Fate In The Iliad Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

No man or woman born, coward or brave, can shun his destiny.