13 Quotes by Emily Wilson

Poets are not to blame for how things are.

The goddess did not shoot me in my home,aiming with gentle arrows. Nor did sickness suck all the strength out from my limbs, with longand cruel wasting. No, it was missing you, Odysseus, my sunshine; your sharp mind, and your kind heart. That took sweet life from me.— The Odyssey (11.198-203)

This is absurd, that mortals blame the gods! They say we cause their suffering, but they themselves increase it by their folly.

Young men often behave oafishly, but they may mature in time – unless they get an arrow through the neck first.

Consumerism provides no psychological satisfaction, because there is no limit to our desires for things that we never needed in the first place.

The greatest empire is to be emperor of oneself.

My Homer does not speak in your grandparents’ English, since that language is no closer to the wine-dark sea than your own. I have tried to keep to a register that is recognizably speakable and readable, while skirting between the Charybdis of artifice and the Scylla of slang.

Seneca’s careful analysis of “first movements” that were absolutely not worthy of moral blame had thus been transformed into its opposite: they were bad thoughts that revealed humanity’s fallen nature.

Stoicism, the intellectual movement with which Seneca most closely associated, was designed to create a possibility of individual happiness in times of vast social unrest.