"Athlete" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a sailor simply to outrun a landsman; he could do more. A little girl stood near, her bright face eager with watching for the fray. Cooper turned quickly and caught her up in his arms, and with the pride and muscle of an athlete exclaimed, "I'll carry her with me and beat you!" Away they flew, Cooper with his laughing burden upon his shoulders; one corner was turned, and the excited crowd saw with surprise James Cooper with his small rider keeping pace with the other flying youth. Another, and the other corners ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... tutor, the skill of the princes, as archers, was tested on foot, on horseback, in howdahs, and in chariots; then they indulged in mock fights with swords and bucklers, closely watched by Drona, who pronounced his favorite Arjuna, the third Pandav, the finest athlete ever seen. ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... College, where he studied hard but yet had time for fun. He became a fine athlete, tall, and well-built. He sang well, and his gentlemanly manner and thoughtfulness of others made him beloved by all who ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... there was no room in his brain for an impure thought. Notwithstanding he was still a young man, being but fifty years of age, nevertheless he had attained distinct success and fame as a musician, composer, scientist, inventor, architect, and athlete. He endeavored to unravel all the mysteries of nature which attracted his attention. One of the many occult forces he experimented with was human magnetism. It was his belief that man could preserve himself indefinitely, either in a state of animation ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... again, in maniac strides, until he had almost beaten where he paced a pathway. There was not the slightest necessity for Ahpilus to guard Lilama, for the awful chasm was more than twice the width that any sane and normal man, even an athlete, would dare attempt to leap, even to preserve his own life; and the distance to be traversed to gain a point in the chasm so narrow that an ordinary man would dare attempt to leap it, was several miles down the mountain-side; so that Lilama was at least ten miles beyond the reach of ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... that monument of recklessness and folly?" cried he. "That autograph is one of those weapons which an athlete in the circus cannot afford to lay down. That note proves that Lousteau has no heart, no taste, no dignity; that he knows nothing of the world nor of public morality; that he insults himself when he can find no one else to ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... century, the small-pox. His pale and clear complexion was but slightly pitted, however, and his eyelids had not suffered. Men were inclined to call him ugly; women thought him interesting. His frame was badly built from the athlete's point of view; but it had the suppleness which makes the graceful dancer, and was an elegant scaffolding on which to hang the picturesque costume of the day. For the rest, all that he was he had made himself, during those eighteen years of intelligent self-culture, ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... might have posed to some Praxiteles and, copied in marble, gone down the ages as "statue of a young athlete." He stood six feet and over, straight as a Sioux chief, a noble and leonine head carried by a splendid torso. His skin was as fine and clean as a child's. He weighed nearly two hundred pounds and had no fat on him. He was the weight-throwing rather than the running type of athlete, ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... since I could remember that I never caught a cold. A cold? I never once sniffled. My health was perfect; never even so much as a pimple. My dandruff and athlete's foot disappeared. I had a wonderful appetite—which was lucky, since I didn't have much other recreation left. And I ...
— Inside John Barth • William W. Stuart
... Polytechnique, in Paris; Gallieni, at Saint Cyr, without the walls; Nivelle studied at both; he may claim to belong to all arms, artillery, infantry—even cavalry. And, in his youth, he was not only a magnificent all-round athlete, as indeed he still is, but also a headlong rider of steeplechases, in which, had he been fated to break his neck, his neck would infallibly have been broken. This is a trait he shares with General Brussiloff, and, like the great Russian General, he was famous for the skill with which ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... a prodigal, Nelly! Perhaps things may not be as bad as they appear. At least, it is but the first fall—the greatest athlete gets many before he ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... the kneeling donor, Averoldo; the lower right panel has the famous St. Sebastian[44] in the foreground, and in the landscape the Angel ministering to St. Roch. The St. Sebastian is neither more nor less than the magnificent academic study of a nude athlete bound to a tree in such fashion as to bring into violent play at one and the same moment every muscle in his splendidly developed body. There is neither in the figure nor in the beautiful face framed in long falling hair any pretence at suggesting the agony or the ecstasy of martyrdom. A wide ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... shape of a tree trunk lost in a dense undergrowth. These overgrown cheeks were sunken. It was an anchorite's bony head fitted with a Capuchin's beard and adjusted to a herculean body. I don't mean athletic. Hercules, I take it, was not an athlete. He was a strong man, susceptible to female charms, and not afraid of dirt. And thus with Falk, who was a strong man. He was extremely strong, just as the girl (since I must think of them together) was magnificently ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... difficult for him to keep up with the others, yet in doing so there was the pleasure of the athlete in having acquired a new mastery over his muscles; and the fascination of being at home in the snow as a sea-bird is at home in the surf, which is the chief element of delight in all winter sports, was his for the first time. With the drunken wretch who was almost frozen he felt small ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... a baseball game, and perhaps from the fans' viewpoint a poor game at that. But the moment when that lithe, redhaired athlete toed the plate was a beautiful one. The long crash from the bleachers, the steady cheer from the grand stand, proved that it was not so ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... demonstration of team spirit and play as one seldom sees. On the next kick-off Johnnie Baird caught the ball, and when he was about to be tackled—in fact, was lying on the ground—he passed the ball to Fred Smith, that great all-round Princeton athlete, who made the most spectacular run of the day. Who will ever forget the wonderful line plunging of Ad Kelly, the brilliant end running of Bill Bannard and the great part all the other men of the team contributed towards Princeton's success, and the score grew and grew by ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... that the first casual gaze instantly returns to with sharpened focus. You have seen gymnasts whose normal movements were slowly performed springs, just as rust is a slow combustion and fire the same thing in less time. Well, Clinton Browne strongly suggested that sort of athlete. Add to this a regularly formed, clearly cut, and all-but-beautiful face, with a pair of wonderfully piercing, albeit somewhat shifty, black eyes, and one need not marvel that men as well as women ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... held alternate years between the Olympic periods. These great national festivals exercised a strong influence in Greece. They were a secure bond of union between the numerous independent states and did much to help the nation to repel its foreign invaders. In Greece the accomplished athlete was reverenced almost as a god, and cases have been recorded where altars were erected and sacrifices made in his honor. The extreme care and cultivation of the body induced by this national spirit is one of the most significant features of Greek ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... laurels green, The learned Girton girl is seen, Or under the trapeze neat Figuring as an athlete. ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... forgive him for having chosen to go to Cambridge. Thebes did his green, unknowing youth engage, and—as the Oxford Magazine gloomily prophesied—he bowls out Athens in his later age." The Boy laughed cheerfully and blushed. I felt a natural awe in holding out an exceedingly dusty hand to an athlete whose fame had already shaken the Antipodes. But it is the way of young giants to be amiable; and indeed this one saluted me with a respect which he afterwards accounted for ingenuously enough—"He always felt like that towards a man who had written a book: it seemed to him a tremendous thing to ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... their bodies, and full cultivation of their mental faculties. Sappho, whose "lofty and subtle genius" places her as the one woman for whose achievement in poetry no apology on the grounds of her sex ever needs to be made, was of AEolian race. The Spartan woman was a huntress and an athlete and also a scholar, for her training was as much a care of the State as that of her brothers. Her education was deliberately planned to fit her to be ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... these vegetables containing proteid, as it is a great mistake to rely entirely for this element on meat, as so many of our race do. The animal products—such as cheese, milk, and eggs—will also form an efficient substitute for much flesh-food. This simple diet suits both the brain-worker and the athlete, though each will have to make a selection of those foods most required by him. Certainly much animal food is liable to produce kidney disease, gout, and kindred troubles. If we have a tendency to corpulence (and many ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... breakfast a half-hour earlier, but she accepted a cup of coffee. Mihul, all athlete, declined. She went over to Plemponi's desk and stood leaning against it, arms folded across her chest, calm blue eyes fixed thoughtfully on Trigger. With her lithe length of body, Mihul sometimes reminded Trigger of a ferret, but the tanned face was a pleasant one and there was humor around ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... coming down from the branches, and some extending themselves in a hopeless tangle in the water and mud. It would have been impossible for even a stork to walk through this forest, but as there was no way of getting around it Bartholemy determined to go through it, even if he could not walk. No athlete of the present day, no matter if he should be a most accomplished circus-man, could reasonably expect to perform the feat which this bold pirate successfully accomplished. For five or six leagues he went through that mangrove forest, never once setting his foot upon the ground,—by ...
— Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts • Frank Richard Stockton
... moment. It's about my boy. He seems to me to have strained himself with his exercises. Jenkins, as you probably know, has gone away for a fortnight's holiday, so I can't consult him. I feel a little anxious. You're an athlete, I know, and could set me right in a moment if I'm making a fuss about nothing. The strain seems to be in the right hip. Is that ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... him down as fair spoil, while on the other hand his influence in the state and among the allies exposed him to the corruption of many an adept in the arts of flattery; honoured by the democracy and stepping easily to the front rank he behaved like an athlete who in the games of the Palaestra is so assured of victory that he neglects his training; thus he presently forgot the duty which ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... a handsome fellow, tall and slim, with a rather military carriage. His face was clean-shaven save for a small straw-colored moustache, which showed up almost white against the bronze of his face. He was more of an athlete than a student, and this was one reason why Juliet was fond of him. She had seen so much of literary circles that she always vowed she would marry a man who never opened a book. Cuthbert nearly fulfilled this requirement, as he read little, save novels and newspapers. He was well known in sporting ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... new town on the banks of the Farmington River, east of the hills of the Housatonic, bade fair to equal Pittsfield as a trading-place. "The Deacon" was a local magistrate under the king, when laymen served as judges. John, his youngest son, is described as tall and powerful, an athlete able to kick a football over the elm-tree on the college green at New Haven when he entered at twenty-three years of age, older in years than most college students of ...
— Colonel John Brown, of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the Brave Accuser of Benedict Arnold • Archibald Murray Howe
... sixteen, and had then begun life as a surveyor—a good calling in a country whose inhabitants were daily increasing and whose lands were practically limitless. Life in the open air, and the custom of the woods and hills, had developed a frame originally powerful into that of a tall and hardened athlete, able to run, wrestle, swim, leap, ride, as well as to use the musket and the sword. His intellect was not brilliant, but it was clear, and his habit of thought methodical; he was of great modesty, yet one of those who rise to the emergency, and are kindled into greater and greater power by responsibilities ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... if left to himself have become an artist by profession. The nearest to Anthony in age was William, afterwards widely celebrated as a naval engineer. Then came Robert, the most attractive of the boys. A splendid athlete, compared by Anthony with a Greek statue, he had sweetness as well as depth of nature. His drawings of horses were the delight of his family; and when his favourite hunter died he wrote a graceful elegy on the afflicting event. ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... he was in full health. In the old days he had been something of an athlete—a runner, an oarsman, and a crack at tennis. The morning swims in the lagoon had thickened the red corpuscle. For all the enervating heat, he applied himself vigorously to ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... be incapable of fully supporting his body, and he behaved like an inexperienced athlete walking on a tight rope without a balancing-pole. His long arms served as this implement, and with a bend at the elbows and the hands dropped down, ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... chests, and injure their digestion and their eyesight, by sitting at desks, poring over books. Intellect is what we want. Intellect makes money. Intellect makes the world. We would rather see our son a genius than a mere athlete." Well: and so would I. But what if intellect alone does not even make money, save as Messrs. Dodson and Fogg, Sampson Brass, and Montagu Tigg were wont to make it, unless backed by an able, enduring, healthy physique, such as I have seen, almost without exception, in those successful men of business ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... written a magnificent article on his work; but so great was the general exasperation against the editor of L'Aristarque, L'Oriflamme, and Le Drapeau Blanc, that his championship only injured Lucien. In vain did the athlete return the Liberal insults tenfold, not a newspaper took up the challenge in spite of ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... the public came to know him as a writer—as a hero in any crew or team on any game field. Perhaps it was a little selfish that his muscle developed in the gymnasium was not put into advertising use for the university. The excuse was that he had not time to become an athlete, any more than he had time to spend three years in the discipline of the regular army, which was in ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... was a lad of nerve, with whom at such a moment to think was to act. Well it was that he had the muscles and strength of a trained athlete. ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... appearances and Traill's supercilious contempt of them, there are the foundations of two utterly opposite characters—it is necessary to say that their friendship had been formed at school, after which, a train of circumstances had nursed it to maturity. At school, Devenish had been an athlete, superior to Traill in every sport that he took up. You have there the ground for approval and a certain strain of sympathy between the two men. The fact that at the 'Varsity Devenish had developed taste for dress was outweighed by the fact that he was a double ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... London he was not occupied as a waiter without intermission; his recreation was to retire from business occasionally for a few weeks, go into training and appear as a champion bicyclist. So that, after my frugal chop and potato in Holborn, I had been in the habit of giving twopence to an athlete famous enough to have had his portrait in the illustrated papers—that is, if his recollection of me in Holborn was not his invention; anyhow, ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... splendid young man of fervent nature, even more spoilt than we were. He was as cool and as fundamentally unsusceptible as he was responsive and emotional. Every one adored him; he combined the prowess at games of a Greek athlete with moral right-mindedness of a high order. He was neither a gambler nor an artist. He respected discipline, but ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... of Hector's pleasantest recollections, the thought of his cowering form, his green silk smoking-jacket all torn, and his eyes sightless. Cyril Lamont's talents had not run in the art of self-defence, and he had been very soon powerless in the hands of this young athlete. ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... thing that a big strong man should waste his years in a dental establishment when the world is clamoring for strong men to do the heavy lifting jobs. But before you can say anything, this muscular athlete has laid violent hands on your palpitating form and wadded it abruptly into the hideous embraces of a red plush chair, which looks something like the one they use up at Sing Sing, only it's done more quickly up there and with less suffering on the part of the condemned. On one ...
