"Charybdis" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a quiet voice at his ear; and he turned to look straight in the eyes of Rewa Gunga, who had leaned forward to read over his shoulder. Just for one second he hovered on the brink of quick defeat. Having escaped the Scylla of the dancing women, Charybdis waited for him in the shape of eyes that were pools of hot mystery. It was the sound of his own voice that brought him back to the world again and saved his will ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... an instant, or she will imagine that some dire calamity has befallen her knight, who, in hunting a siren, encountered Scylla or Charybdis. Good evening, ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... thoughts which forced on his mind the image of, Amy, by saying to himself there would be time to think hereafter how he was to escape from the labyrinth ultimately, since the pilot who sees a Scylla under his bows must not for the time think of the more distant dangers of Charybdis. ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... without doubt his better nature and his good taste would have prevailed. But when fate threw Berene Dumont in his way, and circumstances brought about his close associations with her for many months, there seemed but one way of escape from the Scylla of his desires, and that was to the Charybdis of ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the villain, who has spread confusion amongst the ranks of the Knights, this public robber, this yawning gulf of plunder, this devouring Charybdis,[31] this villain, this villain, this villain! I cannot say the word too often, for he is a villain a thousand times a day. Come, strike, drive, hurl him over and crush him to pieces; hate him as ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... be naught, till in the end he had hit upon the plan of saying, concerning any boy whom he particularly liked, that he was not one of his especial chums, and that indeed he hardly knew why he had asked him; but he found he only fell on Scylla in trying to avoid Charybdis, for though the boy was declared to be more successful it was Ernest who was naught for not thinking more highly ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... language of the Constitution so guarded as not to have even the word 'slave' in it, and yet of such a character as not to interfere with local State legislation upon slavery? Simply to steer between the Charybdis of no union and the Scylla of the repudiation of the Declaration of Independence, teaching that all men are born free and equal, and that all have natural rights, such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And yet, in the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... Scylla of local neglect and the Charybdis of centralized jobbery. At first the settler was burdened with the task of clearing roughly the road in front of his own land, but the existence of vast tracts of Clergy Reserves, or other grants exempt from clearing ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... coming from school one winter day, and some boys threw snowballs at her. Then Ludo and I appeared—"the Ebers boys" and she thought that would be the end of her; but instead of attacking her we fell upon the boys, who turned upon us, and drove them away, she escaping betwixt Scylla and Charybdis. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... had yet the prudence, ere he went out with Lord Kenmore In 1715, to convey his estate to trustees, in order to parry pains and penalties, in case the Earl of Mar could not put down the Protestant succession. But Scylla and Charybdis —a word to the wise—he only saved his estate at expense of a lawsuit, which again subdivided the family property. He was, however, a man of resolution. He sold part of the lands, evacuated the old ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... the position of England in its true light before the world, and I with many another one am very grateful for it. Among all Lord Russell's many titles to fame and to public gratitude, the manner in which he has steered the vessel of the State through the Scylla and Charybdis of the American War will, I think, always stand conspicuous.... Now I am going to ask a great favour. I saw at Minto a copy of verses written for the summer-house at Pembroke Lodge, of which I formed the highest opinion. May I have ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... Flying Dutchman had evidently vanished to join the Phantom Ship. I felt very uneasy, fearing he might fall a prey to my two cats, who would no doubt find cold squirrel a very tempting entremet; or if he escaped this Scylla, the Charybdis of death by starvation lay before him. The hours passed, and Fliegende Hollaender did not appear. Senta was cheerful, and reigned mistress of the revolving wheel—always the bone of contention between the pair. Once, during the afternoon, I fancied I ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... of that sporting Athens—Corinth, perhaps, we should say—Melton Mowbray. Melton was then unknown to fame, but, as if inspired by that furor venaticus which now inspires all who come within twenty miles of this Charybdis of the chase, Bess here let out in a style with which it would have puzzled the best Leicestershire squire's best prad to have kept pace. The spirit she imbibed through the pores of her skin, and the juices ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... which you must suppose has been mortifying to an extreme. We are looking out for the Mutine. As soon as she joins us we expect to proceed in search of the enemy. Our route lies through a passage often celebrated by the ancients, "the famous Scylla and Charybdis." We shall have sight of Mount AEtna and other volcanoes, particularly Mount Strombolo, and other small islands formed by subterranean eruptions. We are at present in sight of Vesuvius, at the foot of which Naples ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I • Sir John Ross
... of disease, the unrest of madness, made Caligula the genius of insatiable appetite; and his martyrdom was the torment of lust and ennui and everlasting agitation. The accident of empire tantalised him with vain hopes of satisfying the Charybdis of his soul's sick cravings. From point to point he passed of empty pleasure and unsatisfying cruelty, for ever hungry; until the malady of his spirit, unrestrained by any limitations, and with the right medium for its development, became unique—the tragic type of pathological desire. What ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... now let them villas rear[68] Ennobled by the charity we spare. There let them warble in the tainted breeze, 75 Or sing like widow'd orphans to the trees: There let them chant their incoherent dreams, Where howls Charybdis, and where Scylla screams! Or where Avernus, from his darksome round, May echo to the winds the blasted sound! 80 As fair Alcyone,[69] with anguish press'd, Broods o'er the British main with tuneful breast, Beneath the white-brow'd cliff protected sings, Or ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... knowing very well that he had to steer his ship through a narrow and dangerous channel, avoiding Hobbism on the one side and tender consciences on the other. Each generation of State Churchmen has the same task. The channel remains to-day just as it ever did, with Scylla and Charybdis presiding over their rocks as of old. Hobbes's Leviathan appeared in 1651, and in 1670 both his philosophy and his statecraft were fashionable doctrine. All really pious people called Hobbes an Atheist. Technically he ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... name brings a sad remembrance of my voyage homeward to my mind. Off the coast of Sicily is a mighty whirlpool, which men call Charybdis, where Aeneas of old narrowly escaped shipwreck. When the tide goes down the whirlpool belches forth the fragments of ships which have been sucked down, and when it returns the ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... sound policy. In time, when passion shall have yielded to sober reason, the current may possibly turn; but, in the mean while, this government, in relation to France and England, may be compared to a ship between Scylla and Charybdis. If the treaty is ratified, the partisans of the French (or rather of war and confusion) will excite them to hostile measures, or at least to unfriendly sentiments;—if it is not, there is no foreseeing all the consequences that may follow as ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... opposite lived another terrible creature called Charybdis who stirred the sea to a ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... a real or imaginary old lady who had got the metaphor of Scylla and Charybdis a little confused. Wishing to describe a perplexing ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... was it for Mary to order anything without an advance notice, for otherwise she was forced to start her little bark through the Scylla and Charybdis of 'fire island,' namely, 'The fire's too low, marm;' or 'I've ...
— A Christmas Story - Man in His Element: or, A New Way to Keep House • Samuel W. Francis
... her father by pulling out the golden hair which grew on the top of his head, and on which which his life and kingdom depended. Minos won the city, but rejected her love in horror. The other Scylla, from whom the rock opposite Charybdis was named, was a beautiful maiden, beloved by the sea-god Glaucus, but changed into a monster through the jealousy and enchantments of Circe. The mother of Romulus: Silvia, daughter and only living child of Numitor, whom her uncle Amulius made a vestal virgin, to preclude the possibility ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... clogging influences of cabinet pudding to induce him to give his spoon too much leeway; as in all etiquette of the table, the spoon has its difficulties and dangers. Particularly has the soup-spoon its Scylla and Charybdis, and if a careless eater make a hissing sound as he eats his soup, the well-bred ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... the morning, to belong to this frontierless world of nature, to be coaxed into flower by the sun, to be a strand in some unknown design, how much better than the weary steering of your life between the Scylla of your ardent futile longings and the Charybdis of some senseless ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... 20. "My Charybdis conducted me to the barracks where a lot of undisciplined philosophers were discussing the parceling out of land.... The ringleader was a round-headed, long-nosed and bulky individual with a shaggy beard and dirty uniform.... ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... cultur'd arts; and Jason for my spouse, "For whom all earth's possessions were too small "To change. His spouse become, supremely blest, "Dear to the gods, the loftiest stars I'll reach. "What are those rocks, they tell, which 'mid the waves "Meet in encounter? Fell Charybdis what,— "Hostile to ships, now sucking in the tide, "Now fierce discharging? What the savage bounds, "Which compass greedy Scylla 'mid the main "Sicilian? O'er the wide-spread ocean borne, "Him whom I love embracing; sheltering close "In Jason's bosom; ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... efforts to reach this Church from the eastern side; once in the night time, during which, and particularly when within 100 yards of the building, we had to beat about mystically between Scylla and Charybdis, and once at day time, when the utmost care was necessary in order to avoid a mild mishap amid deep side crevices, cart ruts two feet deep, lime heaps, and cellar excavations. We shall long remember the time when, after our first visit, we left the Church, All the night had we been in ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... through the vigilance of Cicero and the alliance of the respectable classes under his leadership. In 49, and again in 48, it escaped a similar disaster through the good sense of Caesar and his agents, who succeeded in steering between Scylla and Charybdis by saving the debtors without ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... knight or the squire so bold As to dive to the howling Charybdis below?— I cast in the whirlpool a goblet of gold, And o'er it already the dark waters flow; Whoever to me may the goblet bring, Shall have for his guerdon ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... the excellent descriptions of Nature full of objective life in his longer poems—for instance, the tumult of Charybdis and the unceasing rain in The Diver, evening in The Hostage, and landscape in William Tell and The Walk. In the last, as Julian Schmidt says, the ever varying scenery is made a 'frame for a kind ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... that hath, more shall be given; and from him that hath not, the little that he hath shall be taken away.' The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism. Such are the effects which must ever flow from an unmitigated ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... undue stress on outward forms, and fanaticism, which gives credit to preternatural impulses, and professes a particular kind of inspiration differing not at all from infallibility, are the Scylla and Charybdis, through which, over stormy waters or serene, we have to make our steady way. Both are equally intolerant, and both are condemned by the genius of Protestantism, the constitution of the Church, and the ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... of those to whom the church stands first. Here is one of the difficulties of this complex case. Yet here, too, there may be some trace of compensation. If the reader has been drawn into the whirlpools of the political Charybdis, he might not even in far worthier hands than mine have escaped the rocky headlands of the ecclesiastic Scylla. For ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... tall, thin and severe, and a great helper at St. Matthew's, the church round the corner. She gave up all her time to church work and the care of the poor, and it wasn't her fault that the poor hated her. Between the Scylla of politics and the Charybdis of religion there was very little left for poor Barbara; she faded away under the care of an elderly governess who suffered from a perfect cascade of ill-fated love affairs; it seemed that gentlemen were always "playing with her feelings." ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... the unholy holiday of all the devil's crew. Alas! said Panurge, Friar John damns himself here as black as buttermilk for the nonce. Oh, what a good friend I lose in him. Alas, alas! this is another gats-bout than last year's. We are falling out of Scylla into Charybdis. Oho! I drown. Confiteor; one poor word or two by way of testament, Friar John, my ghostly father; good Mr. Abstractor, my crony, my Achates, Xenomanes, my all. Alas! I drown; two words of ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... the tempestuous sea bellow so loud, when the Northern blast dashes it, with its foaming waves between Scylla and Charybdis; nor Stromboli, nor Mount Etna, when their sulphurous flames, having been forcibly confined, rend, and burst open the mountain, fulminating stones and earth through the air together with ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... or its supernatural powers, are therefore opposite to the deities of Olympus. Hence their shape is changed, they can be even monstrosities, such as Polyphemus, the Laestrigonians, Scylla and Charybdis. Circe and Calypso are beautiful women, yet not natural women, in spite of their beauty; there is something superhuman about them, divine, though they be not Olympians. Shapes of wonder they all seem, unreal, yet ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... trouble keeping peace between them than we did between any of the rest of the Aiders," corrected Pollyanna, a little breathless from her efforts to steer between the Scylla of her father's past commands in regard to speaking of church quarrels, and the Charybdis of her aunt's present commands in regard to speaking ...
— Pollyanna • Eleanor H. Porter
... and new clothes in preparation for that convivial event. And they would have done so except for the fish (sailors) and the women (Highlanders), as they styled us, who, they said, were too much for them, combined I think with the Ladysmith sweet shop, which proved their Scylla with Colenso as their Charybdis. ...
— With the Naval Brigade in Natal (1899-1900) - Journal of Active Service • Charles Richard Newdigate Burne
... a third class, who shun the rock upon which these last fall, but wreck upon another; they run upon scylla though they have missed charybdis; they escape the liquid destruction, but split upon the solid. These are proficients in good eating; adepts in culling of delicacies, and the modes of dressing them. Matters of the whole art of cookery; each carries a kitchen in his head. Thus an excellent constitution may be ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... were fond of the metaphor, taken from the vexed Sicilian Seas, of Scylla and Charybdis. The twin whirlpools threatened the affrightened mariner on either side. To avoid one he too hastily cast the ship to destruction in the other. Such is precisely the position that has been reached at the present crisis ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... dreaded thirteenth tee, which, with the returning fourteenth, forms the malignant Scylla and Charybdis of the course. There is nothing to describe the thirteenth hole. It is not really a golf-hole; it is a long, narrow breathing spot, squeezed by the railroad tracks on one side and by the river on the other. Resolute and fearless golfers often ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... from one end of the Conference to the other, and after he receives it he is liable to find himself among a people, who had rejected him in the canvass, and now only acquiesce in the decision from sheer necessity. But if he escape Scylla in this particular, he is certain to drive upon Charybdis in another. Granting that his relations and labors may be acceptable, he falls upon the inevitable necessity of devoting his time and labor, during the vigor and strength of his days, for a meager compensation, and then pass ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... war had ended. Then, as now, half the world was prostrated by the wounds of fratricidal strife. As Washington said: "The whole world was in an uproar," and he added that the task "was to steer safely between Scylla and Charybdis." The problem, then as now, was not only to make "the world safe for democracy," but to make democracy, for which there is no alternative, safe for the world. The thirteen colonies in 1787, while small and relatively unimportant, were, however, a little world in themselves, and, ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... drive the Communal Council into the right path—equal remuneration of all workers."[1234] The Fabians, like so many other Socialists, cannot apparently quite make up their mind whether to plunge into the Scylla of equal pay or into the Charybdis of unequal pay. Therefore they plunge alternately into the one ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... courageous passengers took hold, and we shot ahead, scudding rapidly along the dark shores, to the sound of the wild Maltese songs. At length, the promontory was gained, and the restless current, rolling down from Scylla and Charybdis, tossed our little bark from wave to wave with a recklessness that would have made any one nervous but an ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... purpose. But he was not the sort of a man upon whom I could use my blade. He was hardly more than a boy—a wild, half-crazed fanatic, whose reason, if he had ever possessed any, had been lost in the Charybdis of his zeal. He honestly thought it was his duty to insult persons who apparently disagreed with him. Such a method of proselyting is really a powerful means of persuasion among certain classes, and it has always been used by men who have successfully founded ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... the sea; and then, keeping near land, I would coast the beauteous shores and sunny promontories of the blue Mediterranean, pass Naples, along Calabria, and would dare the twin perils of Scylla and Charybdis; then, with fearless aim, (for what had I to lose?) skim ocean's surface towards Malta and the further Cyclades. I would avoid Constantinople, the sight of whose well-known towers and inlets belonged to another ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... would only have been a choice of evils, a progress from Scylla to Charybdis: not so to our Colonel. On coming up to the surface after his first dip, he found that swimming would not save him; so he quietly emptied out the water contained in the Umbrella, seated himself upon it, ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster
... sophisticated, being largely based on two inherited blunders, which a truly progressive philosophy would have to begin by avoiding, thus leaving Kant on one side, and weathering his philosophy, as one might Scylla or Charybdis. The one blunder was that of the English malicious psychology which had maintained since the time of Locke that the ideas in the mind are the only objects of knowledge, instead of being the knowledge of objects. The other blunder was that of Protestantism that, in groping ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... Whirling and boiling eddies burst as if from some subaqueous explosion; down currents are on one side of the canoe, and an up current on the other; now a cross stream at the bows and a diagonal one at the stern, with a foaming Scylla on your right and a whirling Charybdis on the left. But our nervousness gave way to admiration as our popero, or pilot, the sedate governor, gave the canoe a sheer with the swoop of his long paddle, turning it gracefully around the corner of a rock against which it seemed we must be dashed, and we felt like ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... on opposite grounds at once. It is condemned for being pessimistic, it is blamed for being optimistic. From this position Chesterton deduces that it is the only rational religion, because it steers between the Scylla of pessimism and avoids the Charybdis of a facile optimism. Regarding presumably the early Church she has also kept from extremes. She has ignored the easy path of heresy, she has adhered to the adventurous road of orthodoxy. She has avoided the Arian materialism by dropping ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... as the Scylla and Charybdis—the two extremes to be avoided—the Anglican Church hoped to attain the safe and golden mean by steering between these opposites, and find, in this via media course, the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 212, November 19, 1853 • Various
... the same card in another; but never, if the devil can help it, never both in one and the same pulpit; never both in one and the same sermon; and never both in one and the same minister. You have all heard of the difficulty the voyager had in steering between Scylla and Charybdis in the Latin adage. Well, the true preacher's difficulty is just like that. Indeed, it is beyond the wit of man, and it takes all the wit of God, aright to unite the doctrine of our utter inability with the companion ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... where he finishes his Military Career XX He prepares a Stratagem, but finds himself countermined— Proceeds on his Journey, and is overtaken by a terrible Tempest XXI He falls upon Scylla, seeking to avoid Charybdis. XXII He arrives at Paris, and is pleased with his Reception XXIII Acquits himself with Address in a Nocturnal Riot XXIV He overlooks the Advances of his Friends, and smarts severely for his Neglect XXV He bears his Fate like a Philosopher; and contracts ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... fiery frost, a flame that frozen is with ice, A heavy burden light to bear, a virtue fraught with vice; It is a worldlike peace, a safety seeing dread, A deep despair annexed to hope, a fancy that is fed, Sweet poison for his taste, a port Charybdis like, A Scylla for his safety, though a lion that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... took snuff from his waistcoat pocket, who was in the way of expressing a grave conviction that it was possible to make a capital living at Roulette, so long as you stuck to the colours, and avoided the Scylla of the numbers and the Charybdis of the Zero. By degrees, then, the shyness of the neophyte wears off. Perhaps in the course of his descent of Avernus, a revulsion of feeling takes place, and, horror-struck and ashamed, he rushes out of the Kursaal, determined ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... approached new dangers, for on one side of them seethed and foamed the whirlpool of Charybdis, whilst on the other towered the mighty rock whence the monster Scylla swooped down upon unfortunate mariners; but here the goddess Hera came to their assistance, and sent to them the sea-nymph Thetis, who guided them safely through ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... his maxim. He puzzled his contemporaries. But we can now locate him with absolute certainty. He personifies the Revolt from Reason. SURTOUT, MON AMI, POINT DE ZELE. He talks about the Scylla of Atheism and the Charybdis of Christianity—a state of mind which, by the way, is not conducive to bold navigation. He was always wavering between the two in an attitude of suburban defiance, reconciling what is irreconcilable by extracting funny analogies all round for the edification of "nice ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... 2, 'Eques Romanus es et ad hunc ordinem tua te perduxit industria.' Ibid. 31, 9, 'Quo modo, inquis, isto pervenitur? Non per Poeninum Graiumve montem, nec per deserta Candaviae, nec Syrtes tibi nec Scylla aut Charybdis adeundae sunt, quae tamen omnia transisti ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... then shall you have reached the limit of your wanderings. Be sure to avoid the eastern coast of Italy opposite these shores. Wicked Greek tribes have their dwelling there, and it is safer to pass at once to the western coast. On your left, you will hear in the Strait the thundering roar of Charybdis, and on the right grim Scylla sits scowling in her cave ready to spring on the unwary traveler. Better take a long circuit round Sicily than come even within sight and sound of Scylla. As soon as you touch the western shores of Italy, go ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... lamentable thing!' and there was a heavy sincerity in his utterance, his pose, with his foot weightily upon the ground, being that of an honest man. 'But I do think you have the right of it. We, and the new faith with us, are between Scylla and Charybdis. For certain, our two paths do lie between divorcing the Queen and seeing you, great lords, who so ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... said the trooper, "as Roanoke has the heels of you greatly; and flying from Scylla, you were liable to encounter Charybdis. Those woods and rocks cover the very ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... country, dismiss the Greek mercenaries, and instead of taking counsel from the Greeks, would hearken only to the commands of the priesthood. But in this, as you must see yourself, the prudent Egyptians had guessed wide of the mark in their choice of a ruler; they fell from Scylla into Charybdis. If Hophra was called the Greeks' friend, Amasis must be named our lover. The Egyptians, especially the priests and the army, breathe fire and flame, and would fain strangle us one and all, off hand, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... on his return trip from Messina to Naples he wrote at the sight of Scylla and Charybdis: "These two natural curiosities, standing so far apart in reality and placed so close together by the poet, have furnished men with an opportunity to abuse the fables of the bards, not remembering that the human imaginative faculty when it would represent objects ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... fork and an immense piece of ham on the top of it at the Charybdis which he had opened to an unusual extent to receive it; "ah, ma'am, it wasn't always that, I'll go bail. My counthrymen knows the value of such a purty woman not to stamp some of their names upon her. Not that you have a married look, ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... literal rendering of the original text, or is paraphrase permissible, and, if permissible, within what limits may it be adopted? In deciding which of these courses to pursue, the translator stands between Scylla and Charybdis. If he departs too widely from the precise words of the text, he incurs the blame of the purist, who will accuse him of foisting language on the original author which the latter never employed, with the ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... his return from the shades to Circe's island, the precautions given him by that Goddess, his escape from the Sirens, and from Scylla and Charybdis; his arrival in Sicily, where his companions, having slain and eaten the oxen of the Sun, are afterward shipwrecked and lost; and concludes the whole with an account of his arrival, alone, on the mast of his vessel, at the island ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... in Syracuse and Panormus, crossed with the rest of the army from Messana to Rhegium (where the myths of the poets say Scylla and Charybdis were), and every day the people of that region kept coming over to him. For since their towns had from of old been without walls, they had no means at all of guarding them, and because of their hostility toward the Goths they were, as was ...
— Procopius - History of the Wars, Books V. and VI. • Procopius
... Leopold, gayly, "what a miserable lot you have chosen for yourself. You have fallen from Scylla into Charybdis, my poor youth." ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... querulous they ask, "Who would with aching head and toiling arms Bear the full pitcher to the stream far off? Who would, of power intent on high emprise, Deem less the praise to fill the vacant gulf Then raise Charybdis upon Etna's brow?" Amid her darkest caverns most retired, Nature calls forth her filial elements To close around and cruel that monster VOID: Fire, springing fierce from his resplendent throne, And Water, dashing the devoted ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... big horn he sprinkles drop by drop Oil on the cabbages himself:—you'd stop Your nose to smell it:—vinegar, I own, He gives you without stint, and that alone. Well, betwixt these, what should a wise man do? Which should he copy, think you, of the two? 'Tis Scylla and Charybdis, rock and gulf: On this side howls the dog, on that the wolf. A man that's neat in table, as in dress, Errs not by meanness, yet avoids excess; Nor, like Albucius, when he plays the host, Storms at his slaves, while giving each his post; ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... enormous sums of money were taken. Then Boyton proceeded to Messina. Before leaving Naples, he had made up his mind to attempt the dreaded straits of that name, and dare the dangers of the noted whirlpools of Scylla and Charybdis. Every one cheerfully assured him that the attempt would result in death, for beside the dangers of the whirlpools, the straits ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... consternation that a great deal more work is expected of him than he is prepared to do. What course, then, Reverend Jones or Brown, does he take? He proceeds to do as much work as will steer him safely between the, ah—I may say, the Scylla of punishment and the Charybdis of being considered what my, er—fellow-pupils euphoniously term a swot. That, I think, is all this morning. Good day. Pray do not trouble to rise. I will find my way out.' I should then have made for the door, locked it, if possible, ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... axis, turning aound an axis, circulation, roll; circumrotation[obs3], circumvolution, circumgyration[obs3]; volutation[obs3], circination|, turbination[obs3], pirouette, convolution. verticity|, whir, whirl, eddy, vortex, whirlpool, gurge[obs3]; countercurrent; Maelstrom, Charybdis; Ixion. [rotating air] cyclone; tornado, whirlwind; dust devil. [rotation of an automobile] spin-out. axis, axis of rotation, swivel, pivot, pivot point; axle, spindle, pin, hinge, pole, arbor, bobbin, mandrel; axle ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the midst of danger and distress, the last strip of earth which their mortal eyes beheld! Think of the amount of suffering which a single strand has witnessed! The ancients would have represented it as a sea-monster with open jaws, more terrible than Scylla and Charybdis. An inhabitant of Truro told me that about a fortnight after the St. John was wrecked at Cohasset he found two bodies on the shore at the Clay Pounds. They were those of a man and a corpulent woman. The man had thick boots ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... the raging Scylla on one hand as you go. His natural reply will be, Well, I will keep as far away from it as possible; I will keep close by the other side. But the rejoinder must be, No, you will be quite as ill off there; you will be in equal peril on the other side: there is Charybdis. What you have to do is to keep at a safe distance from each. In avoiding the one, do not run into ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... however, she was got round and filled on the opposite tack, just in time to clear the rocks. Spike breathed again, but his head was still full of the boat. The danger he had just escaped as Scylla met him as Charybdis. The boatswain again roared to go about. The order was given as the vessel began to pitch in a heavy swell. At the next instant she rolled until the water came on deck, whirled with her stern down the tide, and her bows rose ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... Scylla there a scene of horror forms, And here Charybdis fills the deep with storms. When the tide rushes from her rumbling caves, The rough rock ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... weight of rice on her head; she had fallen on a sharp stake, or snag, as she called it, and had never recovered the injury she had received. She complained also of falling of the womb. Her companion (who was not Charybdis however, but Phoebe) was a cheery soul who complained of nothing, but begged for flannel. I asked her about her family and children; she had no children left, nothing but grandchildren; she had had nine children, ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... little rest and refreshment Nicholas the Fish bade them good-bye, jumped overboard, and continued his voyage. The end of this poor man was very sad. The king, being seized with an insane desire to know something about the depths of the terrible gulf of Charybdis, offered Nicholas a golden cup if he would dive down and explore them. He dived accordingly, remained below nearly an hour, and brought back a glowing account of the wonders and horrors of the seething whirlpool. The king, far from being satisfied, became more than ever desirous of ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... assistance we were in the end to rely for victory in the war. It needed all the resources of an unpopular wisdom and diplomacy to steer between the Scylla of alienating friends by our blockade and the Charybdis of being, in Mr. Asquith's words, "strangled in a network of juridical niceties." The Germans came to our aid with a colossal crime. On 7 May the passenger-ship Lusitania was torpedoed off the south coast of Ireland with the loss of 1100 ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... harbor a boat came to us, and an officer mounted the side and descended to the cabin. The ship proved to be the British Corvette Scylla, just ready to sail for Japan. Escaping her we did not encounter Charybdis. The mission of the Scylla was entirely pacific, and her officer informed us there had been war between Prussia and Austria, but at last accounts all Europe was at peace. The war of 1866 was finished long before ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... of the starving scouts and bed-makers, a stranger might have imagined some ruthless plague had swept away, "at one fell swoop," two-thirds of the population of Rhedycina. It was at this dull period of time, that a poor student, having passed successfully the Scylla and Charybdis of an Oxonian's fears, the great go and little go, and exhausted by long and persevering efforts to obtain his degree, had just succeeded in adding the important academical letters to his name, when he received ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... monster called Scylla, with twelve limbs and six long necks, with a dog's head to each, ready each to seize a man out of every ship that passed; but it was safer to keep on her side than to go to the other cliff, for there a water-witch named Charybdis lived in a whirlpool, and was sure to suck the whole ship in, and swallow it up. However, for her husband Peleus' sake, Thetis and her sister Nereids came and guided the Argo ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... every remark she made, and treating her with that pleased deference of manner which some middle-class people, not otherwise vulgar, invariably drop into in the presence of rank; a Scylla which is only one degree better than the Charybdis of would-be ease of manner into which others fall. If ever the enormous advantages of noble birth and ancient family, with all their attendant heirlooms and hereditary instincts of refinement, chivalrous feeling, and honor, become in future years a mark ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... Alexandrian luxury, are still the spoil of the fishers, the shrimps are delicate to the palate, and the marbles will endure as long as this rock itself. The rock lasts, and the sea. The most ancient memory here is of them, for this is the shore of Charybdis. It is stated in Sallust and other Latin authors, as well as by writers throughout the Middle Ages, that all which was swallowed up in the whirlpool of the straits, after being carried beneath the sea for miles, was finally cast up on the beach ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... many high virtues, and yet a low Catholicism. It seems to me that John Bull is a spirit neither of heaven nor hell.... Has not the Christian Church, in its parts, surrendered itself to one or other of these simulations of the truth?... How are we to avoid Scylla and Charybdis and go straight on to the very image of Christ?" ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... Puritan," cried the Judge, "would not object. But do not fancy that in avoiding Scylla I must run upon Charybdis. Be sure I would not imitate the trim moustaches and peaked chins of those old dandies, Winthrop and Endicott. I prefer the full flowing ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... when passion shall have yielded to sober reason, the current may possibly turn; but, in the meanwhile, this government, in relation to France and England, may be compared to a ship between the rocks of Scylla and Charybdis. If the treaty is ratified, the partisans of the French, or rather of war and confusion, will excite them to hostile measures, or at least to unfriendly sentiments; if it is not, there is no foreseeing all the consequences which may follow ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... Cycones him dismay, And blacke Laestrigones, a people stout; Then greedie Scilla, under whom there bay Manie great bandogs, which her gird about; 540 Then doo the AEtnean Cyclops him affray, And deep Charybdis gulphing in and out; Lastly the squalid lakes of Tartarie, And griesly feends of ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... to the rock's rough brow Looking down on the gulf so black, The waters which it had swallowed, now Charybdis bellowing rendered back; And, with a roar as of distant thunder, Foaming they burst from the dark ...
— Rampolli • George MacDonald
... dreaded President, but it was evident that I had made as absurd a demand as if I had asked for the nose off his respectable face. He referred me to the Governor at the State House, and I backed out, leaving him no doubt to regret that such mild maniacs were left at large. Here was a Scylla and Charybdis business: as if a President wasn't trying enough, without the Governor of Massachusetts and the hub of the hub piled on top of that. "I never can do it," thought I. "Tom will hoot at you if you don't," whispered the inconvenient little ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... but to the outer sense not always. Virtues are often harsh to the ear—errors very sweet-voiced. The sirens did not sing out of tune. Better to stop one's ears than glide on Scylla or be merged into Charybdis." ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Rosemary's was the only personality which counted in this conversation; she, who had just given him such a proof of her interest and devotion. And—O poor dear Garth! O bold, brazen Nurse Rosemary!—he very naturally concluded she was making love to him. Jane felt herself between Scylla and Charybdis, and she took a very ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... woman, her only auxiliaries her beauty, her wit, and the frayed, strained bands of a sorely tried love, stood forth like a challenger, against Charybdis, joined battle with the Cloaca, held back with her slim, white hands against the power of the maelstrom that swung the Nations ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... wilt come to the narrows where Skylla and Charybdis dwell. On each side of the narrows is a steep cliff, one of which is so high that its sharp top reaches the sky. It is so slippery that no one is able to climb up or down its sides, nor could he if he had twenty hands and feet. Not even a bird ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... scorches you with the flames you need not be ashamed of, and you always indulge in an honorable, an ingenuous love. Come, whatever is your case, trust it to faithful ears. Ah, unhappy! in what a Charybdis art thou struggling, O youth, worthy of a better flame! What witch, what magician, with his Thessalian incantations, what deity can free you? Pegasus himself will scarcely deliver you, so entangled, from ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... that company which is hypocritical and deceitful as sin, dazzling and alluring as a poisonous flower, dangerous and deadly as Scylla and Charybdis, of the company ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... son of the wilderness, Owen Dugdale had probably never heard of the kindred terrors that used to lie in wait for the bold mariners of ancient Greece—the rock and the whirlpool known as Scylla and Charybdis—if they missed being impaled upon the one they were apt to be engulfed in the other—and yet here in the rapids of this furious Saskatchewan feeder he was brought face to face with a proposition exactly similar to that ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... Hubmaier, and Denk, and was charged with every conceivable heresy. In a letter of March 14, accompanying the copy of his Propositions which Eck sent to the Emperor, he refers to Luther as the domestic enemy of the Church (hostis ecclesiae domesticus), who has fallen into every Scylla and Charybdis of iniquity; who speaks of the Pope as the Antichrist and of the Church as the harlot; who has praise for none but heretics and schismatics; whom the Church has to thank for the Iconoclasts, Sacramentarians, New Hussites, Anabaptists, New Epicureans, who teach that the ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... critical, and the bank manager's demeanour so unpropitious, that in the previous year more than once the dawn had found her trying to decide between the Scylla of the thankless post of lady companion to some wealthy parvenu on the Riviera, and the Charybdis of raising money enough to allow her to harbour paying guests in ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... the jutting points, the dashing of the waters, and the cries of one of the most timid of our followers, who to save himself from wet feet had mounted an overladen pony, and was now in imminent danger both of Scylla and Charybdis, added to the interest of the picture; but, occasionally, the reverberation caused by the fragments of rock, which, detaching themselves from the upper regions, came tumbling down, not far from where we stood, warned us not to dwell upon the ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... prudence, ere he went out with Lord Kenmore in 1715, to convey his estate to trustees, in order to parry pains and penalties in case the Earl of Mar could not put down the Protestant succession. But Scylla and Charybdis—a word to the wise—he only saved his estate at expense of a lawsuit, which again subdivided the family property. He was, however, a man of resolution. He sold part of the lands, evacuated the old cattle, ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... which the experimental study of development and regeneration soon brought into being. In 1895 he writes:—"The too simple mechanistic conception on the one hand, and the metaphysical conception on the other represent the Scylla and Charybdis, between which to sail is indeed difficult, and so far by few satisfactorily accomplished; it cannot be denied that with the increase of knowledge the seduction of the second has lately ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell |
