"Apogee" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... given us many well-studied types of character, but he excels in the portraiture of the manly young man and the lovable young woman. In this regard I find him at his apogee with Phyllis Fleming and Jack Dunquerque, who are both frankly alive and charming. He is good, too, at the portraiture of a humbug, and finds a humorous delight in him, very much as Dickens did. There is more than a touch of Dickens in ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... sweet it is to be A listener of love's ephemeral song, And live with beauty though it be not long, And die enamoured of eternity, Though in the apogee Of time there sit no individual Godhead of life, than to reject the plea Of passionate beauty: loveliness is all, And love is more divine ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... upon Bradlaugh, the shameless free-thinker, the man who had known how to make himself the centre of discussion in every house in England. This was the Bradlaugh year, the apogee of his notoriety. Dozens of times at the Cedar's meal-table had she heard the shocking name of Bradlaugh on outraged tongues, but never once had a word been uttered in his favour. The public opinion of the boarding-house ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... witnessed the rise and fall of so many musical dynasties; have seen men like Wagner emerge from northern mists and die in the full glory of a reverberating sunset. And I have also remarked that this same Richard the Actor touched his apogee fifteen years ago and more. Already signs are not wanting which show that Wagner and Wagnerism is on the decline. As Swinburne said of Walt Whitman: "A reformer—but not founder." This holds good of Wagner, who closed a period and did not begin ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... those who borrow the most from the French, are the most forward in trumpeting the poverty of that language, very likely thinking that such an accusation justifies their depredations. It is said that the French language has attained the apogee of its beauty, and that the smallest foreign loan would spoil it, but I make bold to assert that this is prejudice, for, although it certainly is the most clear, the most logical of all languages, it would be great temerity to affirm that it can never go farther or higher ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... case, singular piece of delicacy, that he refrained from the attempt to see Vittoria immediately after he had flung his magnificent bouquet of treasure at her feet. In his intoxication with the success which he had foreseen and cradled to its apogee, he was now reckless of any consequences. He felt ready to take patriotic Italy in his arms, provided that it would succeed as Vittoria had done, and on the spot. Her singing of the severe phrases of the opening chant, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... apogee, becomes sterile; and inertia would be its sole teaching did it not, after recognising the pettiness, the nothingness, of our passions and hopes, of our being, and lastly, of reason itself, retrace its footsteps back to the point whence it shall be able once more to take eager interest ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... but one word to show how the Museum of Madrid became so rich in masterpieces. During the long and brilliant reigns of Charles V. and Philip II., when art had arrived at its apogee in Italy, and was just beginning its splendid career in Spain, these powerful monarchs had the lion's share of all the best work that was done in the world. There was no artist so great but he was honored by the commands of ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... are clustered all our observations, our axioms, our problems, which have been scattered deliberately among the wise quips which our loquacious meditations retail. The honeymoon would seem to be, if we may use the expression, the apogee of that analysis to which we must apply ourselves, before engaging in ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... Western-educated Indians which gradually grew up between the repression of the Mutiny and the Partition of Bengal, a measure enforced on the sole plea of greater administrative efficiency by a Viceroy under whom a system of government by efficiency reached its apogee—himself the incarnation of efficiency and unquestionably the greatest and most indefatigable administrator that Britain sent out to India during that period. It would be unfair to suppose that that antagonism was due on either side to mere narrow prejudice ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... Utilitarians is noteworthy. It is indicated in a famous article which J. S. Mill contributed to the Westminster Review in March 1840.[636] Mill's concessions to Coleridge rather scandalised the faithful; and it is enough to observe here that it marks the apogee of Mill's Benthamism. Influences, of which I shall have to speak, had led him to regard his old creed as imperfect, and to assent to great part of Coleridge's doctrine. Mill does not discuss the metaphysical or theological views of the opposite school, though he briefly intimates ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... American appreciation finds itself to-day. Like our own painters, the French artists of the Renaissance found themselves familiar with masterpieces wholly beyond their power to create, and produced by a foreign people who had enjoyed the incomparable advantage of arriving at their artistic apogee through natural stages of growth, beginning with ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... itself. Our system was the sounder and the safer of the two. But the professional politician was then unthought of; he came as the result of several conditions incident to our national development; he has perhaps already touched his apogee, and is beginning to disappear. The nation has awakened to a realization that its interests are not ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... prospect poorer than under capitalism for individuals animated with good and noble qualities, to rise and remain above; and it may be added without exaggeration that the prospect grows darker in the measure that this economic system approaches its apogee. Recklessness and unscrupulousness in the choice and application of the means, are weapons infinitely more effective and promiseful of success than all human virtues put together. To consider a social system, built upon such a basis, a system ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... Lombards and other Italians, the great entrepot for their merchandise. It now became, in addition, the great marketplace for English wool, and the woollen fabrics of all the Netherlands, as well as for the drugs and spices of the East. It had, however, by no means reached its apogee, but was to culminate with Venice, and to sink with her decline. When the overland Indian trade fell off with the discovery of the Cape passage, both cities withered. Grass grew in the fair and pleasant ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... deluded. To wade through these volumes of German mysticism is a task both painful and disgusting — and happily not necessary. Enough has been stated to show how gross is the superstition even of the learned; and that errors, like comets, run in one eternal cycle — at their apogee in one age, at their perigee in the next, but returning in one phase or another for men to ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... good one for a simple lump of dirt like himself. The good saint having used all methods of coercion, having overstretched her muscles, and tried the nerves of her thin face till they bulged out, recognised the fact that no suffering in the world was so great, and her anguish attaining the apogee of sphincterial terrors, she exclaimed, 'Oh! my God, to Thee I offer it!' At this orison, the stoney matter broke off short, and fell like a flint against the wall of the privy, making a croc, croc, crooc, paf! You can easily understand, my sisters, that she had no need of a torch-cul, ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... what Flood the Seeker tells us Of the Dominant that runs Through the cycles of the Suns— Read my story last and see Luna at her apogee. ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... the political apogee of the Romans: Optimis moribus et maxima concordia egit populus Romanus inter secundum atque postremum bellum Carthaginiense. See Augustin (Civ. Dei II, 18). Puchta (Institutionen, I, f. 83), with a great deal of good sense, distinguishes in every people ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... a une autre difference entre les deux groupes de memoires en question. Les notres ont trait pour la plupart a une epoque que beaucoup de gens considerent comme un apogee, de sorte que, pour le lecteur, ils apportent plutot un sentiment de decouragement. "Voila ce qu'ils firent," se dit-il: "et nous?..." Car ce qu'on est convenu d'appeler "les gloires" napoleoniennes du debut du siecle ne suffit pas, helas, a effacer la tache—non moins napoleonienne—de 1870. ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... the apogee of national strength, but it was the beginning also of its decadence. Their reign was great because the flow of energy begun in the Middle Ages lasted till their times; but it was execrable, because their tortuous ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... birth, their apogee and decline. None of those which have been famous from the days of Sesostris to that of Philip Augustus, exist except as monuments. The French will have the same fate, and in the year 2825 if read, will ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... last days of autumn Marie and Raoul again met and renewed their walks in the Bois, where alone they could see each other until the salons reopened. But when the winter fairly began, Raoul appeared in social life at his apogee. He was almost a personage. Rastignac, now out of power with the ministry, which went to pieces on the death of de Marsay, leaned upon Nathan, and gave him in return the warmest praise. Madame de Vandenesse, feeling this change in public opinion, ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... of the Sun; total if she covers it entirely; annular, if the solar disk is visible all round the lunar disk, as appears when the Moon, in her elliptical orbit, is beyond medium distance, toward the apogee. ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... come, and the pleasures and splendours of Paris were at their apogee. The city was at its gayest—that beautiful city, which we can never see again as we have seen it; which we lament, as some fair and radiant creature that has come to an untimely death. Paris the beautiful, Paris the beloved, imperial Paris, with her air of classic splendour, like the mistress ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... her character of genial hostess if she were to interfere too markedly, she retired and sat down helpless. And so the dance whizzed on with cumulative fury, the performers moving in their planet-like courses, direct and retrograde, from apogee to perigee, till the hand of the well-kicked clock at the bottom of the room had travelled over the circumference ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... Ur in the same region that the names of Ismi-Dagan and of his sons Goun-goun and Samsibin are to be found stamped upon the bricks. We may, therefore, look upon their epoch as that in which the first Chaldee Empire reached its apogee. It then embraced all Mesopotamia, from the slopes of Mount Zagros to the out-fall of ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... the Guimard dynasty. She owed her ascendency, moreover, to various well-known protectors, to the Duc de Rhetore (the Due de Chaulieu's eldest son), to the influence of a famous Superintendent of Fine Arts, and sundry diplomatists and rich foreigners. During her apogee she had a neat little house in the Rue Chauchat, and lived as Opera nymphs used to live in the old days. Du Bruel was smitten with her about the time when the Duke's fancy came to an end in 1823. Being a mere subordinate in the Civil Service, du Bruel tolerated ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... capitularies of Charlemagne, and in the Middle Ages was the important and flourishing capital of Basse-Brie and residence of the Counts of Champagne. Under Thibault VI., called Le Chansonnier, Provins reached its apogee of prosperity, numbering at that epoch 80,000 souls. Like most other towns in these parts, it suffered greatly in the Hundred Years' War, being taken by the English in 1432, and retaken from them in the following year. It took part in the League, but submitted to Henry IV. in 1590, and from that ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... workmanship as compared with the stone-knapping triumphs of the late Neolithic and early Chalcolithic periods. The delicacy of the art had all been lost. But the best flint knives of the early period—dating to just a little before the time of the Ist Dynasty, when flint-working had attained its apogee, and copper had just begun to be used—are undoubtedly the most remarkable stone weapons ever made in the world. The grace and utility of the form, the delicacy of the fluted chipping on the side, and the minute care with which the tiny ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... who has three long hairs, so long that they could be twisted twice round the hand on his breast. When these are cut off he becomes the weakest of men. When these grow again he regains his strength. The sun's rays have most power when they are longest, i.e. when the sun is in apogee. ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... reach their culminating point of technical perfection. Perhaps this point is reached when the art is practised for its own sake, without giving much consideration or attributing special importance to what it expresses. Sculpture reached its apogee under the Greeks, who, more than any other race, prized Form—particularly as manifested in its highest expression, the human figure. Painting also was at its climax of technical development during the Renaissance, ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... of all peoples show that when a nation has reached the apogee of its military glory and its wealth, it begins at once to sink more or less rapidly on the declivity of moral degeneration and decay. The Israelites having, among the first, experienced this law of the evolution ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch
... years of the nineteenth century the friar orders in the Philippines had reached the apogee of their power and usefulness. Their influence was everywhere felt and acknowledged, while the country still prospered under the effects of the vigorous and progressive administrations of Anda ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... that has made us happy any time these sixteen years: his huge mouth is a perpetual well of laughter—buckets full of fun can be drawn from it. We have formed no such friendships as that boyish one of the man with the mouth. But though, in our eyes, Mr. Cruikshank reached his apogee some eighteen years since, it must not be imagined that such is really the case. Eighteen sets of children have since then learned to love and admire him, and may many more of their successors be brought up in the same delightful faith. ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... confined the heroine. In "Edwin Brothertoft," it is one of Edwin's renowned breed of white horses that carries him through almost insuperable obstacles to his goal. In "John Brent," the black stallion, Don Fulano, who is throughout the chief figure in the book, reaches his apogee in the tremendous race across the plains and down the rocky gorge of the mountains, to where the abductors of the heroine are just about to pitch their camp at the end of their day's journey. The motive ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... the figure was a study in satin nudity, whence, from a jeweled girdle, light draperies swept downward, covering the feet and swinging, a shimmering curve out into the foreground of the canvas, the curve being cut off in its apogee by ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer |
