Fate In The Iliad Quotes

His descent was like nightfall.

Why so much grief for me? No man will hurl me down to Death, against my fate. 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.

Strife and Confusion joined the fight, along with cruel Death, who seized one wounded man while still alive and then another man without a wound, while pulling the feet of one more corpse out from the fight. The clothes Death wore around her shoulders were dyed red with human blood.

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

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.

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

It is entirely seemly for a young man killed in battle to lie mangled by the bronze spear. In his death all things appear fair.

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.

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

Without a sign, his sword the brave man draws, and asks no omen, but his country’s cause.

Why have you come to me here, dear heart, with all these instructions? I promise you I will do everything just as you ask. But come closer. Let us give in to grief, however briefly, in each other’s arms.

I wish that strife would vanish away from among gods and mortals, and gall, which makes a man grow angry for all his great mind, that gall of anger that swarms like smoke inside of a man’s heart and becomes a thing sweeter to him by far than the dripping of honey.

Fate is the same for the man who holds back, the same if he fights hard. We are all held in a single honor, the brave with the weaklings. A man dies still if he has done nothing, as the one who has done much.

The gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment may 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.

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

A multitude of rulers is not a good thing. Let there be one ruler, one king.

And his good wife will tear her cheeks in grief, his sons are orphans and he, soaking the soil red with his own blood, he rots away himself-more birds than women flocking round his body!