"Alexandrian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... practical necessities of life. The measurement of time and the needs of navigation have always stimulated astronomical research, but the intellectual demand has been keen from the first. Hipparchus and the Greek astronomers of the Alexandrian school, shaking off the vagaries of magic and divination, placed astronomy on a scientific basis, though the reaction of the Middle Ages caused even such a great astronomer as Tycho Brahe himself to revert for a time to the ...
— The New Heavens • George Ellery Hale
... is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza: read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.... We pass for what we are: character teaches ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... blocks and in gems —blocks of granite solidity, and gems of starry lustre. The peculiarity of More is in that poetico-philosophic mist which, like the autumnal gossamer, hangs in light and beautiful festoons over his thoughts, and which suggests pleasing memories of Plato and the Alexandrian school. Like all the followers of the Grecian sage, he dwells in a region of 'ideas,' which are to him the only realities, and are not cold, but warm; he sees all things in Divine solution; the visible is lost in ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... of the Alexandrian astronomers the old world seemed to be approaching the discovery of the universe. Men were beginning to think in millions, to gaze boldly into deep abysses of space, to talk of vast fiery globes that made the earth insignificant But the splendid energy gradually failed, and the long line ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... Ali;" and the host set before him, in vessels of gold and silver and crystal, raisin wine boiled down to one third with fruits and spices; and the cupbearers were pages like moons, clad in garments of Alexandrian stuff interwoven with gold and bearing on their breasts beakers of crystal, full of rose water mingled with musk. So al-Maamun marvelled with exceeding marvel at all he saw and said, "Ho thou, Abu al-Hasan!" Whereupon Ali sprang to the Caliph's carpet and kissing it, said, "At thy service, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... came West by two different routes. First, it came by oral tradition to Egypt, as one of the Libyan Fables which the ancients themselves distinguished from the Aesopic Fables. It was, however, included by Demetrius Phalereus, tyrant of Athens, and founder of the Alexandrian library c. 300 B.C., in his Assemblies of Aesopic Fables, which I have shown to be the source of Phaedrus' Fables c. 30 A.D. Besides this, it came from Ceylon in the Fables of Kybises—i.e., Kasyapa the Buddha—c. 50 A.D., was adapted into Hebrew, and ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs
... The gods forbid! Cleopatra. Nay, 'tis most certain, Iras: saucy lictors Will catch at us, like strumpets; and scald rhymers Ballad us out o' tune; the quick comedians, Extemporally will stage us, and present Our Alexandrian revels; Antony Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness I' the posture ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... author of a poem, still unedited, La Citta Divina, which represented the human race as an incarnation of those angels who, in the revolt of Lucifer, were neither for Jehovah nor for His enemies, a fantasy of that earlier Alexandrian philosophy about which the Florentine intellect in that century was so curious. Botticelli's picture may have been only one of those familiar compositions in which religious reverie has recorded its ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... great Spanish Armada was destroyed. 3. A free people should be educated. 4. The old Liberty Bell was rung. 5. The famous Alexandrian library was burned. 6. The odious Stamp Act was repealed. 7. Every intelligent American citizen should vote. 8. The long Hoosac Tunnel is completed. 9. I alone should suffer. 10. All nature rejoices. 11. Five large, ripe, luscious, mellow apples were picked. 12. The melancholy ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... queen, and was therefore not the typical Greek-cultured, educated Egyptian lady of her time. To represent her by any such type would be as absurd as to represent George IV by a type founded on the attainments of Sir Isaac Newton. It is true that an ordinarily well educated Alexandrian girl of her time would no more have believed bogey stories about the Romans than the daughter of a modern Oxford professor would believe them about the Germans (though, by the way, it is possible to talk great nonsense at Oxford about foreigners when ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... be to know the history of Nippur? Why should the cuneiforms have any bearing on the morals of a backwoods Canadian? Would the grace of God be less effective if the purveyor of it was unaware of what Sprool's Commentaries said about the Alexandrian heresy? Was not he, Jim Hartigan, a more eloquent speaker now, by far, than Silas McSilo, who read his Greek testament every morning? And he wrote to the Rev. Obadiah Champ: "It's no use. I don't know how to study. I'm sorry to get up in the morning and ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... on which British warships were engaged was at Alexandria in July 1882. There had been trouble in Egypt for some time, and a month previously many Europeans had perished at the hands of the Alexandrian mob. A "National" party, headed by Arabi Pasha, was preparing revolt, and it was found that the fortifications of Alexandria were being strengthened, which would give serious trouble if marines had to be landed ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... Being; the God of modern religion is both. For, indeed, civilisation is not opposed to faith. The idea of the Supreme Being in the mind of European society now is more primitive, more childlike, more imaginative than the idea of the ancient Brahman or Alexandrian philosopher; it is an idea which both of these would have derided as the notion of a child—a negotiosus Deus, who interposes in human affairs and answers prayers. So far from the philosophical ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... it came to pass that the Alexandrian Jews, and those Samaritans who paid their worship to the temple that was built in the days of Alexander at Mount Gerizzim, did now make a sedition one against another, and disputed about their temples before Ptolemy himself; the Jews saying that, according ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... often loses herself in sentimentalism. That dangerous vertigo nature in her case adopted, and was to make respectable. As it sometimes happens that a grandiose style, like that of the Alexandrian Platonists, or like Macpherson's Ossian, is more stimulating to the imagination of nations, than the true Plato, or than the simple poet, so here was a head so creative of new colors, of wonderful gleams,—so iridescent, that it piqued curiosity, and stimulated thought, and ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... reduced the dangers of life and limb, made the tenure of existence less precarious, and rendered a general relapse of society impossible. There can never again be an intellectual holocaust, such as the burning of the Alexandrian library. Civilizations may wax and wane, but the totality of knowledge cannot decrease. With the possible exception of a few trade secrets, arts and sciences may be discarded, but they can never be lost. And these things must remain true until ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... I suppose, to the Alexandrian school and to the early Church, that I owe in particular what I definitely held about the Angels. I viewed them, not only as the ministers employed by the Creator in the Jewish and Christian dispensations, as we find on the face of ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... Abraham, or his father Terah, are mythological beings, stars, constellations, countries. Adam is Bootes: Noah is Osiris: Xisuthrus Janus, Saturn; that is to say Capricorn, or the celestial Genius that opened the year. The Alexandrian Chronicle says expressly, page 85, that Nimrod was supposed by the Persians to be their first king, as having invented the art of hunting, and that he was translated into heaven, where he appears under ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... worst I shall only be carrying certain investigations a few steps farther, and developing theories which have been seriously discussed by the hardest-headed scholars in the world. Both the Greek and the Alexandrian philosophers speculated on the possibility of a state of four dimensions; and didn't Cayley, before this very Society, deliberately say that at the present rate of progress in the Higher Mathematics, ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... like his conception of what a "quiet" life is like! His quiet days require no fewer than forty-two of the forty-nine provinces of Spain to take their ease in. For his unquiet days, I presume, the seven—or is it nine?—crystal spheres of Alexandrian cosmogony would afford, but a wretchedly straitened space. A most unconventional thing is his notion of quietness. One would take it as a joke; only that, perchance, to the author of Quiet Days in Spain all days may seem quiet, because, a courageous convert, he is now at ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... that the necessary additions bring out the idea, and contain nothing that is not in the spirit of the original." (Preface, p. vii.) The "Tale of Troy Divine" owes its form, and we may never know how much of its tenderness and grace, to its Alexandrian editor. However, the present version may, from its very literalness, have and interest ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... know their relative importance. In the progress of ages, some of them will stand out more beautiful and more remarkable, and some will be entirely lost sight of. Thousands of books will waste away as completely as if they were burned, like the Alexandrian library; and a future age may know no more of the details of Napoleon's battles than we now know of Alexander's marches. But the main facts can never be lost; something will remain, enough to "point a moral or adorn a tale." The object of all historical knowledge is moral wisdom, and this ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... time is in many places well cultivated. The rivers run in deep valleys or dells, and are very rocky and rapid. The present kingdom of Shoa contains about 2,500,000 of inhabitants, chiefly Christians of the Alexandrian Church. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... develops from an alternate probability of what we call the Nilo-Mesopotamian Basic sector-group," Verkan Vall said. "On most Nilo-Mesopotamian sectors, like the Macedonian Empire Sector, or the Alexandrian-Roman or Alexandrian-Punic or Indo-Turanian or Europo-American, there was an Aryan invasion of Eastern Europe and Asia Minor about four thousand elapsed years ago. On this sector, the ancestors of the Aryans came in about fifteen centuries earlier, as neolithic savages, about the time that the ...
— Temple Trouble • Henry Beam Piper
... incontinently decapitated, by apostolic command, for what appears to be a natural and sensible preference. It was the same furious fanaticism and one-idea'd intolerance which made Caliph Omar destroy all he could find of the Alexandrian Library and prescribe burning for the Holy Books of the Persian Guebres. And the taint still lingers in Al-Islam: it will be said of a pious man, "He always studies the Koran, the Traditions and other books of Law and Religion; ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... continually supplied by the decomposition of the elephants. And if I like the look of an opinion, I treat it civilly, without suspicious inquiries. I have quite a friendly feeling toward Mordecai's notion that a whole Christian is three-fourths a Jew, and that from the Alexandrian time downward the most comprehensive minds have been Jewish; for I think of pointing out to Mirah that, Arabic and other incidents of life apart, there is really little difference between me and—Maimonides. ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... Thessalonians—we have the naive picture of Messiah coming on the clouds, which, as we now know, was part of the Pharisaic tradition. In the central group the Christology is far more complex. Besides the Pharisaic Messiah, and the records of the historical Jesus of Nazareth, we have now to reckon with the Jewish-Alexandrian idea of the generic, archetypal man, which is unintelligible without reference to the Platonic philosophy. Philo is here a great help towards understanding one of the most difficult parts of the Apostle's teaching. We have also, fully developed, the mystical doctrine ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... At present seven scattered months have thirty-one days. Caesar, when he took the Alexandrian month of thirty days as his standard, found the same discrepancy of five days as did the Egyptians. Besides these he lopped two more days off one particular month, then spread his remainder of seven ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... Archbishop Usher's learned scheme, computing that earth and man "were created 4,004 B.C.," having been not only popular but actually forced upon the educated classes until Mr. Darwin's triumphs. Had it not been for the efforts of a few Alexandrian and other mystics, Platonists, and heathen philosophers, Europe would have never laid her hands even on those few Greek and Roman classics she now possesses. And, as among the few that escaped the dire fate not all by any means were trustworthy— hence, perhaps, the secret of their preservation—Western ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... possibly written at Syracuse, as verses 15 and 16 suggest. He there pays a high compliment to Hiero's taste in poetry (ver. 3 ff.). A scholium on Pyth. ii. 90 (166) avers that Hiero preferred the Odes of Bacchylides to those of Pindar. The Alexandrian scholars interpreted a number of passages in Pindar as hostile allusions to Bacchylides or Simonides. If the scholiasts [v.03 p.0122] are right, it would appear that Pindar regarded the younger of the two Cean ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... consist of cape and body blankets made of the wool of the white mountain-goat. The colors are white, black, blue and yellow. The black is a rich sepia, obtained from the devil-fish; the blue and yellow colors coming from two barks grown in the Alexandrian archipelago. The white is the native color and the fringe of both cape and blanket is undyed. To strengthen and give solidity to the garment, the fibrous bark of the yellow root ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... and was all absorbed in his invention, "verily, young man, hurry not in this fashion,—I am about to begin. Know, my lord," and he turned to Henry, who, with an indolent, dreamy gaze, stood contemplating the Eureka,—"know that more than a hundred years before the Christian era, one Hero, an Alexandrian, discovered the force produced by the vapour begot by heat on water. That this power was not unknown to the ancient sages, witness the contrivance, not otherwise to be accounted for, of the heathen oracles; but to our great ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... be. There were, besides, other independent sovereigns in the country, over whom he had little or no controul, so that it is very probable the commonwealth of letters suffered no great loss by the burning of the Chinese books. When the Caliph Omar commanded the Alexandrian library to be destroyed, which the pride and the learning of the Ptolemy family had collected from every part of the world, literature sustained an irreparable loss; but, although the tyrant had the power to consign to eternal oblivion the works of science, ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... whose minds had been prepared and subdued by the awful ceremonies of religion. Such was the strict subordination of the Catholic church, that the same concerted sounds might issue at once from a hundred pulpits of Italy or Egypt, if they were tuned by the master hand of the Roman or Alexandrian primate. The design of this institution was laudable, but the fruits were not always salutary. The preachers recommended the practice of the social duties; but they exalted the perfection of monastic virtue, which is painful to the individual, and useless to mankind. Their charitable exhortations ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... Laplace's gravitational theory, and proportionately to diminish the importance of the part played by tidal friction. But, in order to bring about this diminution, and at the same time conciliate Alexandrian and Arabian observations, it is necessary to reject as total the ancient solar eclipses known as those of Thales and Larissa. This may be a necessary, but it must be admitted to be a hazardous expedient. Its upshot was to indicate a possibility that the observed and calculated values of the ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... imbued with the pagan spirit which he recognised in Goethe and valued in Burckhardt. Even at this early period of his life Nietzsche was convinced that Christianity was the real danger to culture; and not merely modern Christianity, but also the Alexandrian culture, the last gasp of Greek antiquity, which had helped to bring Christianity about. When, in the later aphorisms of "We Philologists," Nietzsche appears to be throwing over the Greeks, it should be remembered that he does not refer to the Greeks of ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the marvel of the world, invented a steam engine, which was used in experiments and was rapidly nearing completion and perfection, when, unfortunately, ignorant and destructive Religion, that was madly trampling upon everything of value, destroyed the famous Alexandrian Library wherein was kept a model of this engine. It also swept away the incalculable wealth of knowledge that had required ages to accumulate, and thereby completely annihilated the most priceless possessions that the human race ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis
... allured by the pleasantness of the drink, took more thereof than consisted with her modesty; whereupon, forgetting all her past troubles, she waxed merry and seeing some women dance after the fashion of Majorca, herself danced in the Alexandrian manner. ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... Cathari and many others, persecuted by a Church jealous of her authority, and fearing lest the holy pearls should pass into profane custody. In this century also S. Elizabeth of Hungary shines out with sweetness and purity, while Eckhart (A.D. 1260-1329) proves himself a worthy inheritor of the Alexandrian Schools. Eckhart taught that "The Godhead is the absolute Essence (Wesen), unknowable not only by man but also by Itself; It is darkness and absolute indeterminateness, Nicht in contrast to Icht, ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant |
