"Laocoon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... as well as warriors, and gazed with astonishment at the strange monster which their enemies had left. Many of them wanted to take it into the city, and dedicate it to the gods as a mark of gratitude for their deliverance. The more cautious ones doubted if it was wise to accept an enemy's gift. Laocoon, the priest of Neptune, struck the side of the horse with his spear. A hollow sound came from its interior, but this did not suffice to warn the indiscreet Trojans. And a terrible spectacle now filled them with superstitious dread. Two great serpents appeared far out ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... He held that office for five years, and then again returned to his old work in Berlin. During the five years in Breslau, Lessing had completed his play of "Minna von Barnhelm," and the greatest of his critical works, "Laocoon," a treatise on the "Boundary Lines of Painting and Poetry." All that he might then have saved from his earnings went to the buying of books and to the relief of the burdens in the Camenz parsonage. At Berlin the office of Royal Librarian became vacant. The claims ...
— Nathan the Wise • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
... effect and is strikingly suitable, as the slight reddish colour gives a full idea of the flesh after the skin is torn off. It makes one shudder to look at it. In one of the halls are the statues of Niobe and her daughters, a beautiful group. Then there is the celebrated copy of the group of the Laocoon by Bandinelli, which none but the most perfect and skilful connoisseur could distinguish from the original. But it is totally impossible for me to describe the immense variety of paintings, historical, portrait and landscape; the statues single ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... restoration of the works of art which Napoleon had pillaged. "The bronzed horses, brought from Corinth to Rome, again resumed their old station in the front of the Church of St. Mark; the Transfiguration was restored to the Vatican; the Apollo and the Laocoon again adorned St. Peter's; the Venus was enshrined with new beauty at Florence; and the Descent from the Cross was replaced in the Cathedral of Antwerp." By the treaty which restored peace to Europe for a generation, the old dominions of Austria, Prussia, Russia, Spain, Holland, and ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... the Vatican, go see Laocoon's torture dignifying pain - A father's love and mortal's agony With an immortal's patience blending: —Vain The struggle; vain, against the coiling strain And gripe, and deepening of the dragon's grasp, The old man's clench; the long envenomed ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... the fearful evidence wound itself around her consciousness, which struggled against it, like Laocoon in the fatal folds of ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... beneath their low-bending branches. In the dim twilight they assumed every variety of fanciful form. There were gaunt old trees, with gnarled and twisted branches, outstretched like arms in deadly Laocoon-like struggle with the writhing winds and storms; there were delicate birches, each slender twig bearing its feathery burden; and there were spruces and hemlocks, regal in snowy splendor. It lay upon them in heavy ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Brain in the conduct of the war. The Wooden Horse is made, and the Palladium is carried out of Troy—both deeds being the product of the brain, if not of the hand, of Ulysses. Next comes the Sack of Troy, whose name indicates its character. Laocoon and Sinon appear in it, but the main thing is the grand slaughter (like that of the Suitors) and the dragging of women and children into captivity; the city is burned. Then follows the epic called the Nostoi or the Returns, really ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... the Prefect of the City, who followed him in company with the Aedile and some learned antiquaries. The work of art was brought to the light, and inspected. Its subject was seen to be the Trojan priest Laocoon, against whom Apollo had sent two snakes because he had warned his countrymen against receiving the dangerous Greek gift of the Trojan horse, in which warriors ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... such as marble shows When exquisitely chiselled, still lay there, But fixed as marble's unchanged aspect throws O'er the fair Venus, but for ever fair;[246] O'er the Laocoon's all eternal throes, And ever-dying Gladiator's air, Their energy like life forms all their fame, Yet looks not life, for they ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... is shown in Fig. 232. The tablet is supported by six grotesque figures, somewhat human in appearance, whose limbs are intertwined with serpents, suggesting the famous group of the Laocoon. The work is roughly done and the details are not carried out in a very consistent manner, as the arms and legs of the figures become confused with the reptiles and are as likely to terminate in a snake's head as in a hand or foot. The ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... Greek artist, say they, sedulously avoided that distortion of features through excessive