"Procrustes" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... assault on Artemis, was pinioned to the ground with two vultures plucking at his vitals. Typhoeus, a hundred-headed giant, was slain by Zeus' thunderbolt, and buried under Aetna. The gin on which he was tortured was probably the rack of the Middle Ages. Cf. the bed of Procrustes. Theseus, for attempting to carry off Persephone, was fixed to a rock in Tartarus. The "fifty sisters" are the fifty Danaides, who, for slaying their husbands, were condemned to pour water forever into a vessel ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... Talmudist borrow this story from the Greek legend of the famous robber of Attica, Procrustes, who is said to have treated unlucky travellers after the ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... realistic reproductions of the antique. It either superciliously neglected the antique, or else dressed it up to suit its own notions of propriety. It was not like a seven-league boot which could fit everybody, but it was like a Procrustes-bed which everybody must be made to fit. Its great exponent was not a Sainte-Beuve, but a Boileau. Its typical sample of a reproduction of the antique was Pope's translation of the Iliad. That book, we presume, everybody has read; and many of those who have read ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... Eddington adds the following even more drastic one: 'Procrustes, you will remember,' he says, 'stretched or chopped down his guests to fit the bed he constructed. But perhaps you have not heard the rest of the story. He measured them up before they left the next morning, and wrote a learned paper On the Uniformity of Stature of Travellers ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... my having slept with Procrustes? Well, you'll get used to having half a man around after a while. The rest do. I've gotten used to it myself. Now sit down. Have a smoke?" He pushed a box of cigarettes along the table. "And tell us what's the news ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... the lemonade. If any of the spectators happen to sneeze or spit, they are to be transported for life; and any person who is so tall as to prevent another seeing, is to be dragged out and sent on board the tender, or, by an instrument to be taken out of the pocket of Procrustes, to be forthwith cut shorter, either at the head or foot, according as ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... miserable victims to the tops of two pine-trees bent towards one another and then allowed the trees to spring back, the young hero dealt with as he had dealt with others; Kerkuon, the wrestler, was slain by him in a wrestling bout; Procrustes, who enticed travellers to his house and made them fit his bed, stretching the short upon the rack and lopping the limbs of the over-tall, had his own measure meted to him; and various other plagues of society were ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... onward to Western Europe, he attempts to show that the actual progress of humanity has been, on the whole, in conformity with his law. To secure, however, even this semblance of harmony between the facts of history and his hypothetical law, he has to treat the facts very much as Procrustes treated his victims,—he must stretch some, and mutilate others, so as to make their forms fit the iron bed. The natural organization of European civilization is distorted and torn asunder. "As the third or ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... stately song"—in particular perhaps. If I am obscure you may understand me by counting lines. I have proposed omitting 24 lines. I feel that thus comprest it would gain energy, but think it most likely you will not agree with me, for who shall go about to bring opinions to the Bed of Procrustes and introduce among the Sons of Men a monotony of identical feelings. I only propose with diffidence. Reject, you, if you please, with as little remorse as you would the color of a coat or the pattern of a buckle where our fancies differ'd. The lines "Friend to the friendless" ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... scoundrel—having nothing of liquor but the name, you narrow, nasty, pitiful alley of a fellow, with a kennel for a body, and a sink for a soul; give me my change and my gin, you scoundrel! Humph, is that all right, you Procrustes of the counter, chopping our lawful appetites down to your rascally standard of seven-pence half-penny? Why don't you take a motto, you Paynim dog? Here's one for you—'Measure for measure, and the devil to pay!' Humph, you pitiful toadstool of a trader, you have no more spirit than an empty ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... takes the place of such courts, and which might be as tyrannical and unreasonable as they were. I do not say that people don't judge their neighbours' conduct, sometimes, doubtless, unfairly. But I do say that there is no unvarying conventional set of rules by which people are judged; no bed of Procrustes to stretch or cramp their minds and lives; no hypocritical excommunication which people are forced to pronounce, either by unconsidered habit, or by the unexpressed threat of the lesser interdict if they are lax in their hypocrisy. Are ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... on the banks of the river Cephissus, Theseus met with a new adventure. Here lived the giant Damastes, called Procrustes or the Stretcher, who had two iron beds, one being long and the other short, into which he forced all strangers; In the short one he placed the tall men, whose limbs he cut to the size of the bed, whilst to ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... classification of passengers on trains was at all desirable, it might be made upon some more logical and considerate basis than a mere arbitrary, tactless, and, by the very nature of things, brutal drawing of a color line. It was a veritable bed of Procrustes, this standard which the whites had set for the negroes. Those who grew above it must have their heads cut off, figuratively speaking,—must be forced back to the level assigned to their race; those who fell beneath the standard set had their necks stretched, literally enough, as the ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... a language of small words. It is, says Swift, "overstocked with monosyllables." It cuts down all its words to the shortest possible dimensions: a sort of half-Procrustes, which lops but never stretches. In one of the most magnificent passages in Holy Writ, that, namely, which describes ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 50. Saturday, October 12, 1850 • Various
... us of another plague of the kitchen-garden: the snail. The slime of the snail is offensive to the beetle; it is safe from the latter unless crippled, half crushed, or projecting from the shell. Its relatives, however, do not share this dislike. The horny Procrustes, the great Scarabicus, entirely black and larger than the Carabus, attacks the snail most valiantly, and empties its shell to the bottom, in spite of the desperate secretion of slime. It is a pity that the Procrustes is not more frequently found ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... notorious brigand. The word means 'one who stretches and tortures,' from [Greek: prokrouein], and refers to his habit of fitting all his captives to the same bedstead—the 'bed of Procrustes'—stretching them if too short to the required length, lopping their limbs as required if they were too long. Here a further pun is involved, [Greek: prokrouein] meaning also 'to go with a ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... "It is Procrustes' bed, and that's the reason you have so few good ones. As for us, we have not one; but that is the fault of ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... what is the symphony, sonata, etc., but a remnant of the dance form? The choric dances of Stesichorus and Pindar came strangely near our modern forms, but it was because the form fitted the poem. In our modern days, we too often, Procrustes-like, make our ideas to fit the forms. We put our guest, the poetic thought, that comes to us like a homing bird from out the mystery of the blue sky—we put this confiding stranger straightway into that iron bed, the "sonata form," or perhaps even the third rondo form, for we have quite ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... adventures that befell Theseus on the road to Athens. It is enough to say, that he quite cleared that part of the country of the robbers about whom King Pittheus had been so much alarmed. One of these bad people was named Procrustes; and he was indeed a terrible fellow, and had an ugly way of making fun of the poor travelers who happened to fall into his clutches. In his cavern he had a bed, on which, with great pretense of ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... compositions superlatively excellent; and it contracts liberal souls to a painful narrowness to descend to books of inferior merit. A work of capital genius, to a man of an ordinary mind, is the bed of Procrustes to one of a short stature, the man is too little to fill up the space assigned him, and undergoes the torture in attempting it: and a moderate, or low production to a man of bright talents, is the punishment inflicted ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... beware of the numerous impostors who claim to have a "Method," a sort of bed of Procrustes, which the victim, whether long or short, is made to fit. A "method" must be adapted to the subject, not the subject made to fit the method. The object of all teaching is the same, viz., to impart knowledge; but the means ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... Theseus! Marathon admires, "Stain'd by the vanquish'd Cretan bull's black gore. "Thy aid the swains of Cromyon own; thou gav'st "That now secure they till their fields. The land "Of Epidaurus saw the club-arm'd son "Of Vulcan slain by thee. By thee, beheld "Cephisus' shores, the fierce Procrustes die, "Ceres' Eleusis hail'd Cercyon's fall. "Sinis thou slew'st, gifted with strength ill-us'd; "His strength high trees could bend, and oft he dragg'd "Close down to earth the loftiest tops of pines, "Thus rent the bodies ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... must be either affirmative or negative, for by denying modality to the copula we have excluded everything intermediate between downright assertion and denial. This classification therefore may be regarded as a Procrustes' bed, into which every proposition is bound to fit at its ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... period, Ben Jonson and John Donne, opposed the sonnet. Ben Jonson complained that it compels all ideas, irrespective of their worth, to fill a space of exactly fourteen lines, and that it therefore operates on the same principle as the bed of Procrustes. The lyrics of this period, with the exception of those by Milton, were usually less idealistic, ethereal, and inspired than the corresponding work of the Elizabethans. This age was far more imitative, but it chose to imitate Jonson and Donne in preference to Shakespeare. ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... a masterly stroke, upon my word! (18) Of course, ever since the decease of Sinis, and Sciron, and Procrustes, (19) foreign travellers have had an easy time of it. But still, if I bethink me, even in these modern days the members of free communities do pass laws in their respective countries for self-protection ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon |
