"Aphrodite" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... minions, to Francis Drake and John Hawkins and Martin Frobisher; to all adventurers and their deeds in the far-off seas! I drink to merry England and to the day when every sea shall bring her tribute!—to England, like Aphrodite, new-risen from the main! Drink ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... of the mere body, the spirituality of a limpid stream of mere physical life. But why among these statues only men and boys, athletes and fauns? Why only the bust of that thin, delicate-lipped little Madonna wife of his? Why no wide-shouldered Amazon or broad-flanked Aphrodite? ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... kept and used I will name three,—meerschaum pipes, violins, and poems. The meerschaum is but a poor affair until it has burned a thousand offerings to the cloud-compelling deities. It comes to us without complexion or flavor,—born of the sea-foam, like Aphrodite, but colorless as pallida Mors herself. The fire is lighted in its central shrine, and gradually the juices which the broad leaves of the Great Vegetable had sucked up from an acre and curdled into a drachm are diffused through ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Supreme Being of the Peruvians was worshiped under the names of Pachacomac, 'he who sustains, or gives life to the universe,' and of Viracocha, 'Foam of the Sea,' a name strikingly recalling that of Venus Aphrodite, the female second principle in all ancient mythologies. Not less curious was the institution of the Vestal Virgins of the Sun, who were buried alive if detected in an intrigue, and whose duty ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... of high degree; A poor and unknown artist he. "Paint me," she said, "a view of the sea." So he painted the sea as it looked the day That Aphrodite arose from its spray; And it broke, as she gazed in its face the while Into its countless-dimpled smile. "What a pokey stupid picture," said she; "I don't believe he can ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... offers his fawnskin and scrip of apples to the great divinity of Pan;[30] the young herdsman and his newly-married wife, still with the rose-garland on her hair, make prayer and thanksgiving with a cream cheese and a piece of honeycomb to the mistress of a hundred cities, Aphrodite with her house of gold.[31] The hard and laborious life of the small farmer was touched with something of the natural magic that saturates the Georgics; "rich with fair fleeces, and fair wine, and fair fruit of corn," and blessed by the gracious Seasons whose feet pass over the furrows.[32] ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... distinguished three sorts of souls—psyche, which signified the sensitive soul, the soul of the senses; and that is why Love, child of Aphrodite, had so much passion for Psyche, and why Psyche loved him so tenderly: pneuma, the breath which gives life and movement to the whole machine, and which we have translated by spiritus, spirit; vague word to which ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... of Greece lie the Ionian Islands, the largest of which was called Corcyra, now Corfu. The rugged island of Ithaca was the birthplace of Odysseus, or Ulysses, the hero of the Odyssey. Cythera, just south of the Peloponnesus, was sacred to Aphrodite (Venus), as it was here fable said she rose from the sea-foam. Beyond Cythera, in the Mediterranean, midway between Greece and Egypt, is the large island of Crete, noted in legend for its labyrinth ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... in the home of the summers, the seats of the happy immortals, Shrouded in knee-deep blaze, unapproachable; there ever youthful Hebe, Harmonie, and the daughter of Jove, Aphrodite Whirled in the white-linked dance, with the gold-crowned Hours and ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... wept with laughter! And Aphrodite, she, With keener mockery than white Artemis Who smiled aloof, drew nigh him unabashed In all her blinding beauty. Carelessly, As o'er the brute brows of a stalled ox Across that sooty muzzle and brawny breast, Contemptuously, ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... knew,—"deport du viel caitif,"—and now he has "come to forty years," and now they are with him no longer. But he does not lament like Mimnermus, like Alcman, like Llwyarch Hen. "What is Life, what is delight without golden Aphrodite? May I die!" says Mimnermus, "when I am no more conversant with these, with secret love, and gracious gifts, and the bed of desire." And Alcman, when his limbs waver beneath him, is only saddened by the faces and voices of girls, ...
— Aucassin and Nicolete • Andrew Lang
... was often depicted in ancient art, and—strange as it may sound—in the later versions Paris was not seldom omitted, Apollo was made arbiter, and the scene was removed from Mount Ida to Delphi.[11] The two hitherto disputable figures are, Prof. Gardner thinks, Hera (seated) and Aphrodite (standing, with a long sceptre). He ascribes the work to the third or early part of the fourth century, and believes that it was made in the Eastern Empire; from the prominence granted to Artemis, he conjectures ...
— Roman Britain in 1914 • F. Haverfield
... to himself, and they behaved in accordance with his ideals. In the dimmest, oldest religions, nearest the matriarchate, we find great goddesses—types of Motherhood, Mother-love, Mother-care and Service. But under masculine dominance, Isis and Ashteroth dwindle away to an alluring Aphrodite—not Womanhood for the child and the World—but the incarnation of female attractiveness ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... terms with the sea. The old maritime spirit, so striking to the eyes of Burke, seems to have died out from among us. If we are to have a brilliant and assured future, we must not look for it wholly to the land. It may not rise sheer, Britain- and Aphrodite-like, from the breast of ocean, but it must yet rest partly upon that most solid ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... her side, too, as near as the plunges of the chestnut would allow, till we reached the gorse that we were to draw; once there, the stronger passion prevailed. Aphrodite hid her face, and the great goddess Artemis claimed her own. As the first hound whimpered, he drew off toward a corner, where a big fence would give a chance of shaking off the crowd, and I do not think he turned his head ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... haven't anything to write about. It isn't as if we were living at one of the beach houses; then I could do you some character studies, and fill your imagination with groups of sea-goddesses, with their (or somebody else's) raven and blonde manes hanging down their shoulders. You should have Aphrodite in morning wrapper, in evening costume, and in her prettiest bathing suit. But we are far from all that here. We have rooms in a farm-house, on a cross-road, two miles from the hotels, and lead the quietest ...
— Marjorie Daw • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... eyes from the horror. Kiss me but once, and I go.' Then lifting her neck, like a sea-bird Peering up over the wave, from the foam-white swells of her bosom, Blushing she kissed him: afar, on the topmost Idalian summit Laughed in the joy of her heart, far-seeing, the queen Aphrodite. Loosing his arms from her waist he flew upward, awaiting the sea-beast. Onward it came from the southward, as bulky and black as a galley, Lazily coasting along, as the fish fled leaping before it; Lazily breasting the ripple, and watching by sandbar and headland, ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... true Christian Art. Gone, music too! The air was stirred By happy wings: Terpander's bird (That, when the cold came, fled away) Would tarry not the wintry day,— As more-enduring sculpture must, Till filthy saints rebuked the gust With which they chanced to get a sight Of some dear naked Aphrodite They glanced a thought above the toes of, By breaking zealously her nose off. Love, surely, from that music's lingering, Might have filched her organ-fingering, Nor chosen rather to set prayings To hog-grunts, ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... tell you. In the first place, if he has reached the age of thirty unscathed by Aphrodite, he will reflect that that peculiar feeling of romantic expectation with which he gets up every morning would cease to exist after marriage—and it is a highly agreeable feeling! In its stead, in moments of depression, he would ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... be read the history of his own love. "The Egeria of his dreams—the Venus Aphrodite that sprang in full and supernal loveliness from the bright foam upon the storm-tormented ocean of his thoughts," was a little girl, Elmira Royster, who lived with her father in a house opposite to the Allans in Richmond. The young people ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... is frequently called "the golden," particularly at Dendera She has much in common with the "golden Aphrodite."] ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Locked doors in his mind were swinging wide, revealing forgotten sumptuous halls of his imagination. The Queen of Sheba, grotesque as a satyr, white and flaming with worlds of desire, as the great implacable Aphrodite, stood with her hand on his shoulder sending shivers of warm sweetness rippling through his body, while her voice intoned in his ears all the ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... the book to its place, and sat down to the piano-player, and in a moment the overture to 'Tannhaeuser,' that sublime failure to prove that passion is folly, filled the vast apartment. The rushing violin passages, and every call of Aphrodite, intoxicated his soul and raised his spirits till he knew with the certainty of a fully-aroused instinct that Camilla Payne must be his. He became optimistic on ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... goddesses who was there wished to be known as the fairest and each claimed the golden apple—Aphrodite who inspired love; Athene who gave wisdom; and Hera who was the wife of Zeus, the greatest of the gods. But no one at the wedding would judge between the goddesses and say which was the fairest. And then ...
— The Adventures of Odysseus and The Tales of Troy • Padriac Colum
... round the walls of Troy The sons of God fought in that great emprise? Why dost thou walk our common earth again? Hast thou forgotten that impassioned boy, His purple galley and his Tyrian men And treacherous Aphrodite's mocking eyes? For surely it was thou, who, like a star Hung in the silver silence of the night, Didst lure the Old World's chivalry and might Into the clamorous ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... sister, felt the blow as deeply as her brother. "O Aphrodite!" she prayed, "immortal Aphrodite, high enthroned child of Zeus, my queen, my goddess, my patron, at whose shrine I have daily laid my offerings, to be now my friend, the ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... cabinets there stood an array of Venetian glass, and statuettes in bronze, marble, and terra-cotta. He was looking about for Miss Craven, when that lady arose from a confused ocean of cushions and Oriental drapery—Aphrodite in an "Art" tea-gown. She ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... for Shelley's Island of Epipsychidion, or the golden age which Empedocles describes, when the mild nations worshipped Aphrodite with incense and the images of beasts and yellow honey, and no blood was spilt upon her altars—when 'the trees flourished with perennial leaves and fruit, and ample crops adorned their boughs through all the year.' This even ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... she said that he could not possibly love a homely, scrawny old maid like her, he delivered a eulogy that would have struck Aphrodite, rising milkily from the sea, as a slight exaggeration. And as for old maid, he cried in a curious blending of puerility ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... handful of clay, respecting which you may gravely question whether it was intended for a human form at all;—by slow degrees, and added touch to touch, in increasing consciousness of the bodily truth,—at last the Aphrodite of Melos stands before you, a perfect woman. But all that search for physical accuracy is merely the external operation, in the arts, of the seeking for truth in the inner soul; it is impossible without ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... the Parthenon, completed in 438 B.C., was built under the direction of Phidias, who was also the sculptor of the colossal statue of Athena within the temple. The most famous work of Praxiteles Was the statue of Aphrodite of Cnidus, not extant, but represented in the Venus of the Capitol and ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... respectabilities, and all the conventions. Nothing could dislodge them from its beautiful hills; the very sea, as it beats primly, or with a violence that never forgets to be discreet, on the indented shore, acknowledges their sway. Aphrodite never visits there; the human race is not continued there. People who have always lived within the conventions go there to die within the conventions. The young do not flourish there; they escape from the soft enervation. Since everybody is rich, there are no poor. There ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... the box-office. But the chuckle of recognition is a better one. So is the glow of sentiment. So is the tear of sympathy. The smutty and the scandalous have a smaller and less active market than homely humor, for instance, or melodramatic excitement or pretty sentiment. When "Aphrodite" was brought here from Paris, it was, for various reasons, impossible to recapture for the translated dramatization the flavor of abnormal eroticism which lent the book a certain phosphorescent glow at home. So its producers relied on lots and lots of nudity to give it rclame here. At ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... Feminine divinity and charm should be the characteristics of all brides; but these delectable beings do not enter the world fully formed, like Venus Aphrodite newly risen from the ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... prototype of all other Venetian versions; it is in painting what the "Aphrodite" of Praxiteles was in sculpture, a perfect creation ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... literary Twins to which I referred at the opening of this paper. What did my isolation matter, when I had all the gods of Greece for company, to say nothing of the fays and trolls of Scottish Fairyland? Pallas and Aphrodite haunted that old garret; out on Waterloo Bridge, night after night, I saw Selene and all her nymphs; and when my heart sank low, the Fairies of Scotland sang me lullabies! It was a happy time. Sometimes, for a fortnight together, I never had a dinner—save, perhaps, on Sunday, when ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the statue of Aphrodite in the gardens of the Tuileries to a crowd of smiling men and girls. He had a German officer's helmet. He described with vivid and disgusting gestures how he had cut off the man's head—he clicked his tongue to ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... attributed rather indiscriminately to both sexes. The cliff of Leucas knew no distinction of sex, and Sappho can be set against Anaxarete. Indeed, it was safer for men to be cruel than for women, inasmuch as Aphrodite, among her innumerable good qualities, was very severe upon unkind girls, while one regrets to have to admit that no particular male deity was regularly "affected" to the business of punishing light o' love men, though Eros-Cupid may sometimes have done so. The Eastern mistress, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... to the old Bard, are still among the earliest specimens of literature, we find, in that to Mercury, that the god laughs on beholding a tortoise, "thinking that he will make a beautiful lyre out of its shell;" and a little further on, Apollo laughs at hearing the sound of the lyre. In the hymn to Aphrodite, the laughter-loving Venus laughed sweetly when she thought of men and mortals being intermarried. The fact that this and the preceding kinds of laughter were not necessarily regarded as intellectual, is evident from ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... rule. And for his son he was bringing to his home the daughter of Alector out of Sparta, for his well-beloved son, strong Megapenthes, {*} born of a slave woman, for the gods no more showed promise of seed to Helen, from the day that she bare a lovely child, Hermione, as fair as golden Aphrodite. So they were feasting through the great vaulted hall, the neighbours and the kinsmen of renowned Menelaus, making merry; and among them a divine minstrel was singing to the lyre, and as he began the song two tumblers in the company whirled through ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... the altar of Hathor, with the sunset on one side and the moonrise on the other, and heard what her votaries say to the Goddess of Beauty. It was so mystical that we almost joined in the worship of the Egyptian Venus Aphrodite. It was so still, so majestic, so aloof from everything modern ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... Theocritus, coming from the fields where Virgil lingered unaware of Dante, could have revisited his much-loved Syracuse, the poet of Berenice would have found that the island of Aphrodite still bore women worthy of the goddess. The girl was tall and straight and slim; health and youth gave their warm color to her cheeks; the old Greek beauty reigned in her face, but her blue eyes shone with the brightness of Oriental stars. Her red hair, wine red, ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Frenchman as a logician, the Englishman as an analyst, the Italian as a mystic, divined the future but inevitable emancipation of the reason of mankind. Nor were there wanting signs, especially in Provence, that Aphrodite and Phoebus and the Graces were ready to resume their sway. We have, moreover, to remember the Cathari, the Paterini, the Fraticelli, the Albigenses, the Hussites—heretics in whom the new light dimly shone, but who were instantly exterminated by ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... established in the world as the primitive man conceives it. Larger tasks are discharged by more important spirits, and everything natural thus becomes animated by supernatural beings. Thor was the god of thunder; Freia the goddess of spring and vernal awakening; Athena inspired the minds of men. Venus and Aphrodite played their special parts, also. But such powers as these, established by the untutored mind, needed to be accounted for, and so in the more advanced religions Jove and Jupiter were created as the more ultimate causes, in response to intellectual demands. By combining all powers into one, God ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... intense spirituality of the Hebrew, the impassioned self-annihilation of the Hindoo, the joyous naturalism of the Greek." Yet he also remarks that there is something beautiful in "such presences as Pan, Aphrodite, and Apollo," which we do not find in Christianity; though he is careful to add that there is not "actually any strife between them and the sadder figure of the Galilean." "All the gods of all the creeds," he says, "supplement or corroborate each other." ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... and despicable, remained in ignorance, nor dreamed that the verses meant anybody of note; to them they seemed but the calf-sigh of some young writer so deep in his first devotion that he jumbled up his lady-love, Hesper, and Aphrodite, in the same poetic bundle—of which he left the string-ends hanging a little loose, while, upon the whole, it remained a not altogether unsightly bit of prentice-work. Tom had not been at the party, but had gathered fire enough from what he heard of Hesper's appearance ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... some teller of tales how there is a certain lady of perfect beauty, beyond the Graces themselves or the Heavenly Aphrodite, and then, without ever an inquiry whether his tale is true, and such a person to be found on earth, falling straight in love with her, like Medea in the story enamoured of a dream-Jason. And what most drew you on to love, you and the others who worship the same phantom, was, if I am ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... mantilla, and vowed his heart was breaking because his love gave him stony glances, she would look very graciously upon him, so that his courage was restored, and he promised her a silver heart as lovers in Greece made votive offerings to Aphrodite. ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... I did not know, I did not feel— what wrack, what weal for him: golden one, golden one, turn again Aphrodite with the yellow zone, I am cursed, cursed, undone! Ah and my face, Aphrodite, beside your gold, is ...
— Hymen • Hilda Doolittle
... the day before in the trip from the station to Fiesole, had not been found, and it was an irreparable disaster; a Paris review had just published one of his poems, with typographical errors as glaring as Aphrodite's shell. ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... with an ignorance blurred and dishonoured by shame, by enigmatical warnings, by cultivated aversions, an ignorance in which a fascinated curiosity and desire struggled like a thing in a net. I knew so little and I felt so much. There was indeed no Aphrodite at all in my youthful Pantheon, but instead there was a mysterious and minatory gap. I have told how at last a new Venus was born in my imagination out of gas lamps and the twilight, a Venus with a cockney accent and dark eyes shining out of the dusk, a Venus ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... set on the brows of the majestic shore. Disappearing as suddenly, it left her standing on the peak, dark and stormy; every tress, if tresses they could be called, of her windy hair, every tatter of her scanty garments, seeming individually to protest, 'The wind is my playmate; let me go!' If Aphrodite was born of the sunny sea, this child was the offspring of the windy shore; as if the mind of the place had developed for itself a consciousness, and this was its embodiment. She bore a strange affinity to the ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... Esperance appears only in three, which are the best. In one she represents Andromeda fastened to the rock, and Perseus (the Duke) delivers her after overcoming the dragon. In the second, the 'Judgment of Paris,' she appears as Aphrodite, to whom Paris (the Duke) gives the apple. The third is 'Europa and the Bull,' Europa being personified by Esperance. The Duke does not wish to look ridiculous in a bull's hide, so takes liberties with the legend and transforms the bull into a centaur. ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... chief characteristic of the Sphinx is an enduring patience, and he chafed at the colorless monotony of the next few days. The Aphrodite crept under sail five hundred miles to the south, until the wind died of sheer exhaustion. Then the engines took their turn, and the yacht exchanged the steady roll of a topsail schooner for the quivering uneasiness ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... glide, And as their crisped streamlets play, To feed, Cephisus, thine unfailing tide, Fresh verdure marks their winding way. Here oft to raise the tuneful song The virgin band of Muses deigns, And car-borne Aphrodite guides her golden reins. ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... great receptions, at the courts, in the cities; and she was the first of the Latin women to be apotheosized in the Orient. Paphos called her "divine" and set up statues to her; Mitylene called her the New Aphrodite, Eressus, Aphrodite Genetrix. These were bold innovations in a state in which tradition was still so powerful; but they could scarcely have been of serious danger to Julia, if her passionate temperament had not led her to commit a much more serious ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... so called from Cythe'ra (now Cerigo), a mountainous island of Laco'nia, noted for the worship of Aphrodite (or Venus). The tale is that Venus and Mars, having formed an illicit affection for each other, were caught in a delicate net made by Vulcan, and exposed to the ridicule of the court ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... the wind to seek and spring upon the pyre of her lord." Fate and Aphrodite drive her headlong, and in heaven Selene, remembering Endymion, bewails the lot of her sister in sorrow. OEnone reaches the funeral flame, and without a word or a cry leaps into her husband's arms, the wild Nymphs wondering. The lovers are mingled in one heap of ashes, and these are bestowed ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... but not one of thy best, for the singers of Antioch!" says the Greek. "Thou art a worshiper of Aphrodite, and so am I, as the myrtle I wear proves; therefore I tell thee their voices have the chill of a Caspian wind. Seest thou this girdle?—a gift of ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... the beloved, misused word with a ripple of vagrant melody, "is a high goddess, one supreme, all-sufficing, all-embracing, absolutely jealous. Her priests may serve none and nothing but her; and she is worthy of such worship.—Beauty of Aphrodite of old—chastity of Artemis of the crescent moon—wisdom of high Athene, of the silver spear—integrity of Hera the quiet-browed, giver of laws—these she combines in her perfect whole; these are the virtues we are bound to emulate who serve her. ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... of antique fresco, does assuredly not do so because the draughtsman's hand faltered in pious dread or pious aspiration. Nevertheless, Ruskin is right in telling us that no Italian modelled a female nude equal to the Aphrodite of Melos, or a male nude equal to the Apoxyomenos of the Braccio Nuovo. He is also right in pointing out that no Greek sculptor approached the beauty of facial form and expression which we recognise in Raffaello's Madonna di San Sisto, ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... Coins, 1837, p. 57, Pl. II., No. 30) we have a female figure standing on a rock between two recumbent male figures holding rudders. From an arch at the foot of the rock a stream is flowing: this is a representation of the rock of the Acropolis of Corinth: the female figure is a statue of Aphrodite, whose temple surmounted the rock. The stream is the fountain Pirene. The two recumbent figures are impersonations of the two harbors, Lechreum and Cenchreia, between which Corinth was situated. Philostratus (Icon. ii., c. 16) describes a similar picture of the Isthmus ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... hatred which existed between crocodiles and the inhabitants of Tentyris, that exquisitely charming Denderah which overlooks the valley of the Nile, and still deserves its old fame as the chief temple of the Goddess Athor, the Egyptian Aphrodite. ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... gift of beauty and holiness in her hand. It had veiled her also with the mysterious magic that was simple enough and directly compelling enough to rouse the beast of jealousy, the beast of mastery, in the hearts of men. She did not seem to him an Aphrodite, bearing in her hand the cup of love. There was something childlike about her, something as virginal as in Nan. He could believe she would be endlessly pleased with simple things, that she could be made to laugh delightedly over the trivialities of daily life. But ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... represented various scenes in the history of the gods and heroes: Ixion embracing the cloud; Diana surprised in the bath by Actaeon; the shepherd Paris as judge in the contest of beauty held upon Mount Ida between Hera, the snowy-armed, Athena of the sea-green eyes, and Aphrodite, girded with her magic cestus; the old men of Troy rising to honour Helena as she passed through the Skaian gate, a subject taken from one of the poems of the blind man of Meles. Others exhibited in preference scenes taken ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... solitary costume produced by certain conditions of climate and duties, acting in conjunction with a natural taste for harmonious coloring and simple form? That dress, I will maintain, sprang as naturally from the salt sea as Aphrodite did; and the man who suspects artifice in it, or invention, has had his mind perverted by the skepticism of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... showing it to be of a time long gone by. Following his conductor, Basil passed along a corridor, and into a peristyle with a double colonnade. In the midst of a little garden, planted with flowering shrubs, rose the statue which its late owner had most prized, an admirable copy of the Aphrodite of Cnidos; it stood upon a pedestal of black basalt and was protected by a light canopy with slender columns in all but transparent alabaster. Round about it were marble seats, and here, shielded from the sun by little silken awnings, sat Heliodora and her guests. At once Basil became aware ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... was difficult to disentangle what he really wished to teach from his jokes about the hangings of the Celestial Council-Chamber; "Willesden beyond Trent"; "Change Alley and Alley Change"; Professor Birks, "his brows crowned with myrtle," going in procession to the Temple of Aphrodite; the Duke of Somerset "running into the strong tower" of Deism, and thinking himself "safe" there from further questionings. This method of illustration threw an air of comedy over the theme which it illustrated; and, if the criticism failed ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... of the ways in which this monstrous reality has been approached by various writers. There is, first, the purely sentimental: Prevost's Manon Les caut. Then there is the slobberingly sentimental: Dumas' Dame aux Camelias. A third is the necrophilically romantic: Louys' Aphrodite. The fertile Balzac has given us no less than two: the purely romantic, in his fascinating portraits of the Fair Imperia; and the romantically realistic, in his Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes. Reade's Peg Woffington may be ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... to worship the goddess. Very similar customs existed in other parts of Western Asia, in North Africa, in Cyprus, and other islands of the Eastern Mediterranean, and also in Greece, where the temple of Aphrodite on the fort at Corinth possessed over a thousand hierodules, dedicated to the ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... the mystical Theologers who preceded Greek philosophy, Love was the Great First Cause and Parent of the Universe. "Zeus," says Proclus, "when entering upon the work of creation, changed Himself into the form of Love: and He brought forward Aphrodite, the principle of Unity and Universal Harmony, to display her light to all. In the depths of His mysterious being, He contains the principle of love within Himself; in Him creative wisdom ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... colliery-managers, and the chemists, they would shine, with their Della Robbia beautiful Madonna, their lovely reliefs from Donatello, their reproductions from Botticelli. Nay, the large photographs of the Primavera and the Aphrodite and the Nativity in the dining-room, the ordinary reception-room, would make dumb the mouth ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... The beautiful myth of Aphrodite, born of the sea foam, is Venus rising out of the waters of winter, to shine resplendent in the western skies at evening, and typifies the birth of forms, as all organic forms have their origin ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... incredible that she and her aunt were, indeed, creatures of the same blood, only by a birth or so different beings, and part of that same broad interlacing stream of human life that has invented the fauns and nymphs, Astarte, Aphrodite, Freya, and all the twining beauty of the gods. The love-songs of all the ages were singing in her blood, the scent of night stock from the garden filled the air, and the moths that beat upon the closed frames of the window next the lamp set her mind dreaming of kisses in the ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... the next room, where the astonished musician perceived D'Epernon before a mirror, occupied in stiffening his mustachios, while Maugiron, seated near the window, was cutting out engravings, by the side of which the bas-reliefs on the temple of Venus Aphrodite would ...
