Tao Te Ching

The Power of Goodness, the Wisdom Beyond Words
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Homer

850 BCE - ?

Primogenitor of Western culture

Called by Plato the “first teacher” and "leader of Greek culture,” Homer spread an immense influence over all Western culture. A blind bard prophet, his books the Iliad and Odyssey represent the first European literature as well as one of the main influences that shaped Western culture. The “Greek Bible,” these books taught the best behavior for almost any situation with true and timeless images of human goodness and wisdom. Describing the most enduring legends known to the Western world, these universal themes inspire and enlighten.

Eras

Sources

Iliad

Odyssey, Ὀδύσσεια

Unlisted Sources

Quotes by Homer (43 quotes)

“A small rock holds back a great wave.”

Chapters: 60. Less is More

Themes: Less is More

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“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.”

from Iliad

Chapters: 24. Unnecessary Baggage

Themes: Death and Dying

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“Empty words are evil.”

Chapters: 56. One with the Dust

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“How prone to doubt, how cautious are the wise!”

from Iliad

Chapters: 63. Easy as Hard

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“I didn't lie! I just created fiction with my mouth!”

Chapters: 65. Simplicity: the Hidden Power of Goodness

Themes: Lies Deception

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“I say no wealth is worth my life!”

Chapters: 44. Fame and Fortune

Themes: Wealth

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“Life is largely a matter of expectation.”

Chapters: 81. Journey Without Goal

Themes: Projection

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“The journey is the thing.”

Chapters: 81. Journey Without Goal

Themes: Travel

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“There in the heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover’s whisper, irresistible–magic to make the sanest man go mad.”

Chapters: 41. Distilled Life

Themes: Sex Magic

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“Discontent springs from a constant endeavor to increase the amount of our claims when we are powerless to increase the amount which will satisfy them.”

from Odyssey, Ὀδύσσεια

Themes: Suffering Hope

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“Wake, wake up! See with your own eyes what all these years you longed for!”

from Odyssey, Ὀδύσσεια

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“The glorious heaven stretches itself to its widest and the multitudinous stars sparkle
Gladdening the hearts of the toil-wearied shepherds
While champing, war-wearied horses close by their chariots wait the coming of gold-throned dawn.”

from Iliad

Themes: Sacred World

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“Men grow tired of sleep, love, singing and dancing sooner than war.”

from Iliad

Themes: War

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“'Tis man's to fight, but Heaven's to give victory.”

from Iliad

Themes: Victory

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“All strangers and beggars are from Zeus, and a gift, though small, is precious.”

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“How vain, without the merit, is the name.”

from Iliad

Themes: Fame

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“there is nothing greater and better than this—when a husband and wife keep a household in oneness of mind”

Themes: Marriage Family

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“murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses, hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls, great fighters' souls, but made their bodies carrion, feasts for the dogs and birds.”

from Iliad

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“Dreams come from Zeus.”

from Iliad

Themes: Dream

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“Ah, no wonder the men of Troy and Argives under arms have suffered years of agony all for her, for such a woman. Beauty, terrible beauty!”

from Iliad

Themes: Beauty Desire

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“As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity.”

from Iliad

Themes: Impermanence

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“And some day let them say of him: 'He is better by far than his father.'”

from Iliad

Themes: Progress

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“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.”

from Iliad

Themes: Fate / Destiny

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“As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night,
O'er heaven's clear azure spreads her sacred light,
Then shine the vales, the rocks in prospect rise,
A flood of glory bursts from all the skies.”

from Iliad

Themes: Moon

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“Who dares think one thing, and another tell, my heart detests him as the gates of hell.”

from Iliad

Themes: Hate

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“Life and death are balanced as it were on the edge of a razor.”

from Iliad

Themes: Equanimity

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“A physician is worth more than several other men put together, for he can cut out arrows and spread healing herbs.”

from Iliad

Themes: Medicine

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“To some the powers of bloody war belong, to some, sweet music, and the charm of song; To few, and wondrous few, has Jove assigned a wise, extensive, all-considering mind.”

from Iliad

Themes: Mind

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“No shame in running,fleeing disaster, even in pitch darkness. Better to flee from death than feel its grip.”

from Iliad

Themes: Strategy

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“In this was every art, and every charm,
To win the wisest, and the coldest warm:
Fond love, the gentle vow, the gay desire,
The kind deceit, the still reviving fire,
Persuasive speech, and more persuasive sighs,
Silence that spoke, and eloquence of eyes.”

from Iliad

Themes: Prostitution

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“If only strife could die from the lives of gods and men and anger that drives the sanest man to flare in outrage—bitter gall, sweeter than dripping streams of honey, that swarms in people's chests and blinds like smoke.”

from Iliad

Themes: Anger

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“The recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all.”

from Odyssey, Ὀδύσσεια

Themes: Mistakes

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“See now, how men lay blame upon us gods for what is after all nothing but their own folly.”

from Odyssey, Ὀδύσσεια

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“My soul shall bear that also; for, by practice taught, I have learned patience, having much endured.”

from Odyssey, Ὀδύσσεια

Themes: Patience

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“And may the gods accomplish your desire: a home, a husband, and harmonious converse with him – the best thing in the world being a strong house held in serenity where man and wife agree. Woe to their enemies, joy to their friends!”

from Odyssey, Ὀδύσσεια

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“Jove weighs affairs of earth in dubious scales, and the good suffers, while the bad prevails.”

from Odyssey, Ὀδύσσεια

Themes: Karma

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“a friend with an understanding heart is worth no less than a brother.”

from Odyssey, Ὀδύσσεια

Themes: Friendship

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“The blessed gods have no love for crime. They honor justice, honor the decent acts of men.”

from Odyssey, Ὀδύσσεια

Themes: Justice Crime

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“Meanwhile let us two, here in the hut, over our food and wine, regale ourselves with the unhappy memories that each can recall. For a man who has been through bitter experiences and traveled far can enjoy even his sufferings after a time.”

from Odyssey, Ὀδύσσεια

Themes: Pleasure Memory

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“Man is the vainest of all creatures that have their being upon earth.”

from Odyssey, Ὀδύσσεια

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“The immortals give each thing its proper place in our mortal lives throughout the good green earth.”

from Odyssey, Ὀδύσσεια

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“Good sir, sit still and hearken to the words of others that are thy betters. (Quoted by Socrates and the cause of his indictment.)”

from Iliad

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“Discontent springs from a constant endeavor to increase the amount of our claims, when we are powerless to increase the amount which will satisfy them.”

from Odyssey, Ὀδύσσεια

Themes: Greed

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Quotes about Homer (16 quotes)

“[Homer was] the greatest of poets and the first of tragedy writers [but unfortunately he became] the educator of Hellas [and the gude] for the ordering of human things.”

Plato Πλάτων 428 – 348 BCE via Daniel J. Boorstin

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“Homer is one of the men of genius who solve that fine problem of art — the finest of all, perhaps — truly to depict humanity by the enlargement of man: that is, to generate the real in the ideal.”

Victor Hugo 1802 – 1885 CE
Literary pioneer, poet, and social justice provocateur
from William Shakespeare, 1864)

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“Notwithstanding the veneration due and paid to Homer, it is very strange, yet true, that among the most learned, and the greatest admirers of antiquity, there is scarce one to be found who ever read the Iliad with that eagerness and rapture which a woman feels when she reads the Novel of Zaïda... The common part of mankind is awed with the fame of Homer, rather than struck with his beauties.”

Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet 1694 – 1778 CE
from Essay on Epick Poetry (1727)

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“This Fire is discerned in Virgil, but discerned as through a glass, reflected from Homer, more shining than fierce, but every where equal and constant.

Alexander Pope 1688 – 1744 CE
Second most quoted English writer

Themes: Confidence

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“An ancient writer says of Homer that he touched nothing without somehow honoring and glorifying it.”

Edith Hamilton 1867 – 1963 CE
from The Greek Way, 1930

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“Homer is pre-eminent among poets, for he alone combined dramatic form with excellence of imitation, so he too first laid down the main lines of comedy, by dramatizing the ludicrous instead of writing personal satire.”

Dante 1265 – 1321 CE
(Durante degli Alighieri)
from Divine Comedy (1321)

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“Who was Homer? The ancient Greeks had no doubt that Homer was a real person... This so-called Homeric Question has provoked some of the bloodiest professorial battles. Speculation about Homer has itself spawned fantasies of epic proportions. Homer himself became a myth.”

Daniel J. Boorstin 1914 – 2004 CE
American intellectual Paul Revere
from Creators: Heroes of the Imagination

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“It is easier to steal the club of Hercules than a line from Homer.”

Virgil 70 – 19 BCE
(Publius Vergilius Maro)
from Suetonius

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“It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.”

Aristotle Ἀριστοτέλης 382 – 322 BCE

Themes: Poetry

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“Pindar astounds, but Homer brings the more sustaining cup. One is a fountain of prodigious ascent; the other, the unsounded purple sea of marching billows.”

George Meredith 1828 – 1909 CE
Victorian novelist nominated 7 times for the Nobel Prize
from The Egoist

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“A poet who may have been a beggar and a ballad-monger, who may have been unable to read and write, and was described by tradition as blind, composed a poem about the Greeks going to war with this town to recover the most beautiful woman in the world... that the most beautiful poem in the world was written by somebody who knew of nothing larger than such little towns is a historical fact.”

G. K. Chesterton 1874 – 1936 CE
from The Everlasting Man (1925)​

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“Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods all sorts of things that are disreputable and worthy of blame when done by men: theft, adultery, and mutual deception.”

Xenophanes Ξενοφάνης ὁ Κολοφώνιος 570 – 475 BCE
(Xenophanes of Colophon)

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“I always had a book in my hand, sometimes Dante, sometimes Homer. As I read the immortal verses, I felt that man could become immortal and that the world's heterogeneous surfae of houses, people, joys, insults—the incoherent chaos we call life—was capable of uniting into harmony.”

Nikos Kazantzakis 1883 – 1957 CE via P. A. Bien
from Report to Greco

Themes: Peace

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“In Homer’s day life was action, and Homer was action’s prophet. Through his turbulent hexameters, the story runs like some broad and power stream, his verse and style, dictated by action… We give his name to all the poets who compound these tales because we are at ease with unity, and dislike the fragmentariness of truth”

Will Durant 1885 – 1981 CE via John Little/Shan Dao
Philosophy apostle and popularizer of history's lessons
from Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time, 1968

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“Homer embodied the ideal perfection of his age in human character; nor can we doubt that those who read his verses were awakened to an ambition of becoming like to Achilles, Hector, and Ulysses: the truth and beauty of friendship, patriotism, and persevering devotion to an object, were unveiled to the depths in these immortal creations.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792 – 1822 CE
from A Defence of Poetry (1821)​

Themes: Immortality

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“When Homer said that he wished war might disappear from the lives of gods and men, he forgot that without opposition all things would cease to exist.”

Heraclitus Ἡράκλειτος 535 – 475 BCE
(of Ephesus, the "Weeping Philosopher")
A Greek Buddha

Themes: War Problems

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