Odyssey Quotes

“Throughout our emotional odyssey in the unembellished narrative of our life, we may sense many alluring voices that are enticing us into a beguiling, seamless story. Our inner monologue, however, might start raising consequential questions about the scintillation of that story, about our vulnerability during the tempting process and the danger of losing our real self. The question may be asked, whether the lure might enlighten, weaken or destroy our living. While our interior monologue mostly listens to the wisdom of our experience and the guidance of our memory, it may happen that it prefers not to listen. In that event, however, unreason and passion will be calling all the shots. ( “Woman in progress” )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“The revelation that I’m destined to meet many virgins from the East and the promise of limitless love they hold in their bosoms gives me strength, fortitude, and tenacity—and the wisdom to know that all three are synonyms.”
― Merlin Franco, Saint Richard Parker

“He knew how to say many false things that were like true sayings.”
― Homer

“The night is dark, the lamps are all off, and the moon is new. But my inner eye sees the path. I follow my feet, and my feet follow my soul.”
― Merlin Franco, Saint Richard Parker

“Like a feather, I let you go. To where you belong.”
― Merlin Franco, Saint Richard Parker

“Penelope

In the pathway of the sun,
In the footsteps of the breeze,
Where the world and sky are one,
He shall ride the silver seas,
He shall cut the glittering wave.
I shall sit at home, and rock;
Rise, to heed a neighbor's knock;
Brew my tea, and snip my thread;
Bleach the linen for my bed.
They will call him brave.”
― Dorothy Parker

“The Odyssey is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile. What else is the history of law?”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

“I reread the Odyssey at that time, which I had first read in school and remembered as a story of a homecoming.But it is not a story of a homecoming. How could the Greeks who knew that one never enters the same river twice, believe in homecoming? Odysseus does not return home to stay, but to set off again. The Odyssey is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile.”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

“As you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that your journey be a long one,
filled with adventure, filled with discovery.
Laestrygonians and Cyclopes,
the angry Poseidon--do not fear them:
you'll never find such things on your way
unless your sight is set high, unless a rare
excitement stirs your spirit and your body.
The Laestrygonians and Cyclopes,
the savage Poseidon--you won't meet them
so long as you do not admit them to your soul,
as long as your soul does not set them before you.
Pray that your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings
when with what pleasure, with what joy,
you enter harbors never seen before.
May you stop at Phoenician stations of trade to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and voluptuous perfumes of every kind--
buy as many voluptuous perfumes as you can.
And may you go to many Egyptian cities
to learn and learn from those who know.
Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
You are destined to arrive there.
But don't hurry your journey at all.
Far better if it takes many years,
and if you are old when you anchor at the island,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will give you wealth.
Ithaca has given you a beautiful journey.
Without her you would never have set out.
She has no more left to give you.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not mocked you.
As wise as you have become, so filled with experience,
you will have understood what these Ithacas signify.”
― Barry B. Powell, Classical Myth

“And when long years and seasons wheeling brought around that point of time ordained for him to make his passage homeward, trials and dangers, even so, attended him even in Ithaca, near those he loved.”
― Homer

“It is generally understood that a modern-day book may honorably be based upon an older one, especially since, as Dr. Johnson observed, no man likes owing anything to his contemporaries. The repeated but irrelevant points of congruence between Joyce's Ulysses and Homer's Odyssey continue to attract (though I shall never understand why) the dazzled admiration of critics.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones

“In a time of disorder [Laertes] has returned to the care of the earth, the foundation of life and hope. And Odysseus finds him in an act emblematic of the best and most responsible kind of agriculture: an old man caring for a young tree.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“Ich las damals die Odyssee wieder, die ich erstmals in der Schule gelesen und als die Geschichte einer Heimkehr in Erinnerung behalten hatte. Aber es ist nicht
die Geschichte einer Heimkehr. Wie sollten die Griechen, die wissen, daß man nicht zweimal in denselben Fluß steigt, auch an Heimkehr glauben. Odysseus kehrt nicht zurück, um zu bleiben, sondern um erneut aufzubrechen. Die Odyssee ist die Geschichte einer Bewegung, zugleich zielgerichtet und ziellos, erfolgreich und vergeblich.”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

“Of all that breathes and crawls across the earth,
our mother earth breeds nothing feebler than a man.
So long as the gods grant him power, spring in his knees,
he thinks he will never suffer affliction down the years.
But then, when the happy gods bring on the long hard times,
bear them he must, against his will, and steel his heart.
Our lives, our mood and mind as we pass across the earth,
turn as the days turn...
as the father of men and gods make each day dawn.”
― Homer

“Now they made all secure in the fast black ship,
and, setting out the wine bowls all a-brim,
they made libation to the gods,
the undying, the ever-new,
most of all to the grey-eyed daughter of Zeus.
And the prow sheared through the night into the dawn.

(Translation by Robert Fitzgerald 1961)”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“It is impossible to overrate the importance of Homer on the culture and religion of ancient Greece. It is not that the Iliad and the Odyssey were “the Bible” the way the Hebrew Scriptures or the New Testament were for later Jews and Christians. No one thought these epics were “the inspired and infallible Word of God.” But they were thoroughly known and deeply influential for people in the Greek and Roman worlds as they thought about their lives and the nature of the divine realm. In particular, the views of the afterlife propounded by Homer were massively influential for centuries to come.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“I too seemed destined to be a man of fortune once
and a wild wicked swath I cut, indulged my lust for violence,
stalking all on my father and my brothers.

Look at me now,
And so, I say, let no man ever be lawless all his life,
just take in peace what gifts the gods will send.”
― Homer

“...μετὰ καὶ τόδε τοῖσι γενέσθω.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“You fill my heart with a pain for which i find no cure”
― Homer, Homer's Odyssey

“In this land to fail of marvels only for an hour were the strangest marvel.”
― E.R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros

“The Iliad consists of nothing more than impressions and the use of impressions. An impression prompted Paris to carry off the wife of Menelaus, and an impression prompted Helen to go with him. If an impression, then, had prompted Menelaus to feel that it was a gain to be deprived of such a wife, what would have come about? Not only the Iliad would have been lost, but the Odyssey too!”
― Epictetus

“And in their distant cave and where the threads of life are woven, measured, and always cut short the three sisters of fate always busy at their terrible task smile sardonically' - Odyssey”
― Stephen Fry

“Dogs, did you think that I should not come back from Troy? You have wasted my substance, have forced my women servants to lie with you, and have wooed my wife while I was still living. You have feared neither God nor man, and now you shall die.”
― Homer, Homer: The Odessey

“Inside it Scylla sits and yelps with a voice that you might take to be that of a young hound, but in truth she is a dreadful monster and no one—not even a god—could face her without being terror-struck. She has twelve mis-shapen feet, and six necks of the most prodigious length; and at the end of each neck she has a frightful head with three rows of teeth in each, all set very close together, so that they would crunch any one to death in a moment, and she sits deep within her shady cell thrusting out her heads and peering all round the rock, fishing for dolphins or dogfish or any larger monster that she can catch, of the thousands with which Amphitrite teems. No ship ever yet got past her without losing some men, for she shoots out all her heads at once, and carries off a man in each mouth.”
― Homer, Homer: The Odessey

“Man is the vainest of all creatures that have their being upon earth. As long as heaven vouchsafes him health and strength, he thinks that he shall come to no harm hereafter, and even when the blessed gods bring sorrow upon him, he bears it as he needs must, and makes the best of it; for God almighty gives men their daily minds day by day.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“for there is nothing dearer to a man than his own country and his parents, and however splendid a home he may have in a foreign country, if it be far from father or mother, he does not care about it.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“Then we entered the Straits in great fear of mind, for on the one hand was Scylla, and on the other dread Charybdis kept sucking up the salt water. As she vomited it up, it was like the water in a cauldron when it is boiling over upon a great fire, and the spray reached the top of the rocks on either side. When she began to suck again, we could see the water all inside whirling round and round, and it made a deafening sound as it broke against the rocks. We could see the bottom of the whirlpool all black with sand and mud, and the men were at their wits ends for fear. While we were taken up with this, and were expecting each moment to be our last, Scylla pounced down suddenly upon us and snatched up my six best men. I was looking at once after both ship and men, and in a moment I saw their hands and feet ever so high above me, struggling in the air as Scylla was carrying them off, and I heard them call out my name in one last despairing cry. As a fisherman, seated, spear in hand, upon some jutting rock throws bait into the water to deceive the poor little fishes, and spears them with the ox’s horn with which his spear is shod, throwing them gasping on to the land as he catches them one by one—even so did Scylla land these panting creatures on her rock and munch them up at the mouth of her den, while they screamed and stretched out their hands to me in their mortal agony. This was the most sickening sight that I saw throughout all my voyages.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“We did not get on much further, for in another moment we were caught by a terrific squall from the West that snapped the forestays of the mast so that it fell aft, while all the ship’s gear tumbled about at the bottom of the vessel. The mast fell upon the head of the helmsman in the ship’s stern, so that the bones of his head were crushed to pieces, and he fell overboard as though he were diving, with no more life left in him. “Then Jove let fly with his thunderbolts, and the ship went round and round, and was filled with fire and brimstone as the lightning struck it. The men all fell into the sea; they were carried about in the water round the ship, looking like so many sea-gulls, but the god presently deprived them of all chance of getting home again.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“It is surely more likely that the composer of the Odyssey had the end of the Iliad especially in mind, whether or not both poems are by the same author. It is, however, tempting to go a step further, and to see the similarities as due to the fact that when Homer gave the end of the Iliad the form it has, the Odyssey was already taking shape in his mind: i.e. not only is a single poet the composer of both, but their composition actually overlapped to some extent. Thus we find that not only does the Iliad itself form a great and complex ring-structure, whose end echoes and resolves the themes of its beginning, but it is also inseparably linked or dovetailed thematically with the Odyssey, as if the two works could really almost be regarded as one great epic continuum, stretching from the Wrath of Akhilleus to the safe homecoming and triumph of the last of the heroes, Odysseus.”
― Geoffrey S. Kirk, The Iliad: A Commentary: Volume 6: Books 21-24

“Life is an exhilarating odyssey for the soul. The journey may at times weigh heavily on our heart, mind, and body, but for our spirit it is a soul-stirring adventure every step of the way. Each trial and tribulation we face is another potential victory in a daring quest to fulfill our divine mission.”
― Anthon St. Maarten