Top 79 The Iliad Quotes
#1. We condemn the Inquisition in the name of Christian values. After all, we can't condemn it in the name of the Mahabharata, which is comprised of a series of alternating murders, rather like the Iliad!
Rene Girard
#2. In Homer and Chaucer there is more of the innocence and serenity of youth than in the more modern and moral poets. The Iliad is not Sabbath but morning reading, and men cling to this old song, because they still have moments of unbaptized and uncommitted life, which give them an appetite for more.
Henry David Thoreau
#3. Stripped of its plot, the 'Iliad' is a scattering of names and biographies of ordinary soldiers: men who trip over their shields, lose their courage or miss their wives. In addition to these, there is a cast of anonymous people: the farmers, walkers, mothers, neighbours who inhabit its similes.
Alice Oswald
#4. It doesn't seem to me that anyone has discovered much that's new since the Iliad or the Odyssey.
Raymond Queneau
#5. No one in the Iliad is spared by it, as no one on earth is. No one who succumbs to it is by virtue of this fact regarded with contempt.
Simone Weil
#6. If one puts an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters, and lets them clap away, there is a certainty that one of them will come out with an exact version of the 'Iliad.'
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#7. For while my classmates found The Iliad too bloody for their taste, an endless catalogue of men butchering one another after formally introducing themselves, I thrilled to the stabbings and beheadings, the gouging out of eyes, the juicy eviscerations.)
Jeffrey Eugenides
#8. 'The Iliad' is about a war 1,200 years ago that solved nothing and achieved nothing. Most of our wars achieve very little. But whatever agenda I have gets buried in a work this great. If you're being honest, you realize that, as an artist, you're not a policy maker.
Denis O'Hare
#9. This is where the Iliad begins, and it should be the focus of all my energies and professional skills, but the truth is that I don't really give a shit.
Dan Simmons
#10. When I was nine, I started reading Homer. I would get up at four o'clock in the morning, before I had to go to school, in third or fourth grade, and, for several hours, I would read 'The Iliad' or 'The Odyssey.'
Franz Wright
#11. In the power and splendor of the universe, inspiration waits for the millions to come. Man has only to strive for it. Poems greater than the Iliad, plays greater than Macbeth, stories more engaging than Don Quixote await their seeker and finder.
John Masefield
#12. With Cosette's garter, Homer would make the Iliad. He would put into his poem an old babbler like me, and he would call him Nestor.
Victor Hugo
#13. It's hard to write a war story without thinking about the 'Iliad.' Because the 'Iliad' knows everything about war.
Chang-rae Lee
#14. The Iliad is only great because all life is a battle, The Odyssey because all life is a journey, The Book of Job because all life is a riddle.
G.K. Chesterton
#15. Something greater than the Iliad now springs to birth -Nescio quid maius nascitur Iliade
Propertius
#16. At last the armies clashed at one strategic point, They slammed their shields together, pike scraped pike With the grappling strength of fighters armed in bronze And their round shields pounded, boss on welded boss, And the sound of struggle roared and rocked the earth. The Iliad, Book 4
Rick Atkinson
#17. The Iliad is the private lives of people thrown into disorder by history.
Raymond Queneau
#18. I practiced on the greatest model of storytelling we've got, which is "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey." I told those stories many, many times.
Philip Pullman
#19. Fiction has consisted either of placing imaginary characters in a true story, which is the Iliad, or of presenting the story of an individual as having a general historical value, which is the Odyssey.
Raymond Queneau
#20. Why can't death - if we must have it - be always glorious, as in 'The Iliad?'
P. J. O'Rourke
#21. No particular music makes me feel nostalgic. If it's great, it just keeps me in the present moment. That level of music is like a classic story, like the Iliad-something so perfect it can never be old.
Wynton Marsalis
#22. A Kindle returns us to the inconvenience of the scroll, except with batteries and electronic glitches. It's as handy as bringing Homer along to recite the 'Iliad' while playing a lyre.
