Greek Myths Quotes

“It'll be dangerous," Nyssa warned him. "Hardship, monsters, terrible suffering. Possibly none of you will come back alive."
"Oh." Suddenly Leo didn't look so excited. Then he remembered everyone was watching. "I mean... Oh, cool! Suffering? I love suffering! Let's do this.”
― Rick Riordan, The Lost Hero

“I'd had years of practise looking dumb when people threw out Greek names I didn't know. It's a skill of mine. Annabeth keeps telling me to read a book of Greek myths, but I don't see the need. It's easier just to have folks explain stuff.”
― Rick Riordan, The Demigod Diaries

“Why would anyone love a monster?' asked Perseus.
'Who are you to decide who is worthy of love?' said Hermes.
'I mean, I wasn't...'
'And who are you to decide who is a monster?' added the messenger god.”
― Natalie Haynes, Stone Blind: Medusa's Story

“Happy endings are best achieved by keeping the right doors locked”
― Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

“You read any Greek myths, puppy? The one about the gorgon Medusa, particularly? I used to wonder what could be so terrible that you couldn't survive even looking at it.

Until I got a little older and I figured out the obvious answer.

Everything.”
― Mike Carey & Peter Gross, The Unwritten, Vol. 1: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity

“Eventually, Krysomallos would be skinned for his fleece, which became known as the Golden Fleece, which means I am related to a sheepskin rug.
This is why you don't want to think too hard about who you're related to in the Greek myths. It'll drive you crazy.”
― Rick Riordan, Percy Jackson's Greek Gods

“Hero,” he said softly, in a manner that was much like his father’s. “Vengeance and glory are the ways of the Greeks and the Trojans. We are of the Herdsmen.”
― Sulari Gentill, Chasing Odysseus

“Kerényi was as aware as anybody today of the territorial limits of Greek myths and of the non-importability of Hermes. He writes: “In his ‘such-ness,’ he is an historical fact that cannot, by strict and honest historical means, be reduced to something else: neither to a concept, to a ‘power,’ nor to a ‘spirit’ – a gravestone or signpost spirit – not even to an idea that would not contain in a nutshell everything that Hermes’ ‘such-ness’ constitutes.” …

Working more in Hermes’ own sleight of hand way, Kerényi is soon saying things like this: “If a god is ‘idea’ and ‘world,’ he remains nonetheless in connection with the world that contains all such ‘worlds’; he can only be an ‘aspect of the world,’ while the world of which he is an aspect possesses such idea-aspects.” Now, if you will let Kerényi get away with a statement like that – and I hope you will – you will end up owning the Brooklyn Bridge. … Kerényi’s Hermes is the only one that is going to rob you or enrich you, enlighten you or screw you. …

“Guide of Souls” is the usual translation given to the Hermes-epithet “Psychopompos” and it refers to his role as the god who leads souls into the underworld when they die. But πομπóς (still present in every French funeral store’s “Pompes funèbres” description of itself) is more than guide, and even more than guide to the underworld. It means to lead, but Hermes as leader is not quite right either. It means something more like to lead on. Hermes is the god who “leads you on.” … This means he is deceiving you, taking advantage of your gullibility, “taking you for a ride.” That, however, is how Hermes works, and how he gets your soul to move anywhere, how he gets you to budge even a hair off whatever you’re in … .

… Go ahead and buy the Brooklyn Bridge from this man. Be had. Be incorrect. Be foolish. You pay with your soul for this kind of reading. And Hermes does not take plastic.”
― Karl Kerényi, Hermes: Guide of Souls

“As the generations pass they grow worse. A time will come when they have grown so wicked that they will worship power; might will be right to them and reverence for the good will cease to be. At last, when no man is angry any more at wrongdoing or feels shame in the presence of the miserable, Zeus will destroy them too. And yet even then something might be done, if only the common people would rise and put down rulers that oppress them.”
― Greek myth on the Iron Age

“The first time I heard the bard reach this part of the story I thought he would sing that you built a new ship and began to sail home. This should be where the story ends, shouldn’t it? But that is not what he sang next. I demanded to know why. Do you not know where Ogygia is, he asked, his blind eyes moistening. I did not know. Why would any Ithacan have heard of such a place? It took you nine days to drift there, if the poet tells it rightly. So after all the danger you endured, after all the risks you took, I have it on good authority from the poet that you have never been further away from me than you are at this moment.”
― Natalie Haynes, A Thousand Ships

“It is not easy to soothe the immortal gods from their vengeance.”
― Sulari Gentill, Chasing Odysseus

“What could you possibly write at Gates of Hades?” Cadmus asked.

“Keep your spirits up.” Lycon sheathed the dagger he’d used to chisel the trunk.

Cadmus shook his head. “Idiot.”
― Sulari Gentill, Chasing Odysseus

“He has been known to devour men.”

“He’s a cannibal?” Cadmus asked in horror.

“Well, not really,” Daemon replied. “He is a Cyclops. He does not eat his own kind — just men and only those who challenge him … he does not hunt them.”
― Sulari Gentill, Chasing Odysseus

“You know, Mac,”Cadmus said still looking out the window. “We may have to work on the way we tell our story …apparently it’s not amusing enough.”

“I’ll try to include a joke between ‘he bled to death’and ‘the city burned’.”Machaon responded tersely.”
― Sulari Gentill, Chasing Odysseus

“Since ancient times, sacred texts from around the world foretold about a time period in human history when a mighty demi-god would appear on earth. Whether we call this figure Perseus, Krishna, or Messiah, he is epitomized in the figure of Jesus Christ—the modern equivalent of which is Superman!”
― Eli Of Kittim, The Little Book of Revelation: The First Coming of Jesus at the End of Days

“Hero,” said Machaon to his sister who was still muttering to her gods. “Please stop. Surely the gods would have heard you by now … let’s try not to annoy them.”
― Sulari Gentill, Chasing Odysseus

“Are we Greeks, or are we barbarians?”
― Pietros Maneos

“Some say that Darkness was first, and from Darkness sprang Chaos. From a union between Darkness and Chaos sprang Night, Day, Erebus, and the Air.”
― Robert Graves, The Greek Myths : 1

“But this is ruin! New waves breaking in
To wreck us, ere we are righted from the old!”
― Euripides, Medea

“I know who you are, daughter of the sun. All that the sea touches comes to me at last in the depths. I have tasted you. I have tasted all your family. Your brother came once also seeking my power. He went away empty-handed, like all the rest. I am not such a one as you may fight.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“The sun, the moon, the ocean– these were all the children of Ouranos and Gaia. They had hundreds more, and they were the grandparents of the gods and of human beings. Ouranos didn’t make any of this out of nothing, and neither did God. There had to be a wife.”
― Erin O'Riordan, Cut

“Are the legends true?” asked Cadmus. “Of course they are,” replied Pan. “We live in an age of legends.”
― Sulari Gentill, Chasing Odysseus

“Gracious is the giver who can host and also be a stranger at the door.”
― Benjamin Aubrey Myers

“How can I put the Auras back in the chest?” I asked, terror boiling inside my stomach.
“You can’t. Not if those that were or will be struck by them won’t be eager to express their feelings and let you help them. You do not change people, dearie. It’s the people that change themselves. You’re the Guardian, but they’re the bearers,” the Oracle whispered.
“I’m no Guardian. I’m doomed!” I said and I knew that this was true.”
― Victoria Moschou, Guardian of the Auras

“Και πίσω από τους Λαπίθες και τους Κενταύρους διακρίνουμε τους δύο μεγάλους αιώνιους αντιπάλους: το νου και το χτήνος, τον πολιτισμό και τη βαρβαρότητα.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Journeying: Travels in Italy, Egypt, Sinai, Jerusalem and Cyprus

“The Fates were heard as winds
To our ears they ran faster
and threw their voices further
than we could understand

Thus we watched the tides
reaching out slowly and thin
on to barely felt journeys

The shuddering tides whose movements
became of our own body
Familiar and well-used
and unremarkable to us”
― Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides

“The curse had fallen upon her shoulders, one that she had taken willingly at the time. But her regrets increased with time, much like the threads she added to the tapestries she wove.”
― D.A. Henneman, Web Of Lies: A Goddesses In Love Novella

“In Greek myth, Circe was a sorceress and a goddess born of the sun god Helios and the ocean nymph Perse. And a powerful sorceress she was, so adept at incantations that she could morph men into animals to keep them enslaved to her on her island.”
― The Editors of National Geographic, National Geographic The History of Witchcraft