We are perpetually labouring to destroy our delights, our composure, our devotion to superior power. Of all the animals on earth we least know what is good for us. My opinion is, that what is best for us is our admiration of good.
What a lamentable thing it is that men should blame the gods and regard us as the source of their troubles, when it is their own wickedness that brings them sufferings worse than any which destiny allots them.
For my part I have no joy in tears after dinnertime. There will always be a new dawn tomorrow. Yet I can have no objection to tears for any mortal who dies and goes to his destiny. And this is the only consolation we wretched mortals can give, to cut our hair and let the tears roll down our faces.
Her heart raced with joy to sleep with War.
It is hateful to me to tell a story over again, when it has been well told.
Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles.
Very like leaves upon this earth are the generations of men – old leaves, cast on the ground by wind, young leaves the greening forest bears when spring comes in. So mortals pass; one generation flowers even as another dies away.
My mother Thetis tells me that there are two ways in which I may meet my end. If I stay here and fight, I will not return alive but my name will live forever: whereas if I go home my name will die, but it will be long ere death shall take me.
The gods are hard to handle – when they come blazing forth in their true power.
It has been an easy, and a popular expedient of late years, to deny the personal or real existence of men and things whose life and condition were too much for our belief.
I am going to stand against him now, though his hands are like flame, though his hands are like flame, and his heart like the shining of iron.
You must endure and not be broken-hearted.
As a bull roars when feeding in the field, so roared the goodly door touched by the key and open flew before her.
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.
For lo? my words no fancied woes relate; I speak from science and the voice of fate.
In The Odyssey, we find instead the story of a man whose grand adventure is simply to go back to his own home, where he tries to turn everything back to the way it was before he went away. For this hero, mere survival is the most amazing feat of all.
Grief wrapped around her, eating at her heart. The house was full of chairs but she could not bear to sit upright.
If something rude of any kind was said, let the winds take it.
The spearhead sliced right through to the flesh, And when Diomedes pulled it out, Ares yelled, so loud you would have thought Ten thousand warriors had shouted at once, And the sound reverberated in the guts of Greeks and Trojans, As if Diomedes had struck not a god in armor But a bronze gong nine miles high.
Probability is a powerful and troublesome test; and it is by this troublesome standard that a large portion of historical evidence is sifted. Consistency is no less pertinacious and exacting in its demands.