— Cobb's Anatomy • Irvin S. Cobb
... but was used solely and simply for micturating purposes, impotence was often the result, citing the case of a patient who came to consult him for an obstinate priapism resulting from venereal excess, who met, in his anteroom, an athlete who was being treated for the opposite condition, due to the too rigid continence to which he had been for years subjected. Acton does not believe that continued continence has that effect, quoting Dr. Bergeret, who had long been physician ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... like a young athlete; a running jump and it fell short. There was a great laugh of derision. But the second was more successful and a shout went up. The next one leaped over the mark. Four of ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... Diodotus the Stoic, studied the action of Esop and Roscius—then the stars of the Roman stage—declaimed aloud like Demosthenes in private, made copious notes, practised translation in order to form a written style, and read hard day and night. He trained severely as an intellectual athlete; and if none of his contemporaries attained such splendid success, perhaps none worked so hard for it. He made use, too, of certain special advantages which were open to him—little appreciated, or at least seldom acknowledged, by the men of his day—the society ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... in after life to literary pursuits, Sir Walter never lost his taste for field sports; but while writing 'Waverley' in the morning, he would in the afternoon course hares. Professor Wilson was a very athlete, as great at throwing the hammer as in his flights of eloquence and poetry; and Burns, when a youth, was remarkable chiefly for his leaping, putting, and wrestling. Some of our greatest divines were distinguished in their youth for their physical energies. Isaac Barrow, when at ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... passed the night. It is rather strange that the good Doctor is never mentioned as a companion of Washington's favorite sport. That he was an able horseman, covering the roughest terrain in arduous campaigns, a seasoned sportsman, a hardened athlete but no fox-hunter, seems borne out by the fact that he is never mentioned as sharing in the chase, although the gentleman to whom it meant so much noted almost every hunt and ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore
... arm and they went into the house together. Twenty minutes later he rode away on his pony, looking if possible even more of an athlete than in his pajamas, for there was an added suggestion of accomplishment in the rolled-up sleeves and scarred boots laced to the knee. Their leave-taking was a purely American episode, mixed of comradeship, affection and just plain foolishness, witnessed by more wondering, ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... plenty for a change of setts without me. I am not good enough for Binning and his two young aristocrats, and I don't choose to make sport for the Philistines by an exhibition of my ineptitude. I have no pretentious to being an athlete." ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... occasional flashes of brilliancy in his imagery, when it is lit up by his keen sense of beauty or splendour in external nature. A radiance, "as of fire," streams from the forms of the Nereids (xvi. 103 ff.). An athlete shines out among his fellows like "the bright moon of the mid-month night" among the stars (viii. 27 ff.). The sudden gleam of hope which comes to the Trojans by the withdrawal of Achilles is like a ray of sunshine "from beneath the edge of a storm-cloud" (xii. 105 ff.). The shades of the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... moulded, that his superior stature was only perceived by comparison with others, and the proportions were those of great strength. The small, well-set head, proudly carried, the short, straight features, and the form of the free massive curls, might have been a model for the bust of a Greek athlete; the colouring was the fresh, healthy bronzed ruddiness of English youth, and the expression had a certain boldness of good-humoured freedom, agreeing with the quiet power of the whole figure. Those bright gray eyes could never have been daunted, those ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... symphony of colour and song, and down this flower-prinked, song-filled, clean washed, grassy lane stepped Dick this summer morning, stepped with the spring and balance of the well-trained athlete, stepped with the step of a man whose heart makes him merry music. A clean-looking man was Dick, harmonious with the day and with the lane down which he stepped. Against the grey of his suit his hands, ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... have been rather awkward," remarked Brown, "if you had found he was a popular athlete practising ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... try anything. I'm an M.A. of Toronto University; have substituted in school; can clear land if I get my own time to it; have a pretty fair knowledge of accounting; but haven't done much of anything so far. I used to be a good athlete." ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... is rapidly approaching the door.] You might as well let it be. There's nothin' to be done. That there man—he's like an athlete. He'll bite his teeth into the edge of a table, and he'll lift the table up for you so steady, you won't notice a glass on it shakin'. If he went an' took the notion, I tell you, we'd all be flyin' out into the street ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... in the world," replied the writer, who had listened to the Marquis's tirade; with an unconvinced smile, he repeated: "Not the least in the world.... You have spoken of me as an acrobat or an athlete. I am not offended, because it is you, and because I know that you love me dearly. Let me at least have the suppleness of one. First, before passing judgment on a financial affair I shall wait until I understand it. Hafner was acquitted. ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... exercise requiring considerable exertion, precautions should be observed to prevent an overstrain of the heart. The heart of the amateur athlete, bicyclist, or mountain climber is frequently injured by attempting more than the previous training warrants. The new work should be taken up gradually, and feats requiring a large outlay of physical energy should be attempted only after ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... her hair; her cheeks crimsoned; then dainty as a lithe and spangled athlete, she turned clean over in the air, landing lightly ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... the twelfth was Herbert Coleridge. With the exception of Coleridge, his cousin Arthur, and W. J. Beamont (1828-1868), who at his death was a Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, he had hardly any intimates. Chitty, afterwards his colleague on the Bench, was then famous as an athlete; but with athletics my brother had nothing to do. His only amusement of that kind was the solitary sport of fishing. He caught a few roach and dace, and vainly endeavoured to inveigle pike. His failure was caused, perhaps, by scruples as to ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... railway of railways was no school for the humanities; but this university graduate, Chancellor of Queen's, distinguished counsel and potential eminent judge, bachelor, Canadian born, every inch an athlete and as rugged as Carpentier, seemed to my aroused imagination one who would be as much bigger than the stodgy C.P.R. as that system was greater than others of ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... outspoken man, and he tells me that Wilbur is a regular fighting so-and-so. These were his very words. They are army slang, and mean that he is a brave soldier. A young man, a Mr. Edward Brennon from Newbern, a sort of athlete, came over with him, and they have been constantly together. I did not see this Mr. Brennon, but I hear that he, too, is gallantly great, and also a regular fighting so-and-so, as these rough men put ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... well remembered an incident recorded in Grecian history, where two brothers had been engaged in an athletic contest and been victorious. When they came forth to receive the crown which rewarded their victory, their aged father—who himself, in his younger days, had been an athlete—was present, and the sons placed their crown on his venerable head. He was sorry that the father of the young heroes whom they were then entertaining was not present to witness the reward freely bestowed upon his sons by their fellow-countrymen. (Cheers.) ...
— Explorations in Australia • John Forrest
... unyielding will of his own prejudices. As his virtues were massive, so were his errors grievous. He ventured to grasp the great speculative themes of existence with a mind that was neither profound nor suggestive. He swam with all the wondrous ease of an athlete through the billows and across the currents and counter-currents of elegant literature, of politics, of theology, yet possessed not the diver's power to win their sunken but priceless jewels. Rich he was with the accumulated intellectual ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... Story of American Life." It is American life, just as the statue of the Venus de' Medici or the Apollo Belvedere is the representation of the human figure. No Athenian belle, no Delphic athlete, stood for those beautiful shapes; but the nose was modelled from one copy, the limbs from another, the brow from a third, and the result is a joy forever. So the American life portrayed in this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... He was not used to it. His books were beautiful. He would have rather had them less beautiful and more alive. He was like an athlete resting, not knowing to what use to turn his muscles, and, yawning in boredom like a caged wild beast, he sat looking ahead at the years and years of peaceful work that awaited him. And as, with his old German capacity for optimism, he had no difficulty ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... delight in. I suppose you are one of those grasping traders that go about in ships as captains or merchants, and who think of nothing but of their outward freights and homeward cargoes. There does not seem to be much of the athlete ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... the brown-skinned fighting man wise in ringcraft and champion of a hundred fights, and the white-fleshed athlete, each alike clean and bright of eye, light-poised of foot, quivering for swift action, while the Old Un looks needfully from one to the other, watch in one bony ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... Ensigns who was assigned to work at Camp Grant hut had been an all-round athlete before he joined the Salvation Army, a boxer and wrestler of ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... young fellow's retreating form with reluctant admiration. "He moves like a trained athlete and he hasn't got a bad face," he admitted. "I pray he does not prove to ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... furtively, and climbed, as an athlete should climb, the boarding which defended the entrance to this amazing habitation. A contented watchman, dozing by a comfortable fire, cared little who came or went and rarely bestirred himself to ask the question. There were two entrances to the caves: ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... story is, for all time, the example of the victory of unarmed faith over the world's utmost might. It is in little the history of the Church and the type of all battles for God. It is a pattern for the young especially. The youthful athlete leaps into the arena, and overcomes, not because of his own strength, but because he trusts ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... met, for the first time, Dr. Jack Hamilton, afterwards M.L.A. and whip for the National Party in the Parliament of 1888. Among the Palmer diggers Hamilton was extremely popular because of his prowess as an athlete, and his medical ability, which was given gratuitously to all. He was said to have been concerned in some of the many South American revolutions, but although we were friendly from this time until his death, ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... spirit subjected to ennui, if his body was exposed to fatigue; never did the man healthy of body fail to find life light, if he had something to engage his mind. D'Artagnan, riding fast, thinking as constantly, alighted from his horse in Paris, fresh and tender in his muscles as the athlete preparing for the gymnasium. The king did not expect him so soon, and had just departed for the chase toward Meudon. D'Artagnan, instead of riding after the king, as he would formerly have done, took off his boots, had ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... whole weight against the door, felt it push at her fiercely without opening, and, even in the midst of her turmoil, smiled. Mr. Severance had never been exactly what one would call an athlete— ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... grinning at the wrath his mysterious behavior aroused, peruses those sections of Scoop Sawyer's epistle telling of two scenes already described; first, the one in the Camp Bannister grub-shack, where Head Coach Corridan blue-printed the Gargantuan athlete he desired, and the blithesome Hicks confidently requested that the Herculean task be left to him; second, the scene of intense excitement on the campus the night that the missing Hicks returned personally conducting that mountain of muscle, the ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... The curate sighed deeply, Samayana uttered a strong word in Hindoostanee, and there was a feminine cry of "Shameful!" when the girl, putting down her load, folded her white arms, whose sinew and muscle an athlete might have envied, and, with teeth and smile as faultless as our Elise's, threw us down a "Gruss Gott!" If there ever beamed content and happiness from human face we saw it in that of this peasant beauty, who had no conception of our commiseration. We gave her back a "God greet ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... after the wild man and the money-lender's son. The way was along the road, but presently the wild man turned into a stretch of woods. He could run like a trained athlete, and easily outdistanced Nat, who ...
— Dave Porter and the Runaways - Last Days at Oak Hall • Edward Stratemeyer
... light in life, the conflict of seeming good with seeming evil in the world, that constitutes the world a probation-place. It is a kind of moral gymnasium, crowded with phantoms, wherein by exercise man makes moral muscle. And the vigour of the athlete's struggle is not in the least abated by the consciousness that all he deals ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... of golf with Jacques d'Ormeval, who rather fancies himself as an athlete, and I played at dolls with ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... to hold him down all night, and he had his last fit at six in the morning. Died screaming!" A burst of laughter hailed the climax, and then one appreciative friend remarked, "He was a fool—I suppose he was drunk eleven months out of the last twelve." This was the epitaph of a bright young athlete who had been possessed of health, riches, and all fair prospects. No one warned him; none of those who swilled expensive poisons for which he paid ever refused to accept his mad generosity; he was cheered down the ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... was not, as he would himself have said, tremendously clever; but though there was a kind of appealing dullness in his eye, he looked thoroughly reasonable and competent, and his appearance proclaimed that to be a nobleman, an athlete, and an excellent fellow was a sufficiently brilliant combination of qualities. The young girl beside him, it may be attested without further delay, thought him the handsomest young man she had ever seen; and Bessie Alden's imagination, ...
— An International Episode • Henry James
... Pulcher aspectu sit athieta, cujus lacertos exercitatio expressit; idem certamini paratior. Nunquam vero species ab utilitate dividitur. Sed hoc quidem discernere, modici judicii est. Quinct. lib. 8. (A horse with narrow flanks looks more comely; It also moves faster. An athlete whose muscles have been developed by training presents a handsome appearance; he is also better prepared for the contest. Attractive appearance is invariably associated with efficient functioning. Yet it takes no outstanding powers of ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... practiced in all accomplishments of this kind by Pythoclides. Damon, it is not unlikely, being a sophist, out of policy, sheltered himself under the profession of music to conceal from people in general his skill in other things, and under this pretense attended Pericles, the young athlete of politics, so to say, as his training-master in these exercises. Damon's lyre, however, did not prove altogether a successful blind; he was banished the country by ostracism for ten years, as a dangerous intermeddler and a favorer of arbitrary power, and, by this means, gave the stage ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... knick-knacks that adorned the walls and mantelpiece. An array of silver cups, several photographs of cricket and football teams, and a miscellaneous pile of bats, fencing-sticks, Indian clubs, etc., standing in one corner, all spoke of the athlete; while carelessly thrown down on the top of a cupboard was an article for the possession of which many a, boy would have bartered the whole of his worldly wealth—a bit of worn blue velvet and the tarnished remnant of ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... hills, with his already withering wreath, all the people would come and hail him a victor and wave ribbons in the air. A great sculptor would carve a statue of him in imperishable marble and it would be set up in the city. And on the head of the statue of the young athlete was carved ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... the spokesman seemed a bit old and fat, ripe for his pension, little apt to prove seriously effective in a rough-and-tumble; but the other was young, sturdy, and broad-chested, with the poise of an athlete, and carried in addition to his sword a pistol naked in his hand, while his clear blue eyes, meeting the adventurer's, lighted up with a ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... more moderate but less logical, who would teach us that in uniting with the antique, the mediaeval art of the fifteenth century purified and sanctified the beautiful but evil child of Paganism, that the goddess of Scopas and the athlete of Polyclete were raised to a higher sphere when Raphael changed the one into a Madonna, and Michel Angelo metamorphosed the other into a prophet. But both schools of criticism are wrong. Every civilization has its inherent evil; antiquity had its' inherent evils, as the Middle Ages had theirs; ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... Commodus. "I'm not the man my Father was, not by a great deal. I am a natural all-round athlete, but I was never born to be an Emperor. All the same, when I buckle down to my job, I'm not such a bad hand at it. If I have a talk with Almo I'll swing him my ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... alias of Marmaduke Moorsdyke had prevented the match. Since then Sir Ernest had been their implacable and relentless enemy, and his desperate attempt to kidnap Lady Margaret had only been frustrated by the skill and courage of the famous athlete, Ralph Wonderson. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 26th, 1914 • Various
... till they had pushed the boat out from the reeds and the water-lilies, and she was sitting with the steering ropes in her hands opposite a boy in his shirt sleeves, with the head and face of a cherub, and the spare frame of an athlete, who was devouring her with ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... atmosphere of investigation; old ideas were abandoned; old creeds, hallowed by centuries, were thrown aside; thought became courageous; the athlete, Reason, challenged to mortal ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... creed more decidedly, perhaps, than any of the Professors. He had the firm fibre of a theological athlete, and lived to be old without ever mellowing, I think, into a kind of half-heterodoxy, as old ministers of stern creed are said to do now and then,—just as old doctors grow to be sparing of the more exasperating drugs in their later days. He had manipulated ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... bearer of heavy burdens on the back or the outturned feet of the man who sits or stands. The perfection of muscular development of two-thirds of the men of Bontoc between the ages of 25 and 30 would be the envy of the average college athlete in the States. ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... He, himself, was decidedly slender of limb much to his regret. Also, in spite of incessant motoring, his face was not that of unexceptionable health. "You look as rugged as a rock. Never thought you were cut out for an athlete, either, when you were ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond
... The rustic party, with its rough Accompaniment of blind-man's-buff, And whirling plate, and forfeits paid, His winter task a pastime made. Happy the snow-locked homes wherein He tuned his merry violin, Or played the athlete in the barn, Or held the good dame's winding-yarn, Or mirth-provoking versions told Of classic legends rare and old, Wherein the scenes of Greece and Rome Had all the commonplace of home, And little seemed at best the odds ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... preferred foot-slogging to ski at any time, and there were certainly days when teams on foot would literally dance round men pulling on ski. In the light of experience, however, the expert ski-runner has enormous advantage over the "foot-slogger," however good an athlete. ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... physiological principles, of every muscle in the human body, instead of aiming at the hypertrophy of an isolated set. I do not mean by this to deny the value of the old style gymnasium, our Island will possess as good a one as any athlete could desire. Horseback riding will form another admirable means of effecting our purpose, especially where the patient suffers from more than the usual opiate torpidity of the liver. We shall have room enough if not for an extended ride at least for a mile ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... of hardships, and he was vain of enduring them, cherishing a sovereign scorn for every physical weakness or defect; but deceived, moreover, by the rapid development of frame and sinew, which flattered him into the belief that discipline sufficiently unsparing would harden him into an athlete, he slighted the precautions of a more reasonable woodcraft, tired old foresters with long marches, stopped neither for heat nor for rain, and slept on the earth without blankets." The result was that his intense energy carried him ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... struggle to the death, for this formidable duel, Providence could have chosen a more illustrious champion, a grander athlete. But what matter men, there, where it is the idea with combats! Such as it is, it is good, let us repeat, that this spectacle should be given to the world. What is this in truth? It is intellect, an ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... "An athlete ... sometimes awakens suddenly to an understanding of the fine points of the game and to a real enjoyment of it, just as the convert awakens to an appreciation of religion. If he keeps on engaging in the sport, there ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... or men training for contests is a mistake. It not only affects the wind, but relaxes the nerves in a way to make them less vigorous for the coming contest. It shows its results at once, and when the athlete is trying to do his best to win he will do well to avoid it." Joseph Hamblen Sears, Harvard Coach, and Ex-Captain of the Harvard Football Team, Article in In ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... his mother by the shoulders and turned her face toward the door. He was a clean-looking, blondish fellow, younger than his sister—an athlete, a boxer, with far more restlessness of muscle than absorption of mind. He had failed at Harvard, where his great-grandfather had distinguished himself; he had, with the influence of a Congressman, secured a West Point cadetship, and there had fallen under the rapid ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... Coquetry was no part of Miss Alicia's equipment, but no woman likes to be utterly neglected on the care-taking side, or to be transformed ruthlessly into a man-companion whose well-being may be brusquely ignored. And this young athlete in brown duck shooting-coat and service leggings, who was patiently doing a sentry-go beside her up and down the newly-laid track at the summit of Plug Pass, was quite a different person from the abashed apologist who had paid for her dinner in the dining-car ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... paradoxical statements to which Macaulay likes to give a glittering plausibility. It is true that Boswell wrote a great book, and it is also true that in some regards he was what we are accustomed to designate as a fool; but to connect the two as cause and effect is like saying that a man was a great athlete because he was lame, or that Lord Byron had a beautiful face because he had a club-foot, or that Demosthenes was a great orator because he stammered. Men have been made by their foibles, but in those cases weakness in some directions has been more than compensated ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... du San Miguel; no von see, no von hear. I know in my heart you loaf me; tell me so vonce! Blanca!" The music and entreaty in the deep voice thrill me strangely. "Oh, Blanca darling, keess me!" My puny resistance is nothing to those athlete's arms; he holds me close one instant and I, breathless, struggle to free my hands, and push his ...
— Under the Southern Cross • Elizabeth Robins
... philosophy of it. Its practical side might be infinitely extended. Woodsmen are tough and enduring and in good condition; but no more so than the average college athlete. Time and again I have seen men of the latter class walked to a standstill. I mean exactly that. They knew, and were justly proud, of their physical condition, and they hated to acknowledge, even to themselves, that the rest of us were more enduring. As a consequence they ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... you to resign now, rather than to fail of graduation. And in this decision I am fully seconded by the faculty members of the athletic committee, who realize the harmful effect upon university athletics in the future were so prominent an athlete as ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... as a splendid young giant swung himself up on deck and ran his fingers through a shock of curling chestnut hair; a glorious youth, six feet and over in his hose of hodden gray, with the shoulders and sinews of an athlete, and the calm, strong ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... He walked up and down the room describing things under discussion; fire in his eye, spring in his step. Although about fifty-nine years of age, he looked forty-five, and strong enough to wrestle with two or three ordinary men. He had enough vitality for an athlete. ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... as a rule, carried a package considerably lighter and comporting more with their superior masculine dignity. I recall one little woman in particular. She was bearing a burden heavy enough to send a strong American athlete staggering down to the ground, while at her side majestically marched her faithful knight, bearing a bird-cage, and there wasn't any bird in ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... be remembered that this literary faculty, unusual at the age of eight, had been attained by a girl in the physical condition of an athlete, who could climb a tree like ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... for the feet of the runner. They loved the trees for the shadow that they cast, and the forest for its silence at noon. The vineyard-dresser wreathed his hair with ivy that he might keep off the rays of the sun as he stooped over the young shoots, and for the artist and the athlete, the two types that Greece gave us, they plaited with garlands the leaves of the bitter laurel and of the wild parsley, which else had been ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... Jerome still acted as general supervisor of my education, and, willy-nilly, I was being prepared for the University. In addition to my studies, my occupations included certain vague dreamings and ponderings, a number of gymnastic exercises to make myself the finest athlete in the world, a good deal of aimless, thoughtless wandering through the rooms of the house (but more especially along the maidservants' corridor), and much looking at myself in the mirror. From the latter, however, I always turned away ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... wobbly on his feet. He felt both sore and sick at the pit of his stomach, in no mood for any further altercation with this hard-hitting athlete. But he would not go without saving ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine |
