Take courage, my heart: you have been through worse than this. Be strong, saith my heart; I am a soldier; I have seen worse sights than this.
…There is the heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover’s whisper, irresistible—magic to make the sanest man go mad.
Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred that is weaker than man.
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.
Yet, taught by time, my heart has learned to glow for other’s good, and melt at other’s woe.
For my part I have no joy in tears after dinnertime. There will always be a new dawn tomorrow. Yet I can have no objection to tears for any mortal who dies and goes to his destiny. And this is the only consolation we wretched mortals can give, to cut our hair and let the tears roll down our faces.
You, why are you so afraid of war and slaughter? Even if all the rest of us drop and die around you, grappling for the ships, you’d run no risk of death: you lack the heart to last it out in combat—coward!
Let him submit to me! Only the god of death is so relentless, Death submits to no one—so mortals hate him most of all the gods. Let him bow down to me! I am the greater king, I am the elder-born, I claim—the greater man.
…but there they lay, sprawled across the field, craved far more by the vultures than by wives.
Generations of men are like the leaves.In winter, winds blow them down to earth,but then, when spring season comes again,the budding wood grows more. And so with men:one generation grows, another dies away.