Fate In The Iliad Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

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

His descent was like nightfall.

Nay if even in the house of Hades the dead forget their dead, yet will I even there be mindful of my dear comrade.

Still, we will let all this be a thing of the past, though it hurts us, and beat down by constraint the anger that rises inside us. Now I am making an end of my anger. It does not become me, unrelentingly to rage on

All things are in the hand of heaven, and Folly, eldest of Jove's daughters, shuts men's eyes to their destruction. She walks delicately, not on the solid earth, but hovers over the heads of men to make them stumble or to ensnare them.

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.

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!

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.

A man's life breath cannot come back again-- no raiders in force, no trading brings it back, once it slips through a man's clenched teeth.

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

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.

Achilles glared at him and answered, "Fool, prate not to me about covenants. There can be no covenants between men and lions, wolves and lambs can never be of one mind, but hate each other out and out an through. Therefore there can be no understanding between you and me, nor may there be any covenants between us, till one or other shall fall

Fear, O Achilles, the wrath of heaven; think on your own father and have compassion upon me, who am the more pitiable

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

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.

Sing, O muse, of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.

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.

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

Strife, only a slight thing when she first rears her head but her head soon hits the sky as she strides across the earth.

Is he not sacred, even to the gods, the wandering man who comes in weariness?

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.

...like that star of the waning summer who beyond all stars rises bathed in the ocean stream to glitter in brilliance.

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.

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.

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

…but there they lay, sprawled across the field, craved far more by the vultures than by wives.

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 him submit to me! Only the god of death is so relentless, Death submits to no one—so mortals hate him most of all the gods. Let him bow down to me! I am the greater king, I am the elder-born, I claim—the greater man.

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!

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. And look, you see how handsome and powerful I am? The son of a great man, the mother who gave me life-- A deathless goddess. But even for me, I tell 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.

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.