Odyssey 8.166 · Book 8, lines 166–168
‘The gods give no man everything’
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Odysseus — ξεῖνʼ, οὐ καλὸν ἔειπες· ἀτασθάλῳ ἀνδρὶ ἔοικας. οὕτως οὐ πάντεσσι θεοὶ χαρίεντα διδοῦσιν ἀνδράσιν, οὔτε φυὴν οὔτʼ ἂρ φρένας οὔτʼ ἀγορητύν.
Stranger, you have spoken not well; you look like a reckless man. So the gods do not give gracious gifts to all men — neither form nor sense nor eloquence.
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Odysseus answers the taunt. Instead of boasting, he opens with a hard rebuke and a general truth about how unevenly the gods hand out their gifts.
A note on this passage
Odysseus opens with a flat reproof — you have spoken badly, like a reckless man — and then lifts the quarrel to a general truth: the gods do not give every good gift to every man, not looks, not sense, not the power to speak.
The maxim is a trap being laid. By naming the three gifts separately — beauty, wit, and eloquence — Odysseus prepares to split them apart in Euryalus's case, and to claim for himself the two that matter. It is the Odyssey's own scale of worth: the hero is famously no beauty, but he holds the mind and the tongue, and here he begins to teach his mocker the difference between a fine surface and a full man.
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