You Will Never Be Lovelier Than You Are Now We Will Never Be Here Again Movie Quote
The Homer We Want
Homeric Multiformity in the Misinformation Historic period
Everything is more cute because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you lot are now. We will never exist here again.
— Homer
I know my Homer, and I like to retrieve that I can spot him when I run across him. Merely when I opened a gift from my father and found this quotation inscribed inside, my confidence wavered. Ane Google search followed another, and then began my katabasis into the beguiling world of Homeric misquotations.
Homeric misquotation has a long history, as does its study. Accusations of misquotation of Homer's epics appointment back at least to the sixth century BCE. Plato and Aeschines made liberal employ of the Homeric texts, and Alexandrian critics censured the misquotations of others while surely engaging in the same themselves. But it is often difficult to prove that a line attributed to Homer is not genuine. This has go an even more vexed enterprise recently, with the rising of the theory of Homeric multiformity, which holds that lines that differ from the traditional text are non necessarily any less genuine, despite their difference. For adherents of this theory, authentic Homeric poetry is to be found in quotations, but as well in apparent misquotations.
Some cases, however, are clearer than others. The quote my male parent lovingly wrote out, for instance, dates dorsum all of fourteen years, to Wolfgang Petersen's Troy. (Nice effort, Dad.)
Though it postdates Homer by more than two and a half millennia, this has get 1 of the most pop Homeric quotations of the decade. It is attributed to Homer in every cyberspace quotation repository, from AZ Quotes to Quotissimo, and frequently ranks amid Homer's all-time quotations. I Googled "Iliad quotes," and it was the first result I saw.
Homer'southward influence on later literature is well known, simply the literary influence of Homeric counterfeits is a story that remains to be told. This counterfeit has proven particularly productive for new fiction of the young developed and, ahem, developed varieties. It appears in Lizzy Ford's Omega, Jenny Valentine'due south Fire Colour One, and Sam Millar's The Bespoke Hitman. In Her Underground Rose , it is quoted equally W. B. Yeats'due south "favorite lines from Homer," and in Merlin's Son it is attributed to Achilles by Falling star, son of Merlin and Princess Accolade. (Other characters include Diotima, Héloïse, and Darwin.) In Beneath Wandering Stars, unlikely friends (and hereafter lovers?) Gabi and Seth cozy upwardly together when Seth reads out a passage from the Iliad:
Seth puts on his sunglasses, takes off his backpack, and pulls out the Iliad, stretching along the wall like a lizard. 'Listen to this: "Everything is more beautiful because nosotros're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. Nosotros will never be here again."'
Pinpricks dance along my skin every bit I join Seth on the wall. These lines really do encapsulate this unabridged morning.
In Cass Alexander's Working for It, Brad Pitt'due south existential reflection serves as a kind of Horatian injunction to seize more but the mean solar day:
She reads information technology silently then looks at me. I hold her gaze for simply a 2d before she looks down again and reads the quote aloud.
'Any moment might be our last. Everything is more than beautiful considering nosotros're doomed. You volition never be lovelier than yous are now. Nosotros will never be here over again.'
Serendipity, indeed.
She smiles and moves dorsum to her seat, inches away from me.
'Homer?'
I nod.
'I'm not surprised y'all chose something from the Iliad. That what it's from, correct?'
Of class, she knows where it'southward from. Her intellect is staggering, when she chooses to use it. I nod over again.
Half a page later on: "Her hands quickly get to my pilus and she pulls. Hard."
Of Homeric quotations in popular apportionment, roughly a tertiary can be classified equally not Homer, the wrong Homer, or Homerically-based just, really, not Homer. These quotations frequently resonate with Homeric themes, but their sentimentality, evocation of Christian morality, or even their very quotability give them away. (For all Homer'south poetic virtues, brevity is — let's be honest — not the soul of his wit.)
Not Homer
The difficulty is non and then great to die for a friend, as to find a friend worth dying for.
This attractively chiastic aphorism is frequently attributed to Homer and has been ranked among Homer's twelve- and 10-best quotes. Information technology is included in such anthologies as Everlasting Wisdom, Life Lessons of Wisdom & Motivation, iii,000 Astounding Quotes, Fourth dimension, Times and a Dividing of Time, Bully into Super Brains with 6,000 Supreme Quotes, and Warrior Daytimer. You can get it on a affiche, send it as an eastward-card, or purchase it for a friend, printed on a hoodie or engraved on forest.
The quotation evokes Achilles' human relationship with Patroclus and might plausibly accept come up from Achilles' oral cavity, if Achilles had been a Romantic era aristocrat with a significantly milder disposition. The actual origin of this apothegm, however, is Introduction to the Art of Thinking (1761) by Henry Home of Kames. 1 'r' and a world abroad from Homer.
It behooves a father to be blameless if he expects his child to be.
This precept ticks several Homeric boxes: it sounds archaic, it measures children by their fathers, and it features i of Homer's favorite adjectives, clean-living. I might imagine it beingness spoken by Nestor or Priam or fifty-fifty Odysseus. But, again, its pithiness betrays its inauthenticity. It is attributed to Homer by all the usual suspects, but besides past this book almost astrology, this non-profit, these anthologies of inspirational quotations, and these 3 books on parenting. The Homeric attribution has fifty-fifty been extended to Homer Simpson, who makes no pretense about what he expects from him children: "Kids, y'all tried your all-time, and you failed miserably. The lesson is: never try."
The precept is ancient, only no Homer is responsible. Instead, information technology originates with Plautus' Pseudolous, where, in Paul Nixon's (1932) translation, Callipho says, "It behooves a father to be blameless, if he expects his son to exist more blameless than he was himself."
I know not what the future holds, but I know who holds the future.
Attributed to Homer hither, here, hither, here, here, and here, this first appeared in "Known Only to Him," written and recorded by Stuart Hamblen in 1952 and recorded past Elvis eight years later. The line was oft excerpted and quickly became anonymized. By Jan 1960, Martin Luther King Jr. ascribed it to "somebody" and by 1979 it was credited to an "one-time divine." In the confusion, information technology has since been attributed not just to Homer, just likewise to Martin Luther King Jr., Oprah Winfrey, Ralph Abernathy, and Tim Tebow, in patently the same procedure past which The Office's Michael Scott quotes himself quoting Wayne Gretzky'due south "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."
Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth.
Despite its vague reminiscence of Homeric boasting, this is the famous dictum of Archimedes, not Homer, withal many citations to the opposite. The Archimedean proverb is first securely attested in Pappus of Alexandria's Synagōgē: δός μοι, φησί, ποῦ στῶ, καὶ κινῶ τὴν γῆν (8.1060).
The journey is the thing.
How would Homer fifty-fifty have said this, and why? It is attributed to Homer here, here, here, here, here, here and hither, and information technology makes the cutting of Homer'southward top-twenty list. Information technology smacks of twentieth-century mindfulness movements, and the first testament of the phrase that I tin can find is Ivan Kane's "The Journey Is the Matter," in the September 1978 issue of Michigan Alumnus, when the idea that the journey is the destination! was not yet quite so cliché. In the earth of the Odyssey, the journey is the thing, certain— the affair that's ruining everybody's lives.
Wrong Homer
I didn't lie! I merely created fiction with my rima oris!
Odysseus, is that yous? Quotesss, Quotefancy, and Quotissimo seem to retrieve so. Though he once played Odysseus on television, the source of this bit of sophistry is Homeric in the idiotic, not the Iliadic, kind of mode. Interestingly, the original line ("I was writing fiction with my oral fissure!") has been modified, mayhap to make it sound more believably bardic.
Not not Homer, but … non Homer
Out of sight, out of mind.
In add-on to various internet quotation repositories, several idiom dictionaries merits that this phrase originates with Homer. The Macmillan Book of Proverbs, Maxims, and Famous Phrases (1948), for instance, writes that this phrase "has been proverbial since Homer's fourth dimension," an exclamation that is reiterated by A New Dictionary of Eponyms and Gabay's Copywriters' Compendium and is repeated verbatim past The Dictionary of Clichés, The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, and Two is a Visitor: Dictionary of Pair Idioms.
Information technology is hard for me to recollect of an idiom that is more obviously not Homeric. In a world where people can exist forgotten when they're away, the plots of the Iliad and the Odyssey autumn to pieces. Odyssey: opening scene. Athena sees Odysseus, stranded on Calypso's island.
Athena: Father, my eye is torn for Odysseus, miserable man,
who suffers on a sea-girt island, far from his friends.
Don't you call back Odysseus — all his sacrifices to you?
Zeus: No.
The End
So why is Homer credited as the originator of the phrase? Because in 1869 Reverend Lovelace Bigge-Wither published his Nearly Literal Translation of Homer's Odyssey, which renders one.242 (oíkhet' áïstos ápustos) as "He's gone out-of-sight — out-of-heed!" The inadequacy of this translation is pointed upward by what follows: "and-to-me hath left | Woes simply-and-tears: nor only him I weep for | Now." Odysseus may be "nameless and unknown," as Wilson translates, simply he is anything but out of Telemachus's mind.
There is the estrus of Honey, the pulsing blitz of Longing, the lover's whisper, irresistible — magic to make the sanest man go mad.
The cyberspace loves this quote. It's on all the quotation repositories, it's the inspiration for the championship of an episode of Star Trek: Discovery ("Magic to Make the Sanest Human being Go Mad"), and it has fabricated its way into fiction too. In Myrna Brown's A Season of Mists, Da uses it (without attribution!) in a letter to his lover, and in Martin Millar'due south The Goddess of Buttercups and Daisies, a lovestruck Luxos quotes it to Aristophanes the playwright:
'Did you fifty-fifty talk to her?'
'No,' admitted Luxos. 'Only we shared some pregnant eye contact. I tell you lot,
it's the real thing.
At that place is the rut of Love,
the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover's whisper,
irresistible-magic to make the sanest man go mad.[']
'I've never thought yous were that sane, Luxos. And don't quote Homer at me.'
Yes, okay, the quote is Homeric, just Fagles' many translational liberties, combined with its decontextualization, make its authenticity clumsily hard to recognize. In Iliad 14, Hera asks Aphrodite to lend her dear and desire, ostensibly so that she can fix her parents' sexless wedlock. Aphrodite agrees and hands Hera the belt "wherein lies love and desire and amour, allurement that steals the mind even of the wise" (14.216–17). Homer'south love has no "heat," his longing has no "pulsing rush," his flirtation is neither "irresistible" nor "magic," and its power isn't restricted from women, as in Fagles' version.
The clemency that is a trifle to the states tin can exist precious to others.
Beyond internet databases, yous can find this Homeric proverb quoted anywhere from nursing textbooks, holiday giving guides, books about hotel direction, and spiritual handbooks, including Daily Bread For Your Listen and Soul, Becoming Fully Human: The Greatest Glory of God, A World Tour of Wisdom: Finding Inner Peace, Learning Through Living, and Bleedership: Biblical Start-Aid for Leaders. This one has constitute its way to fiction likewise. In Sandy James' Fringe Benefits, hot new teacher Nate Ryan gets his way with his dominate, Dani Bradshaw, all thanks to his ability to quote Homer:
Nate took her hand, stroking her knuckles with his thumb. 'I'd exist really grateful, Dani. And it will only be temporary.' His optics shone with humor as the corners of his oral fissure rose with a lopsided smile. '"The charity that is a trifle to us tin can be precious to others."'
The man could fucking quote Homer. How could she ever turn him downwards?
'Fine. You can alive in my basement.'
I wonder what'due south going to happen in that basement.
As with Fagles' pulsing rush of magical human being-dearest, this proverb'south quotability is due more than to the translator than the translatee. In Odyssey half dozen, Nausicaa instructs her attendants to look after Odysseus, "since foreigners and beggars are from Zeus, and even a small souvenir is welcome" (6.207–8). The original doesn't have near the aforementioned axiomatic or Christian strength every bit Rieu's, which owes as much to the Biblical story of the widow's mite as it does to Homer.
Two friends, two bodies with 1 soul inspired.
This is Pope's rendition of a significantly less quotable Homeric original. When the Myrmidons enter boxing in Iliad xvi, Patroclus and Automedon pb the way: "Two men were armed in front end of all: Patroclus and Automedon, having one intention — to wage war at the head of the Myrmidons" (xvi.218–20). Though Homer's version speaks simply to the bloodlust that the two men share, Pope's translation has made Homer a poster boy for Aristotelian friendship. By 1910, Pope's translation could be cited as Homer's definition of friendship; in 1928 it was quoted as the ideal of friendship; and in 1971 it could be used to demonstrate that "Homer rated friendship very high." To paraphrase Richard Bentley, it's pretty poetry, Mr. Pope; but it isn't Homer.
There is an old story, related in the scholia to Dionysius Thrax, of how we came to have our Iliad and Odyssey. In apportionment for many years after the poet'south death, Homer's grand epics had started to disintegrate. Damaged by earthquakes, fires, and floods, diverse scraps of Homer lay scattered beyond the Greek world. Seeking renown for himself and the restoration of Homer'due south poems, Peisistratus, ruler of Athens, put out a call: Whosoever of you possesses verses of Homer, bring them to me, and you shall receive bounty to match your contribution. Entrepreneurial Greeks flocked to Athens, bringing verses of Homer, supplemented with several of their own, to brand the most of the rex's offer. When Peisistratus had gathered all that he could, he invited lxx-two grammarians to arrange the collected fragments as each thought best. Having made their arrangements, each grammarian presented his work to a commission of his peers, and from seventy-two Homeric medleys they judged Aristarchus's to be the best.
The story is fictitious (Aristarchus was born three hundred years after Peisistratus died); but, like these quotations, its spuriousness does not negate its resonance. Equally in the scholiast's story, so with these popular quotations, the questionable attribution of verses to Homer is a win-win. In the story, Peisistratus gets prestige, Homer isn't forgotten, seventy-ii Hellenists get jobs, a lot of people brand money for supporting the arts, and we all have epics to bask. Homer'due south public image and the ideas erroneously ascribed to him do good from their mutual association. Homer gets to sound similar Shakespeare, and words of wisdom from Christian cowboys that might have faded from the obscurity of their source survive, feeding and feeding on Homer'due south fame. Similar Peisistratus and the seventy-ii grammarians, when we look to Homer for a quotable phrase, we get the Homer we want, non the Homer we have. And peradventure that's the way it has always been.
This article is part of the Diacritical Remarks column
Nib Beck is a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. He explores origins of another sort @GreekEtymology, and y'all can find more of his writing here.
Source: https://eidolon.pub/the-homer-we-want-7e7299acdfe2