The Iliad Quotes

Be strong, saith my heart; I am a soldier; I have seen worse sights than this.

You, why are you so afraid of war and slaughter? Even if all the rest of us drop and die around you, grappling for the ships, you’d run no risk of death: you lack the heart to last it out in combat—coward!

The proud heart feels not terror nor turns to run and it is his own courage that kills him.

Like a girl, a baby running after her mother, begging to be picked up, and she tugs on her skirts, holding her back as she tries to hurry off—all tears, fawning up at her, till she takes her in her arms… That’s how you look, Patroclus, streaming live tears.

But listen to me first and swear an oath to use all your eloquence and strength to look after me and protect me.

I say no wealth is worth my life!

My life is more to me than all the wealth of Ilius

There is the heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover’s whisper, irresistible—magic to make the sanest man go mad.

Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.

Let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter.

Any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.

Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men. Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth, now the living timber bursts with the new buds and spring comes round again. And so with men: as one generation comes to life, another dies away.

We men are wretched things.

And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you - it’s born with us the day that we are born.

No one can hurry me down to Hades before my time, but if a man’s hour is come, be he brave or be he coward, there is no escape for him when he has once been born.

No man or woman born, coward or brave, can shun his destiny.

Come, Friend, you too must die. Why moan about it so? Even Patroclus died, a far, far better man than you.

Death and the strong force of fate are waiting. There will come a dawn or sunset or high noon when a man will take my life in battle too -- flinging a spear perhaps or whipping a deadly arrow off his bow.

His descent was like nightfall.

There is nothing alive more agonized than man of all that breathe and crawl across the earth.

Beauty! Terrible Beauty! A deathless Goddess-- so she strikes our eyes!

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.

Now I am making an end of my anger. It does not become me, unrelentingly to rage on.

The roaring seas and many a dark range of mountains lie between us.

Ruin, eldest daughter of Zeus, she blinds us all, that fatal madness—she with those delicate feet of hers, never touching the earth, gliding over the heads of men to trap us all. She entangles one man, now another.

“Yes. Read The Iliad. It’s full of references to the stuff. Whenever divine or monstrous elements mix with the mortal world, they generate Mist, which obscures the vision of humans. You will see things just as they are, being a half-blood, but humans will interpret things quite differently. Remarkable, really, the lengths to which humans will go to fit things into their version of reality.”