Quotes about Homer

141 Sourced Quotes

It would be foolhardy to swell the pages of this book with an exhaustive list of Greco-Hebrew differences. Everyone knows that Homer is very different from the Bible.

Cyrus H. Gordon

Homer often calls kings shepherds of the people, but nature more accurately applies the title to the good, since kings are more often in the position of the sheep than of the shepherd. They are led by strong drink and good looks and by baked meats and savory dishes and the dainties produced by cooks and confectioners, to say nothing of their craving for silver and gold and grander ambitions.

Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.

To My Friend John Sylvester, Just a few words reminding you that I have not forgotten my sick little pal. Sorry I couldn't get out to see you but here's hoping this little message of cheer finds you well on the road to recovery. I will try to knock you another homer maybe two today. Best regards from your friend and rooter, Babe Ruth.

The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad. Time does not make their voices fainter, on the contrary, it reinforces our sense of their truth-telling capacity.

Homer himself must beg if he want means, and as by report sometimes he did "go from door to door and sing ballads, with a company of boys about him."

The translator of Homer should above all be penetrated by a sense of four qualities of his author: — that he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally, that he is eminently noble.

The Framers did not pioneer the concept of man as a personally responsible agent. That notion, arguably the greatest of all Western ideas, dates to line 32 of Homer's Odyssey, where Zeus asks people to stop blaming their bad choices on the gods.

Those oft are stratagems which errors seem,
Nor is it Homer nods, but we that dream.

Ages elapsed ere Homer's lamp appear'd,
And ages ere the Mantuan swan was heard:
To carry nature lengths unknown before,
To give a Milton birth, ask'd ages more.

The saying of the noble and glorious Aeschylus, who declared that his tragedies were large cuts taken from Homer's mighty dinners.

Upon being asked whether he would rather be Achilles or Homer:

Which would you rather be—a victor in the Olympic games, or the announcer of the victor?

Verse no longer stands at the centre of communicative discourse. It is no longer, as it was from Homer to Milton, the natural repository of knowledge and traditional sentiment. It no longer gives to society its main record of past grandeur or its natural setting for prophecy, as it did in Virgil and Dante. Verse has grown private. It is a special language which the individual poet insinuates, by force of personal genius, into the awareness of his contemporaries, persuading to learn and perhaps hand on his own uses of words. Poetry has become essentially lyric — that is to say, it is the poetry of private vision rather than of public or of national occasion.

And this is that Homer's golden chain, which reacheth down from heaven to earth, by which every creature is annexed, and depends on his Creator.

We welcome almost any break in the monotony of things, and a man has only to murder a series of wives in a new way to become known to millions of people who have never heard of Homer.

Robert Wilson Lynd

When Paul's Foundations was published in the 1940s, readers experienced a kind of revelation that created a sensation. This brings to mind the post-WWI public's similar reaction to Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Critics compared Proust's prolific writings to those of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. But, what a difference in Proust's and Paul's dispositions!

Michael Szenberg

Only two people in East Mediterranean antiquity developed [parallel tendecies towards] "canonical" Scripture: the Greeks and the Jews. The Greeks treated Homer as their Scripture par excellence, much as the Jews regarded the Bible.... Hebrew and pagan Greek scriptures were each considered the divinely inspired guide for life.

Cyrus H. Gordon

The Trojan War without Homer was nothing more than a battle over trade routes.

Would Alexander, madman as he was, have been so much a madman, had it not been for Homer?

Samuel Richardson

Whatever the poets pretend, it is plain they give immortality to none but themselves; it is Homer and Virgil we reverence and admire, not Achilles or Aeneas. With historians it is quite the contrary; our thoughts are taken up with the actions, persons, and events we read, and we little regard the authors.

To those who ask if I have read their book, I reply: I have not yet read Homer.

Natalie Clifford Barney

The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.

I am displeased when sometimes even the worthy Homer nods.

"Mrs. Sandoval," Homer said swiftly, "your son is dead. Maybe it's a mistake. Maybe it wasn't your son. Maybe it was somebody else. The telegram says it was Juan Domingo. But maybe the telegram is wrong."

William Saroyan

He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.

Traffic in marijuana is increasing to such an extent that it has come to the be cause for the greatest national concern.
This drug is as old as civilization itself. Homer wrote about, as a drug that made men forget their homes, and that turned them into swine. In Persia, a thousand years before Christ, there was a religious and military order founded which was called the Assassins and they derived their name from the drug called hashish which is now known in this country as marihuana. They were noted for their acts of cruelty, and the word "assassin" very aptly describes the drug.

Harry J. Anslinger

The Greek world will continue in almost constant cultural revolution from the time of Homer to the day Rome brings Greece to its knees in the second century B. C.... the longest trajectory of fluid development in any society known to history.

There are no moral or intellectual merits. Homer composed the Odyssey; if we postulate an infinite period of time, with infinite circumstances and changes, the impossible thing is not to compose the Odyssey, at least once.

Jorge Luis Borges

I am, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school; Walter Scott's school, that is to say, and Homer's.

Human justice is ever lagging after wrong, as the prayers in Homer came limping after sin.

William Ewart Gladstone