— Chicot the Jester - [An abridged translation of "La dame de Monsoreau"] • Alexandre Dumas
... at his Love's feet, he thanked Aphrodite that she had the manner and the subtle fire and the grace to bring them there. Her mind was wonderful, too, aflame, like Sappho's, with the love of beauty. That was why he called her Lesbia. He had used Sappho's great love poem (Valerius probably did not know it, but ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... parting, ever meeting, as the severer Muses assert, while the gentler ones do not insist on the perpetual strife and peace, but admit a relaxation and alternation of them; peace and unity sometimes prevailing under the sway of Aphrodite, and then again plurality and war, by reason of a principle of strife. Whether any of them spoke the truth in all this is hard to determine; besides, antiquity and famous men should have reverence, and not be liable to accusations so serious. Yet one thing may be said ...
— Sophist • Plato
... quiet there as in the groves of Subiacum. For a number of days I did not know that a divinity dwelt in the house. Once about daybreak I saw her bathing in the garden fountain; and I swear to thee by that foam from which Aphrodite rose, that the rays of the dawn passed right through her body. I thought that when the sun rose she would vanish before me in the light, as the twilight of morning does. Since then, I have seen her twice; ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Heaven and consort of Zeus—Athena, the goddess of wisdom, and Zeus's favorite daughter—and Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... voluntary—pathicks effeminately submitting, to use Plato's words, 'to be treated bestially'—is altogether a foul and unlovely favour. And so I think Solon wrote the lines quoted above 'in his hot youth,' as Plato puts it; but when he became older wrote these other lines, 'Now I delight in Cyprus-born Aphrodite, and in Dionysus, and in the Muses: all these give joys to men': as if, after the heat and tempest of his boyish loves, he had got into a quiet haven of marriage and philosophy. But indeed, Protogenes, if we look at the real facts ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... stealing over the water and faintly glorifying the old house and its spreading gardens. An overpowering sense of youth—of the beauty of the world—of the mystery of the future, beat through his pulses. The coming dance became a rite of Aphrodite, towards which ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... These wings were obtained at their request when Proserpine was carried off, that they might be better able to hunt for her. But another account says that they refused their sympathy to Ceres, and were given their feathery coating by her in punishment. Some writers say it was due to Aphrodite, who was angered at their virginity. The Sirens, as well as other ambitious performers, were rash enough to attempt a contest with the Muses, and met with the customary defeat. The victorious nine then pounced upon the unfortunate trio, and tore ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... came to pass that the only joy of her life was in the seeing King Menelaus in the morning, and in the reading in his gaze the assurance of that peace which she longed for. And, again, her pride lay in fitting herself for it when it should come. Now, therefore, she forsook the religion of Aphrodite, to whom all her duty had been before, and in a grove of olive-trees in the garden of the house had built an altar to Artemis Aristoboule. There offered she incense daily, and paid tribute of wheaten cakes kneaded with honey, and little figures of bears such as virgins offer to the ...
— The Ruinous Face • Maurice Hewlett
... implacable Aphrodite, Saw the hair unbound and the feet unsandalled Shine as fire of sunset on ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... root; something of birth and temperament is in it—the stamp and heritage of a race born to suffer. But dominant and fundamental though it was, Hebraism was only latent thus far. It was classic and romantic art that first attracted and inspired her. She pictures Aphrodite the beautiful, arising from the waves, and the beautiful Apollo and his loves,—Daphne, pursued by the god, changing into the laurel, and the enamored Clytie into the faithful sunflower. Beauty, for its own sake, supreme and unconditional, charmed her primarily ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... too, many problems still wait for their solution. Think, for instance, of the allusion to the fable of the donkey in the lion's skin, which occurs in Plato's Cratylus.[5] Was that borrowed from the East? Or take the fable of the weasel changed by Aphrodite into a woman who, when she saw a mouse, could not refrain from making a spring at it. This, too, is very like a Sanskrit fable; but how then could it have been brought into Greece early enough to appear in one of the comedies of Strattis, about ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... name of Cyclops reminds me that these scientific people have been playing a scurvy trick upon the classics behind our backs. It reminds one of Epistemon's visit to Hades, when he saw Alexander a patcher of clouts and Xerxes a crier of mustard. Aphrodite, the dabbler tells me, is a kind of dirty mud-worm, and much dissected by spectacled pretenders to the London B.Sc.; every candidate, says the syllabus, must be able to dissect, to the examiner's satisfaction, and demonstrate upon Aphrodite, Nereis, Palaemon. Were the gods ever so insulted? ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... Ideal Beauty a Moral Form, and then aesthetics will translate itself into ethics. The unmoral sentiment of a Shelley for Beauty may issue in another generation in the immoral sentiment of a Swinburne. Even thus the vision of the Aphrodite sank into the dream of a Venus. An Oscar Wilde's maunderings over an art which has no reference to morality may possibly be poetry, but they certainly are not religion according to the Bible, for all his blasphemous apostrophes ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... treasure which was to be found, alas! only within the abyss. Upon the broad black marble flagstones at the entrance of the palace, and a few steps above the water, stood a figure which none who then saw can have ever since forgotten. It was the Marchesa Aphrodite—the adoration of all Venice—the gayest of the gay—the most lovely where all were beautiful—but still the young wife of the old and intriguing Mentoni, and the mother of that fair child, her first and only one, who now, deep beneath the murky water, was thinking ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... where her mother had spent so many years, chequered with sunshine and shade. She rambled over the park and cooled her fevered head and hands in the water that dripped from the tresses of the marble Aphrodite. Fancy took her over the route of foreign travel, her mother had pursued with the Count de Rossillon. She longed herself to visit those regions of classic and romantic interest. During the long, golden, September afternoons, she spent hours, ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... hour on the mountain. The depth of his own tenderness, the deliciousness of his passion swept over him like a revelation, as he asked himself in wonder how it could be that this love had sprung up at once, like Aphrodite from the waves, where no one could have suspected such a marvel. He himself had been without realization of how his passing interest had deepened its roots until now they fed on every part of him. Love had startled him like a stroke of lightning ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... Jove had driven the Titans out from Heaven, huge Earth bare her youngest-born son, Typhœus (Typhaon, Typhœus, Typhon), by the embrace of Tartarus (Hell), through golden Aphrodite (Venus), whose hands, indeed, are apt for deeds on the score of strength, and untiring the feet of the strong god; and from his shoulders there were a hundred heads of a serpent, a fierce dragon playing with dusky tongues" (tongues of fire and ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... the story told by Ovid (Met. x. 243) Pygmalion, king of Cyprus, conceived an aversion to women, and devoted himself to art, but having made in ivory a lovely statue of a woman he became enamored of it, and at his request Aphrodite endowed it with life. This beautiful woman, Galatea, became his wife, and bore him a son called Paphos, founder of the city ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... mythological poem known as the "Descent of Istar into Hades" ("Records of the Past," Vol. I, p. 143). The myth of Tammuz and Istar passed, through the Phoenicians, to the Greeks, among whom Adonis and Aphrodite represent the personages of the ancient Accadian legend. Tammuz is referred to in Ezek. viii. 14. (See "Records of the Past," Vol. IX, p. 147.) The second hymn treats of the world-mountain, the Atlas of the Greeks, ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... in gum boots, also loose and cavernous, and his entire costume looked relaxed and flapping, so that he gave the impression of being able to shake himself out of his raiment, and to rise like a burlesque Aphrodite. His face was overgrown with a grizzled tangle that looked as though it had been trimmed with button-hole scissors, while above the brush heap grandly ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... from off the sea? Ah, quietly the shingle waits the tides Whose waves are stinging kisses, but to me Love brought no peace, nor darkness any rest. I crept and touched the foam with fevered hands And cried to Love, from whom the sea is sweet, From whom the sea is bitterer than death. Ah, Aphrodite, if I sing no more To thee, God's daughter, powerful as God, It is that thou hast made my life too sweet To hold the added sweetness of a song. There is a quiet at the heart of love, And I have pierced the pain and come to peace. I ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... 4. Production of G. W. Chadwick's symphonic fantasie "Aphrodite" by the Litchfield County ...
— Annals of Music in America - A Chronological Record of Significant Musical Events • Henry Charles Lahee
... her festival comes they act in the following way, by night: Putting upon their heads what the priestess of Athene gives them to carry (neither she nor they know what these things are), these maidens descend, by a natural underground passage, from an inclosure in the city sacred to Aphrodite of the Gardens. In the sanctuary below they deposit what they carry, and bring back something else closely wrapt up. And these maidens they henceforth dismiss, and other two they elect instead of them for ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... deeds of golden Aphrodite, Who wakens with her smile the lulled delight Of sweet desire, taming the eternal kings Of Heaven, and men, and all the living things That fleet along the air, or whom the sea, 5 Or earth, with her maternal ministry, Nourish innumerable, thy delight All seek ... O crowned Aphrodite! ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... were middle-aged lovers," said Rorie. "The moon must have despised them. Youth is the only season when love is wisdom, Vixen. In later life it means folly and drivelling, wrinkles badly hidden under paint, pencilled eyebrows, and false hair. Aphrodite should be ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... of Beauty—of Beauty alone—of Beauty and naught else. It is well that one should dare to follow that terrible goddess even to the bitter end. That pitiless marble altar has its victims, as the other Altars. The "white implacable Aphrodite" cries aloud for blood—for the blood of our dearest affections; for the blood of our most cherished hopes; for the blood of our integrity and faith; for the blood of our reason. She drugs us, blinds us, tortures us, maddens us, and ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... an entirely new religion. Three hundred years before Christ, the people of Salonika worshipped the mysterious gods who had their earthly habitation on the island of Thasos. The Greeks ejected them, and erected altars to Apollo and Aphrodite, the Egyptians followed and taught Salonika to fear Serapis; then came Roman gods and Roman generals; and then St. Paul. The Jews set up synagogues, the Mohammedans reared minarets, the Crusaders restored the cross, the Tripolitans restored the crescent, the Venetians re-restored Christianity. ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... away the garment which covered her bosom. The artifice was successful. The judges pronounced her not guilty, being convinced that such wondrous grace and beauty could only belong to a favorite of Aphrodite. Athen. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Babylonian and Assyrian mythologies we have the chief deities as Ishtar, Tammuz, Baal, and Astarte. In the Phrygian religion we have the Goddess Cybele and her husband Attis. Among the Greeks we have the Goddess Aphrodite and the God Adonis. The Persians had their Mithra. Adonis and Attis flourished in Syria. In the Egyptian religion was found the Goddess Isis and the God Osiris. The Semites have their Jehovah, the Mohammedans their Allah, and the Christians the Goddess Mary, the God the Father, ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... Venus (Aphrodite), the goddess of love and beauty, was the daughter of Jupiter and Dione. Others say that Venus sprang from the foam of the sea. The zephyr wafted her along the waves to the Isle of Cyprus, where she was received and attired by the Seasons, and then led to the assembly of the gods. All were ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... were they haunters of the sculptures in the Louvre, where, because of the difficulty of it, she piqued herself most especially on knowledge, and could convict him most triumphantly of a barbarian ignorance. Up and down they wandered, and she gave him eyes, whether for Artemis, or Aphrodite, or Apollo, or still more for the significant and troubling art of the Renaissance, French and Italian. She would flit before him, perching here and there like a bird, and quivering through and ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Aphrodite (pronounced just as spelled) was so named because her father thought it had something to do with Africa. She was astoundingly, absolutely, and gratifyingly black, and Ambrose was sure that he had never seen any ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... was out; and from the sea's salt path Rose amorous odors, filtering through the night And stirring all the senses with delight; Sweet perfumes left since Aphrodite's bath. Back in the wooded copse, a whip-poor-will Gave love's impassioned and impatient call. On pebbled sands I heard the waves kiss fall, And fall again, so ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... skill to praise That perfect bodily beauty which is hers, Even as those worshippers Who bore rude offerings of honey and maize, Their all, into the gold-paved ministers Of Aphrodite, I have given her these My faltering melodies, That are ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... horizon's rounded edge. There behind them—miles behind—Kerguelen Land reared its fierce cliffs against the twilight sky. Clear and desolate they towered in an unutterable solitude, and on their snowy surfaces the sunbeams beat coldly as the warm breath of some human passion beating on Aphrodite's marble breast. ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... fairness, elegance, comeliness, pulchritude, grace, exquisiteness, charm, attraction. Associated Words: aesthetics, aesthetician, aestheticism, aesthete, aesthetic, esthetology, Apollo, Adonis, Venus, Hebe, Hyperion, Houri, Aphrodite. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... suddenly concerned with conquests of ambition, not of love. So fresh a realm was opened to her that she was herself renewed and restored to that boyish-girlish estate of young womanhood before love has educated it to desire and the slaveries of desire. The Aphrodite that lurks in every woman had been put to flight by the Diana that ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... This charming 'aphrodite piscatrix' is stalwart and strong (she can swim a mile with ease), she has carried her basket and nets since sunrise, and now at eight o'clock on this summer's morning sits down on the rocks, makes a quick breakfast of potage, plumes herself ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... over the wise of Samos, the democracy of Corcyra, the graceful and deep-taught loveliness of Miletus, smiles as graciously as of yore. For the North, philosophy and freedom are essentials to human happiness; in the lands which Aphrodite rose from the waves to govern, as the Seasons, hand in hand, stood to welcome her on the shores, Nature is all ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... himself was so infected with the pagan view that he sees a sort of Nemesis pursuing the hero whom the slighted Aphrodite reproaches with lack of reverence—religious reverence—for her power. This primitive pagan view, crude, non-moral, but essentially sincere, animates the story of Tom Jones and gives it a character which is lacking in the popular ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James |