grief, which was incompatible with beauty of form. They would tone down the expression, as Lessing argues that the sculptor did in the features of Laocoon, until it became consistent with the lines of beauty. Timanthes, therefore, finding that, in order to render with fidelity the expression of Agamemnon, he must admit such a distortion of the features as would violate the rule, chose rather to veil the countenance. But we would suggest that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... of ancient art which have been dug up from the ruins of villas, and temples, and basilicas, where they had lain buried for ages. Of course, I enter on no description of these. Let me only remark, that though I had seen hundreds of copies of some of these sculptures,—the Apollo Belvedere and the Laocoon, for instance,—no copy I had ever seen had given me any but the faintest idea of the transcendent beauty and power of the originals. The artist, I found, had flung into them, without the slightest exaggeration of feature, a tremendous energy, an intense life, which perhaps ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... primeval forest. On each side of the road great trees towered up, carrying their crowns out of sight amongst a canopy of foliage; lianas wound round every trunk and hung from every bough, passing from tree to tree, and entangling the giants in a great network of coiling cables, as the serpents did Laocoon; the simile being strengthened by the fact that many of the trees are really strangled in the winding folds. Sometimes a tree appears covered with beautiful flowers, which do not belong to it, but to one of the lianas that twines through its branches and sends ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... Weight of bodies was upon him; yellow hands clutched for his throat; he felt hot breaths and heard throaty cries. A madness of horror possessed him, a horror that was like the blind madness of Laocoon struggling with his sons in the coils of the giant serpent. In these moments he was not fighting men. They were monsters, yellow, foul-smelling, unhuman, and he fought as Laocoon fought. As if it had been a cane, he snapped the bone of an arm whose hand was throttling him; ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... same breath with these beautiful compositions, condemned to perpetual twilight. They were secured by the late and lamented Von Tschudi, who left the National Gallery after their purchase and retired to Munich, where he bought a great example of El Greco for the old Pinakothek, the Laocoon, a service, I fancy, not quite appreciated by the burghers of Munich. The masters who have thus fallen under the ban of official displeasure are Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley, and Cezanne—the latter represented by two of the most veracious fruit-pieces I ever saw. ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... of theories of criticism—can he do with less than, say, an acquaintance with Aristotle, and Lessing's "Laocoon," or even with so little? With Shakespeare and some of his commentators he ought to be at home; the "Paradoxe sur le Comedien" he can hardly escape, and the works of some of the modern English and latest French critics may not be overlooked. Of course he must have ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... these there was a collection of family portraits in daguerreotype, including an interesting representation of Mrs. Bateson's parents sitting side by side in two straight-backed chairs, with their whole family twining round them—a sort of Swiss Family Laocoon; and a picture of Mr. Bateson—in the attitude of Juliet and the attire of a local preacher—leaning over a balcony, which was overgrown with a semi-tropical luxuriance of artificial ivy, and which was obviously too frail to support him. But the masterpiece ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... These will determine him largely in the choice of his themes, and in the aspect under which he will treat them. Obviously in many cases there are noble themes of art for whose appreciation no particular delicacy of moral or religious taste is required. There is no reason why such a subject as the Laocoon should make a different impression on a saint and on a profligate. It appeals to the tragic sense, which may be as highly developed in one as in the other. But if the Annunciation be the theme, we can well understand how differently ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... inseparable in the description, and they were so in the reality. And both together, inevitably seizing on beings who had rejected or lost divine knowledge, maintained a hold as fatal and invincible as that of the intervolved serpents of Laocoon. ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... the variations of the beautiful, Lessing's analysis of the spheres of sculpture and poetry, in the Laocoon, was a very important contribution. But a true appreciation of these things is possible only in the light of a whole system of such art-casuistries. And it is in the criticism of painting that this truth most needs enforcing, for it is in popular judgments on pictures that that ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... if not the chief ornament of a very elegant library, filled with vases and bronzes, is a marble head, supposed to be the original head of the Laocoon. It is, unquestionably a finer head than that which at present figures upon the shoulders of the famous statue. The expression of woe is more manly and intense; in the group as we know it, the head of the principal figure has always ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... magnificent cedar, with a tall straight stem, covered over with a curious sort of fretwork, wove by the branches of some strong parasitical plant, which had warped itself round and round it, by numberless snakelike convolutions, as if it had been a vegetable Laocoon. The tree itself shot up branchless to the uncommon height of fifty feet; the average girth of the hunk being four—and twenty feet, or eight—feet in diameter. The leaf of the cedar is small, not unlike the ash; but when I looked up, I noticed that ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... of Ilium's sons, Down from the tower Laocoon runs, And, "Wretched countrymen," he cries, "What monstrous madness blinds your eyes? Think you your enemies removed? Come presents without wrong From Danaans? have you thus approved Ulysses,* known so long? Perchance—who knows?—the bulk we see Conceals a Grecian enemy, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... successors were enabled to attain to it through seeing excavated out of the earth certain antiquities cited by Pliny as amongst the most famous, such as the Laocoon, the Hercules, the Great Torso of the Belvedere, and likewise the Venus, the Cleopatra, the Apollo, and an endless number of others, which, both with their sweetness and their severity, with their fleshy roundness copied from the greatest beauties of nature, and with ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... honoured in the history of literature, is little known in England, save by his exquisite comparison of art and poetry, called the Laocoon.(694) He was one of those whose labours remain for the benefit of other ages, like that of the coral worms, which die, but leave their work. That a native German literature exists, is the work of Lessing as pioneer; that it is worth studying, is the result of his criticism and influence. ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... was standing before the Laocoon with Rogers, who remarked that the absence of all parental feeling in the aspect of Laocoon, his self-engrossed indifference to the sufferings of his children (which is noticed and censured, I think, by Dr. Moore) adds to the pathos, if properly ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... forms of gods and heroes ever present to our fancy. The assertion may appear somewhat strange at present, but I hope in the sequel to demonstrate its justice: it is only before the groups of Niobe or Laocoon that we first enter into the spirit of the ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... supposed to have been originally arranged in the pediment of a temple. The figure of the mother clasped by the arm of her terrified child is one of the most admired of the ancient statues. It ranks with the Laocoon and the Apollo among the masterpieces of art. The following is a translation of a Greek epigram supposed to relate ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... safety, and they that hunt the wild-bird's egg on the sea-shaken cliff, as they swing over the frightful abyss. With the lasso the bold Matador, like the Retiarius of the ancient arena, makes the cast that is for life. Then the fine arts!—Carrara sends her block for the Laocoon by aid of thine; and what were all the galleries in Europe but a collection of gilt frames, but for thy backing and support. By thy subserviency alone (for what were panel or laminated copper for such gigantic works?) did Raffaelle bequeath so many legacies of his immortal genius. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... that it should be drowned in water or burned with fire, or that men should pierce it and see whether there were aught within. And the people were divided, some crying one thing and some another. Then came forward the priest Laocoon, and a great company with him, crying, "What madness is this? Think ye that the men of Greece are indeed departed or that there is any profit in their gifts? Surely there are armed men in this mighty horse; ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... sketches and studies in color and crayon. In one corner lolled a despondent-looking lay-figure in a moth-eaten Spanish cloak; in another lay a heap of plaster-casts, gigantic hands and feet, broken-nosed masks of the Apollo, the Laocoon, the Hercules Farnese, and other foreigners of distinction. Upon the chimney-piece were displayed a pair of foils, a lute, a skull, an antique German drinking-mug, and several very modern empty bottles. In the middle of the room ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... to do!" cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath; and making a perfect Laocoon of himself with his stockings. "I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a school-boy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A Merry Christmas to everybody! A Happy New Year to all the world! Hallo here! ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various |
