And empty words are evil.

I also became a poet, and for one year lived in a Paradise of my own creation; I imagined that I also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and...

There are five dangerous faults which may affect a general:(1) Recklessness, which leads to destruction;(2) cowardice, which leads to capture;(3) a hasty temper, which can be provoked by insults;(4) a delicacy of honor which is...

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

I “love” reading.It makes me feel like I am swallowing up Christ, Homer, Confucius, Newton, Franklin, Socrates, Caesar, and the whole world into one gigantic invincible Sir Moffat. Mine is creative reading. I read building...

but sing no more this bitter tale that wears my heart away

Troy owes to Homer what whist owes to Hoyle

To alcohol! The cause of… and solution to… all of life’s problems

Primary Epic is great, but not with the greatness of the later kind. In Homer, its greatness lies in the human and personal tragedy built up against this background of meaningless flux. It is all...

Question me now about all other matters, but do not ask who I am, for fear you may increase in my heart it’s burden of sorrow as I think back; I am very full of...

What Pascal overlooked was the hair-raising possibility that God might out-Luther Luther. A special area in hell might be reserved for those who go to mass. Or God might punish those whose faith is prompted...

Never on me let such wrath lay hold, as the wrath you cherish, you whose valor causes harm!

Not like Homer would I write,Not like Dante if I might,Not like Shakespeare at his best,Not like Goethe or the rest,Like myself, however small,Like myself, or not at all.

We scored one run on a homer, but it was nice to see some other things go well. We had a couple guys walk, a couple base hits, a couple hits with runners in scoring...

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

…[T]he three greatest works are those of Homer, Dante and Shakespeare.These are closely followed by the works of Virgil and Milton.

I fancied my luck to be witnessing yet another full moon. True, I’d seen hundreds of full moons in my life, but they were not limitless. When one starts thinking of the full moon as...

After Homer and Dante, is a whole century of creating worth one Shakespeare?

I took the sheep and cut their throats over the pit, and let the dark blood flow. Then there gathered the spirits of the dead, brides and unwed youths, old men worn out by labour,...

Alexander the Great slept with ‘The Iliad’ beneath his pillow. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ as if it were the sweet body of a woman.

Plato utterly condemns the poets for publishing trivial, false and indeed wicked stories about the gods, such as that they fight with each other, or are overcome by emotions like grief, anger, mirth. Reluctantly, he...

It is always as it was between Achilles and Homer: one person has the experience, the sensation, the other describes it. A real writer only gives words to the affects and experiences of others; he...

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation...

As to the need of improvement there can be no question whilst the reign of Euclid continues. My own idea of a useful course is to begin with arithmetic, and then not Euclid but algebra....

Ingersoll is with Homer and Tully and Shakespeare and Burns.

Fate is the same for the man who holds back, the same if he fights hard.We are all held in a single honour, the brave with the weaklings.A man dies still if he has done...

I have not been nourished by English Literature. . . for the simple reason that I have never found much there in which to rest my heart (or heart and head together). I was brought...

tout aboutit en un livre,” everything ends up in a book. The Greeks speak of generations that will sing; Mallarmé speaks of an object, of a thing among things, a book. But the idea is...

After so many years even the fire of passion dies, and with it what was believed the light of the truth. Who of us is able to say now whether Hector or Achilles was right,...

For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations, as in ancient Greece in the time of Homer, where there were gods of the sky and the Earth, the...