"Palimpsest" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... variations have been based, and separate features specially emphasized, by individual psychoanalysts. Thus Sadger considers that, beneath the male individual loved by the invert, a female is concealed, and that this fact may be revealed by psychoanalysis which removes the upper layer of the psychic palimpsest; he believes that this disposition of the invert is favored by a frequent mixture of male and female traits in his near relatives; originally, "it is not man whom the homosexual man loves and desires but man and woman together in ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... rise and have their fall; the brass That held their glories moulders in its turn. Hard granite rots like an uprooted weed, And ever on the palimpsest of earth Impatient Time rubs out the word he writ. But one thing makes the years its pedestal, Springs from the ashes of its pyre, and claps A skyward wing above its epitaph— The will of ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... Ambrosian library there, Among Pinellian writings seared with age, I found a prophet's palimpsest—a scroll That Angelo Maio had brought to light. And on the margin of this scroll, I found Mysterious signs which baffled me at first. After a full week's search I chanced to find The mongrel dialect of which they were. I thus translated: Gihon is the Nile. A perfect soul may ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey
... Life! thou sea-fugue, writ from east to west, Love, Love alone can pore On thy dissolving score Of wild half-phrasings, Blotted ere writ, And double erasings. Of tunes full fit. Yea, Love, sole music-master blest, May read thy weltering palimpsest. To follow Time's dying melodies through, And never to lose the old in the new, And ever to solve the discords true— Love alone can do. And ever Love hears the poor-folks' crying, And ever Love hears ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... drama, as if it were a stream and you a boatman in your boat. Commit you to the drama's flood, omitting for a time what others have thought, and read as if the poem were a fresh manuscript found by you, and read with such avidity as scholars of the Renaissance knew when a palimpsest of Tacitus or Theocritus was found. Let your imagination, as well as the poet's, spread wings. Become creative yourself; for this is true: No one can rightly conceive any work of imagination and be himself unimaginative. Read and re-read, and at length, like the cliffs of shore rising out of ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... England, for some eight centuries, may be traced in the buildings of Oxford. Nay, if we are convinced by some antiquaries, the eastern end of the High Street contains even earlier scratches on this palimpsest of Oxford; the rude marks of savages who scooped out their damp nests, and raised their low walls in the gravel, on the spot where the new schools are to stand. Here half- naked men may have trapped the beaver in the Cherwell, and hither they may have brought home the ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... the "Manual" of Pomponius, and the "Institutes" of Gaius, who flourished in the time of Hadrian and the Antonines. Both of these works were, for a long time, lost, though fragments were preserved in the pandects of Justinian. In 1816, however, Niebuhr discovered a palimpsest MS., in which the epistles of St. Jerome were written over the erased "Institutes" of Gaius. From the numerous misunderstandings of the Roman historians respecting the laws and constitutional history ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... copied it word for word (Att. vi. 2. 3). In the same passage he used an incorrect adjective, Phliuntii for Phliasii; he says that he had already corrected his own copy, but the mistake survives in the single palimpsest in which this work has been preserved. The only merits, therefore, which can be claimed for Cicero are that he invented a philosophical terminology for the Romans, and that he produced a series of manuals which from their beauty of style ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... as given in the rough by Signor de Tivoli, seem to me insuperable, and that his readings, though ingenious, cannot in my opinion be accepted as absolutely certain. He himself describes the MS. as a palimpsest, deliberately defaced by Michael Angelo, from which the words originally written have to be recovered in many cases by a process of conjecture. That the style of the restoration is thoroughly Michael Angelesque, will be admitted by all students of ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... panorama which passes before the mind of a child, it is certain no picture dawns and fades without leaving some trace behind. The exact images may not be recorded, but the effect produced by their passing will remain and become part of the palimpsest of life and character. The panorama which passed before the mental vision of the boy Marquess during the years of his early youth was not only brilliant but full of great changes, being indeed such a panorama as could not fail to produce strong and formative impressions ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... by two miles, has kept not the tower of its old church but its chancel. The little building stands apart in the churchyard; you may peep through a grille at the tombs and the pedigree of sixteen generations of Lumleys, and at a palimpsest brass mounted on a screen. But if Cheam's church has gone, in the village there is still the White Hall, a gabled Elizabethan house of painted timber; the daintiest and lightest little place, with tiny ordered lawns under its white wood, and old-fashioned ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... leave Rome will fill me with barbarian complacency. I don't pretend to have a ray of sentiment about Rome. It's a palimpsest Rome, a watering-place written over the antique, and I haven't taken to it as a poet should I suppose. And let us speak the truth above all things. I am strongly a creature of association, and the associations ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... obtain additional senses; our spirits may command the means of translating into correspondent states of consciousness all the other modes of vibration of the ethereal medium, and grasp the keys of unlimited knowledge deciphering every secret wherever they go. The whole universe may be a palimpsest preserving the inscriptions of all deeds, and every soul may be a reagent gifted with the power to ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... folded cycles within cycles cloak: We pass, we pass, we pass; this does not pass away, But holds the furrowing earth still harnessed to its yoke. The stars still write their golden purposes On heaven's high palimpsest, and no man sees, Nor any therein Daniel; I do hear From the revolving year A voice which cries: 'All dies; Lo, how all dies! O seer, And all things too arise: All dies, and all is born; But each resurgent morn, behold, more near the ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... those which are most seriously to be deplored, except in so far as the second and fifth books may have preserved real information on the early history of the Roman State and the development of Roman jurisprudence. Large fragments were recovered early in the present century from a palimpsest, itself incomplete, on which the work of Cicero had been expunged to make room for the commentary of St. Augustine on the Psalms. The famous Somnium Scipionis, with which (in imitation of the vision of Er in Plato's Republic) the work ended, has been independently ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... original—and you can usually do anything with the "original"—does not bear me out in saying that it was a pleasant picture. I should like to believe that Jehoiakiin—for that was the singular name of the gentleman who sat by his hearthstone—had just received the Memphis "Palimpsest," fifteen days in advance of the date of its publication, and that his secretary was reading to him that monthly, and cutting its leaves as he read. I should like to have seen it in that year when Thales ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... annexed provinces present a strangely complex patchwork and oft-repeated palimpsest, civilization after civilization overlapping each other. If Alsace-Lorraine has produced no Titan either in literature or art, she yet shows ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... hypothesis with those who speculate on the probable effects of these disillusionments that Germany may break up again into its component parts. It is pointed out that Germany is, so to speak, a palimpsest, that the broad design of the great black eagle and the imperial crown are but newly painted over a great number of particularisms, and that these particularisms may return. The empire of the Germans may break up again. That I do not believe. The forces that unified Germany lie deeper ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... gone; their places filled by five-storey brick or stone ones, with Post Offices to match. Occasionally some overlooked fragment of the past still cleaved to a town, and marked it for an old acquaintance, but often one had to get a mile away and look back on a place—as one holds a palimpsest up against the light—to identify the long overlaid lines of the beginnings. Each town supplied the big farming country behind it, and each town school carried the Union Jack on a flagstaff in its playground. So far as one could understand, ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... verse That runs spontaneous from the poet's pen To be half-blotted by ambitious men Who hope with his their meaner names to link By writing o'er it in another ink The thoughts unreal which they think they think, Until the mental eye in vain inspects The hateful palimpsest to ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... wolf, or ogre, may have been derived from a view of Night as the all-swallower. But to disengage natural phenomena, mythically stated, from the human tangle of Marchen, to find natural phenomena in such a palimpsest as Perrault's courtly and artificial version of a French popular tale, is a delicate and dangerous task. In many stories a girl has three balls—one of silver, one of gold, one of diamond—which she offers, in succession, as bribes. This is a perfectly natural invention. It ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... West Rich roses blowing On Heaven's palimpsest God's message glowing; Rose hues and amethyst Drenched in purpureate mist, Darkness with Day keeps tryst, Night's curtain closes; Quenched is the burning gold, Shadowed the upland wold, Day's fires grow dull and cold Ashes ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner |
