I always thought that would be the epic award in sports to get.
Chris Klein
#31. There is a part of me that likes things that are epic, that's why I think a lot of my songs go to these soundscapes that are cinematic, because I really like the epic storytelling.
Josh Garrels
#32. The culture of the Epic Fail, in its rituals of comic sacrifice, is a culture of sublimated predation.
Mark O'Connell
#33. 'Grey's' is just a machine. I wasn't really prepared for the epic nature of how popular the show is.
Kevin McKidd
#34. The commonalities include the following, in the order of the Moses myth as in the Bible. For the exact book or tablet in which these themes appear, please consult the epic itself.
D.M. Murdock
#35. My prayer as you read this book is that you will find comfort for the disappointment of unanswered prayer, but also courage to continue on the epic journey that prayer is.
Gerald L. Sittser
#36. The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
Walter Benjamin
#37. This presentation was truly a testament to the epic magnitude of getting into Thomas Treadwell's class. This exercise was pointedly not some theoretical simulation dreamed up by an academic with no real-world experience. We were presenting our ideas to real venture capitalists and angel investors.
Mitty Walters
#38. The epic love I've always wanted was with me all along, and it's nothing like what I imagined. It's better, because it's real. It's not perfect or pretty. It's full of mistakes and sacrifices, and sometimes even ugliness.
L. H. Cosway
#39. Of what violences, murders, depredations, have not the epic poets, from all antiquity, been the occasion, by propagating false honor, false glory, and false religion?
Samuel Richardson
#40. Asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form. And those taught that they deserve nothing rightly enjoy it when they succeed in terms the culture understands.
Zadie Smith
#41. Milton says, that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods, and their descent unto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. For poetry is not "Devil's wine," but God's wine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#42. God, Himself, wrote the 10 into stone with his own finger. He told the epic of mankind, our origins and our future, in a book. For me, there is no more noble a cause and no more honorable a vocation than to say, like Him, I am a writer.
Gerard De Marigny
#43. The epic poet collaborates with the spirit of his time in the composition of his work. That is, if he is successful; the time may refuse to work with him, but he may not refuse to work with his time.
Lascelles Abercrombie
#44. We are all walking museums, housing our small portion of the epic human story.
James Hawthorne
#45. Some people stick with the traditional, feeling struck by the epic beauty or blown away by the insane scale of the universe. Personally, I go for the old existential meltdown followed by acting weird for the next half hour. But everyone feels something.
Enrico Fermi
#46. In an age robbed of religious symbols, going to the shops replaces going to the church. We have a free choice, but at a price. We can win experience, but never achieve innocence. Marx knew that the epic activities of the modern world involve not lance and sword but dry goods.
Stephen Bayley
#47. Tens of millions of Russian people died, fighting all sorts of Western expansionism. They defeated Nazism. They helped to liberate much of our world from colonialism. Of course the West never forgave Russia for fighting the epic battles against its expansionism and colonialism.
Andre Vltchek
#48. The architect had not stopped to bother about columns and porticos, proportions or interiors, or any limitation upon the epic he sought to materialize; he had simply made a servant of Nature - art can go no further.
Lew Wallace
#49. Robert Vavra is one of these artists, part magician, part alchemist, who is able to create a series of photographs in unforgettable compositions. Only visible are the dunes, the blinding fields of flowers and the vast sky, the epic intimacy of Robert Vavra's vision.
Peter Ustinov
#50. The struggle to excavate your true, authentic self from beneath the mountain of conditioning and ridiculous expectation is the epic struggle of your lifetime.
Bryant McGill
#51. Prophecy is characteristic for the epic, prediction for the novel.
Mikhail Bakhtin
#52. I love that, for Kanye [West], there's no difference between the epic and the personal. That makes him sound like a really grandiose douche - which, I don't think anyone, himself included, could contest - but at the same time, it's really amazing. I love the scope of his perfectionism.
David Longstreth
#53. There's never been a fantasy movie of the epic battle of good versus evil that ended with evil winning.
David Benioff
#54. I want to return to the epic idea of the grand, big Western, in the sense that 'The Searchers' was.
Ridley Scott
#55. I am all for titillating trivialities. I am all for the epic touch. I could almost say that everything in Time, should be either titillating or epic or starkly, supercurtly factual.
Henry R. Luce
#56. Rationalists believe Gandhari had only two sons, Duryodhana and Dusshasana, who are the only two of the hundred to play a significant role in the epic. They were probably twins, the 'two-year' pregnancy probably meaning 'twin' pregnancy.
Devdutt Pattanaik
#57. That was the part of the epic story about coming back from the dead, being restored to life. "He is risen," it says. He is risen.
Terry Hayes
#58. But the development of human society does not go straight forward; and the epic process will therefore be a recurring process, the series a recurring series - though not in exact repetition.
Lascelles Abercrombie
#59. If you look at 'The X-Files' generally, we did 202 episodes. About 80% of them are not 'mythology' episodes, which tend to be the epic episodes. They deal with the big conspiracies, the search for Mulder's sister. They deal with what I would call the 'saga' of 'The X-Files.'
Chris Carter
#60. Troy is based on the epic poem The Iliad by Homer , according to the credits. Homer's estate should sue.
Roger Ebert
#61. The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.
Victor Hugo
#62. Plot, or evolution, is life responding to environment; and not only is this response always in terms of conflict, but the really great struggle, the epic struggle of creation, is the inner fight of the individual whereby the soul builds up character.
William Wallace Cook
#63. Nothing higher can be accomplished by the epic poet thus interpreting his own time in order to serve the future.
(Foreword by Frederick Ungar in Elective Affinities, 1962, Ungar Publishing)
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#64. Sister Maria Martinez whom I believe I've mentioned before has been giving me cooking classes. Today I learned how to bake mean banana bread. The secret apparently is half a cup of dark rum.
Adele Griffin
#65. Passover takes place in the home rather than the synagogue and centers around an epic meal - the seder - so you remember Passover as storytelling, you remember it in food, and you remember it in the family.
Simon Schama
#66. I would be scared to go under the knife, but you know, talk to me when I'm 50. I'll try anything. Except I won't do Botox again, because I looked crazy. I looked like Joan Rivers!
Gwyneth Paltrow
#67. The calibre of TV's changing. It's becoming much more epic. To rival film, definitely.
Emilia Clarke
#68. It must be remembered that the Iliad and Odyssey were composed as epic tales and not as historical texts. To use Shakespeare's Macbeth as a source for 11th-century Scottish politics would rather miss the point of the play, and the same is true of the Homeric epics.
Nic Fields
#70. The evolutionary epic is ... the best myth we will ever have.
E. O. Wilson
#71. I never shied away from a challenge and I love doing big, epic films. They're interesting to me just on a pure music level, just in terms of the amount of music I could create for a symphony orchestra and chorus.
Howard Shore
#72. I'm sorry ma'am, I said. Really, I had no idea what else to say. I'd spent the weekend caught up in an epic battle to save humanity, and now ... jean shorts?
Richelle Mead
#73. If someone asked you what the greatest good on this earth is, what would you say? An epic surf session? Financial security? Health? Meaningful, trusting friendships? Intimacy with your spouse? Knowing that you belong? The greatest good on this earth is God. Period. God's one goal for us is Himself.
Francis Chan
#74. Jesus didn't die on the cross so we can do something epic. He died so we can have a relationship with an epic God who moves in epic ways!
Alisa Hope Wagner
#75. Zach had been on the receiving end of a few of Lanning's ass-chewings back in the day. They were epic sagas of righteous fury and perfectly applied touches of profanity. It was like being verbally disemboweled.
Christopher Farnsworth
#76. My God, that scene in Monster Inc. where the monsters realise that their entire world is founded on hurting children -look at that for a change! Two galumphing cartoon characters making a shattering realisation about their world and their role in sustaining it. A truly epic moment. It's stunning.
Russell T. Davies
#77. To live is to travel, on a voyage more epic than the odysseys of myth - not from place to place, but through the poignant strangeness of time.
T.L. Rese
#78. We live in the most epic of fantasy worlds.
T.L. Rese
#79. Small men command the letter of the law. Great men serve its spirit. For the spirit of the law is justice ... and justice is the spirit of God.
J.C. Marino
#80. It was just as all the Kettral said: You went to Hook to escape your problems and came back with a dozen more.
Brian Staveley
#81. Good, evil - it all becomes blurred. You go far enough and everything turns to grey. And the power Isaac, you don't understand. The power I have now - I can't let it go. It's in my blood, it's right there in my soul. I can't let it go.
Matthew Head
#83. Work and thou canst escape the reward; whether the work be fine or course, planting corn or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#84. It's a cliche to say this now, but to me, 'The Sopranos' is like Dickens. It's able to take this very focused look at something but make it epic and profound.
Stephen Merchant
#85. Dhoni is the greatest captain of our country. His record is proof of that.
Sourav Ganguly
#86. It is important to tell good stories. You can tell stories even if they are not huge, epic, and wonderful. You can still take the responsibility for being a scribe of your tribe.
Ajay Naidu
#87. Yet gold all is not, that doth gold seem,
Nor all good knights, that shake well spear and shield:
The worth of all men by their end esteem,
And then praise, or due reproach them yield.
Edmund Spenser
#88. I just think the David O. Selznick story is one of the great, epic stories of Hollywood history that nobody knows. Maybe one of the reasons why nobody knows it is because he wasn't a movie star.
Karina Longworth
#89. I have been working. I've been blessed to have shared a movie in the north of Chile called 'The 33,' with Gabriel Byrne and Juliette Binoche and Antonio Banderas, which is the beautiful story of the miners (trapped underground for 69 days in 2010). And then, this incredible, epic story came my way.
Cote De Pablo
#90. My name is Scarlet Stone. I was offered useful traits the day I entered this world. I passed on common sense, opting for the-edge-of-a-knife journey. When I die, I want my gravestone to have the word 'epic' on it somewhere.
Jewel E. Ann
#91. With the first 'Hatchet,' I had an epic battle with the ratings board. They kept giving the movie an NC-17. There is absolutely no way that movie should have gotten an NC-17. All the gore in it is so ridiculous and over-the-top that you can't take it seriously.
Adam Green
#92. In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men (and women) of flesh and blood.
Richard M. Nixon
#93. Every epic collapse, the provost believed, could be traced back to a single moment - a chance meeting, a bad decision, an indiscreet glance.
Dan Brown
#94. Miss MacIntosh, My Darling stands out in my mind as the most significant innovative novel since Ulysses and The Waves. Marguerite Young has added epic grandeur to the philosophical novel. Every page gleams with the poetry of existence.
Nona Balakian
#95. Life is the result of war, and society is the instrument of war... To refuse war means to refuse an epic life
James Palmer
#96. When a mortal man breaks a people, it is always blamed on the gods.
S.M. White
#97. I want to have an epic life. I want to tell my life with big adjectives. I want to forget all the grays in between, and remember the highlights and the dark moments.
Isabel Allende
#98. Yep. His epic good looks without succumbing to the adorable label had made him a man-unicorn in my mind. Or a merman. Or a Loch Ness Monstman. He was a mystical creature.
Penny Reid
#99. James scoffed. "We are not being held prisoner. You're so dramatic."
"Oh yeah, she just kidnapped us and told us the only way we're going to be let go is if we go to other alien planets and steal from them. You're right, James, I'm clearly overly overreacting," Kat snapped.
L. Taylor
#100. Don't cry my son
Don't cry, because life is a redeemed fight
Life is a fight that will demean the weak person
And will always exalt the strong ones
Goncalves Dias