P. J. O'Rourke
#24. [I] thought of that line from The Iliad I love so much, about Pallas Athene and the terrible eyes shining.
Donna Tartt
#25. The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.
Aldous Huxley
#26. One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey.
Raymond Queneau
#27. I have looked warily at anthropologists ever since the day when I went to hear a great Greek scholar lecture on the Iliad, and listened for an hour to talk about bull-roarers and leopard-societies.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
#28. Troy is based on the epic poem The Iliad by Homer , according to the credits. Homer's estate should sue.
Roger Ebert
#29. If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.
G.K. Chesterton
#30. Be that blind bard who on the Chian strand, By those deep sounds possessed with inward light, Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssey Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#31. For all the import and message of 'The Iliad,' it's ultimately a story that's meant to be heard, and the person hearing 'The Iliad' determines what it means.
Denis O'Hare
#32. Gregorian chant, Romanesque architecture, the Iliad , the invention of geometry were not, for the people through whom they were brought into being and made available to us, occasions for the manifestation of personality.
Simone Weil
#33. 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
#34. The Odyssey is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the original romance of the West; but the Iliad, though a magnificent poem, is not much of a story.
George Saintsbury
#35. I suppose it's true that most great television, literature, and other forms of high art (and basic cable) benefit from a little hindsight. 'M.A.S.H.' comes to mind. So does 'The Iliad.'
Kevin Bleyer
#36. 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
#37. Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.
Patrick Kavanagh
#38. The earliest full-length account of a chariot race appears in Book xxiii of the Iliad.
Richard Arnold Epstein
#39. 'The Odyssey' is the great tale, and I was really taken by 'The Iliad,' so I dig into those things, and when I was a kid I didn't. You've gotta have a certain level of understanding yourself before that stuff really starts to resonate.
Karl Marlantes
#40. The ancient world is always accessible, no matter what culture you come from. I remember when I was growing up in India and I read the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey.'
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#41. The Colors, The Iliad, Ulysses, Metamorphosis, the Theban plays, The Draconic Labels, Anabasis, and restricted works like The Count of Monte Cristo, Lord of the Flies, Lady Casterly's Penance, 1984, and The Great Gatsby. I
Pierce Brown
#42. 'Troy' is an adaptation of the Trojan War myth in its entirety, not 'The Iliad' alone. 'The Iliad' begins with the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon over the slave girl Briseis nine years into the war. The equivalent scene occurs halfway through my script.
David Benioff
#43. I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.
Andre Dubus
#44. I wanted to know if the 'Iliad' in the original was as relevant and contemporary as it was in translation. I then started Latin. I had finally found something I enjoyed and was good at: dead languages!
Caroline Lawrence
#45. The Bible is to religion what the Iliad is to poetry
Joseph Joubert
#46. But which of us has read every line of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or The Divine Comedy, or Paradise Lost? Only men of epic stomach can digest these epic tales.
Will Durant
#47. Creative writing teachers should be purged until every last instructor who has uttered the words 'Write what you know' is confined to a labor camp. Please, talented scribblers, write what you don't. The blind guy with the funny little harp who composed The Iliad, how much combat do you think he saw?
P. J. O'Rourke
#48. Alexander the Great slept with
'The Iliad' beneath his pillow.
Though I've never led an army,
I am a wanderer. I cradle
'The Odyssey' nights while the
moon is waning, as if it were
the sweet body of a woman.
Roman Payne
#49. In those days, when my hands were much employed, I read but little, but the least scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my holder, or tablecloth, afforded me as much entertainment, in fact answered the same purpose as the Iliad.
Henry David Thoreau
#50. I've always felt, with 'The Iliad,' a real frustration that it's read wrong. That it's turned into this public school poem, which I don't think it is. That glamorising of war, and white-limbed, flowing-haired Greek heroes - it's become a cliched, British empire part of our culture.
Alice Oswald
#51. Lastly, this threefold poetry flows from three great sources - The Bible, Homer, Shakespeare ... The Bible before the Iliad, the Iliad before Shakespeare.
Victor Hugo
#52. The first dictionaries were glossaries of Homeric words, intended to help Romans read the Iliad and Odyssey as well as other Greek literature employing the 'archaic' Homeric vocabulary.
Mortimer J. Adler
#53. If you put a real leaf and a silk leaf side by side, you'll see something of the difference between Homer's poetry and anyone else's. There seem to be real leaves still alive in the 'Iliad,' real animals, real people, real light attending everything.
Alice Oswald
#54. The genuine remains of Ossian, or those ancient poems which bear his name, though of less fame and extent, are, in many respects,of the same stamp with the Iliad itself. He asserts the dignity of the bard no less than Homer, and in his era, we hear of no other priest than he.
Henry David Thoreau
#55. Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, tuned the English tongue.
Harold Bloom
#56. Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order.
Harold Bloom
#57. One of the rules of Greek lament poetry is that it mustn't mention the dead by name in case of invoking a ghost. Maybe the 'Iliad,' crowded with names, is more than a poem. Maybe it's a dangerous piece of the brightness of both this world and the next.
Alice Oswald
#58. Epic stories, especially 'quest narratives' like 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey,' are brilliant structures for storytelling. The quest lends itself to episodic storytelling.
Simon Toyne
#59. He will find one English book and one only, where, as in the "Iliad" itself, perfect plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness; and that book is the Bible.
Matthew Arnold
#60. The Iliad represents no creed nor opinion, and we read it with a rare sense of freedom and irresponsibility, as if we trod on native ground, and were autochthones of the soil.
Henry David Thoreau
#61. Acadia "Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again." Homer, The Iliad
Mia Sheridan
#62. This found its classic expression in Homer's Iliad, in which Glaucus says to Diomedes that he still hears his father's urgings ringing in his ears: Always be the best, my boy, the bravest, and hold your head high above the others.
Anthony Everitt
#63. Without oblivion, there is no remembrance possible. When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past.
Thomas Carlyle
#64. It was built against the will of the immortal gods, and so it did not last for long.
Homer
#65. Strife, only a slight thing when she first rears her head but her head soon hits the sky as she strides across the earth.
Homer
#66. He knew the things that were and the things that would be and the things that had been before.
Homer
#67. A very great Iliad ... concerns the creation of a nation.
Raymond Queneau
#68. 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.
Homer
#69. Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.
Homer
#70. Homer's Iliad was the cultural encyclopedia of pre-literate Greece, the didactic vehicle that provided men with guidance for the management of their spiritual, ethical, and social lives.
Marshall McLuhan
#71. Nay if even in the house of Hades the dead forget their dead, yet will I even there be mindful of my dear comrade.
Homer
#72. Choose,' she says, reaching out towards him. 'Choose to which of us the apple most belongs...
Emily Hauser
#73. His tales took on the form of an epic poem, and I felt I was hearing some Canadian Homer reciting his Iliad of the High Arctic regions.
Jules Verne
#74. After so many years even the fire of passion dies, and with it what was believed the light of the truth. Who of us is able to say now whether Hector or Achilles was right, Agamemnon or Priam, when they fought over the beauty of a woman who is now dust and ashes?
Umberto Eco
#75. Sing, O muse, of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.
Homer
#76. Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nordrove back Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor abolished slavery.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#77. The Odyssey and Iliad say things about the human condition in ways we should re-acquaint ourselves with, and use as a prism to interpret though.
Robert Dessaix
#78. Antilochus! You're the most appalling driver in the world! Go to hell!
Homer
#79. No ancient story, not even Homer's Iliad or Odyssey, has remained as popular through the course of time. The story of Rama appears as old as civilization and has a fresh appeal for every generation.
David Frawley
