"Olympian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... efflorescence of all these aspects of legend which accompanied the centenary of his birth there has since seemed to be emerging—though the older aspects still persist as well—a conception of him as a figure at once lofty and familiar, at once sad and witty, at once Olympian and human. Among poets of all grades of opinion Lincoln is the chief native hero: Edwin Arlington Robinson has best expressed in words as firm as bronze the Master's reputation for lonely pride and forgiving laughter; John Gould Fletcher, with an eloquence ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... table, took a sheet of paper, traced a few lines on it, and at once blotted them out.... He recalled Gemma's wonderful figure in the dark window, in the starlight, set all a-fluttering by the warm hurricane; he remembered her marble arms, like the arms of the Olympian goddesses, felt their living weight on his shoulders.... Then he took the rose she had thrown him, and it seemed to him that its half-withered petals exhaled a fragrance of her, more delicate than the ordinary ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... sweat-drops on that Carthage shore, Some blood on Gallic javelins. That is past! My pleasant days are come: my couch is spread Beside all waters of the Midland Sea; By whispers lulled of nations kneeling round; Illumed by light of balmiest climes; refreshed By winds from Atlas and the Olympian snows: Henceforth my foot is in delicious ways; Bathe it, ye Persian fountains! Syrian vales, All roses, make me sleepy with perfumes! Caucasian cliffs, with martial echoes faint Flatter light slumbers; charm a Roman dream! I send ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... pot-pourri of artistic ideas was rich in helmeted Minervas, vine-wreathed Bacchuses, winged Apollos and nameless classic nymphs, all staring downward from the spandrels of pointed arches with quite as much at-homeness as Olympian heroes would feel amid the mystic shades of the Scandinavian Walhalla. This room was magnificent with crimson upholstery, upon which rested a multitude of scarlet-embroidered cushions that seemed to the color-loving eye like a dream ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... millennial habit to secure control of every important religious movement and to incorporate rather than suppress. And this incorporation is more than mere recognition: the parvenu god borrows something from the manners and attributes of the olympian society to which he is introduced. The greater he grows, the more considerable is the process of fusion and borrowing. Hindu philosophy ever seeks for the one amongst the many and popular thought, in a more ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... appear at every opening in the woods. Their curls float about their god-like heads, their slender hands hold aloft wreaths and cymbals, and laughter, sparkling, Olympian laughter, comes leaping, ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... and can make rain or blue sky, pestilence or fertility. This explains many things in the Priest's first speech, in the attitude of the Chorus, and in Oedipus' own language after the discovery. It partly explains the hostility of Apollo, who is not a mere motiveless Destroyer but a true Olympian crushing his Earth-born rival. And in the same way the peculiar royalty of Jocasta, which makes Oedipus at times seem not the King but the Consort of the Queen, brings her near to that class of consecrated queens described in Dr. Frazer's Lectures on the Kingship, who are "honoured ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles
... When the Olympian Games were held in Sweden, and all the champion athletes of the world took part, it was the ambition of each to win one event, or even to run one-two-three in it. There were five events in the Pentathlon and ten in the Decathlon. ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... more powerfully built, awaited developments with apparent unconcern. Mr. Handyside, in fact, was in the august company of the Commissioner of Police, and the latter, though eminently agreeable, nevertheless observed an Olympian attitude. Thus might Jove watch a ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... thus, out of the midsummer noonday: so that those things might be felt as warm, and fresh, and blue, by the young and the old, the weak and the strong, who came to sun themselves in the god's presence, as procession and hymn rolled on, in the fragrant and tranquil courts of the great Olympian temple; while all the time those people consciously apprehended in the carved image of Zeus none but the personal, and really ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... though offering in its appearance no explanation of its toothsome name—perhaps it was regarded as the drinking cup of the Olympian gods—is one of the most singular of the dark lunar plains in its outlines. At the south it ends in a vast semicircular bay, sixty miles across, which is evidently a half-submerged mountain ring. But submerged ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... and now we come to the third novel, "Peter and Alexis." The scene is in Russia, and the hero is Peter the Great, whom Merezhkovsky represents as a worshipper of things Olympian. He gives a magnificent description of the orgies held by the emperor in honor of Bacchus and Venus, especially the latter, whose statue he expressly ordered from Rome and installed in the Summer ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... and Peleides the swift-footed answer'd: "So let it be: let a ransom be brought, and the body surrender'd, Since the Olympian minds it in earnest, and ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... downfall of the Homeric deities—how many years there were when the common people believed in the divine origin of the Odyssey, while the educated classes were more or less discreetly heretical, until at last the whole Olympian outfit became poetic myths. But strangely enough I do not recall just the date when we began to demand a ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... Farewell, volcanic din, Olympian brattle, The bursting bomb, the thousand-throated cheer Tartarean roar, the volleyed rifle rattle, The rocket's lightning line of fire and fear. I sought my fate 'mid foes in brilliant battle, Gorging with souls the hungry atmosphere; I find my fate from one cold coward's command, ...
— Soldier Songs and Love Songs • A.H. Laidlaw
... heaven, Urania, by that name If rightly thou art called, whose voice divine Following, above th' Olympian hill I soar. Above the flight of Pegasean wing. The meaning, not the name, I call; for thou Nor of the Muses nine, nor on the top Of old Olympus dwell'st, but heavenly born: Before the hills appeared, or fountain flowed, Thou with eternal Wisdom didst converse, Wisdom ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... questioned them with so much insistence about the thrust of Nevers, it was plain that he spoke from the brimmings of a wisdom richer than their own. Staupitz, who was in some sense a son of Paris, if only an adopted son, and that, indeed, by process of self-adoption, knew enough of Olympian matters to be aware that there was an illustrious gentleman that was Duke of Nevers, whom he was equally willing to aid with his sword or slay with his sword, if occasion served. Now occasion seemed to demand that Staupitz should follow the latter course. ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... And am I two? Do I still exist? I am no longer conscious of being. All about me is the infinite: I have the soul of a statue, with large tranquil eyes, filled with Olympian peace...." ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... Barcelona, Columbus restored to favour, Columbus presenting natives, Columbus announcing his discovery, the recall of Columbus, Isabella pledging her jewels, Columbus in chains, and Columbus describing his third voyage. Greece has given us a set of stamps illustrating the Olympian Games. But collectors look with considerable suspicion upon stamps of this showy class, for too many of them have been produced with the sole object of making a profit out of their sale to collectors, and not ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell
... Nausicaae: "Stranger, because you do not seem a common, senseless person,—and Olympian Zeus himself distributes fortune to mankind and gives to high and low even as he wills to each; and this he gave to you, and you must bear it therefore,—now you have reached our city and our land, you shall not lack for clothes nor anything besides which it is fit a ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... Olympian self-sufficiency is usually untroubled by what any mean other-person may say, at this cannot contain himself, but starting to his feet cries out a command for the blasphemous fool's annihilation! Before Alberich, however, has caught the words—his deafness perhaps it is which ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... a circle, and a non-existent all-perfect Being is as inconceivable as a quadrilateral triangle. It is sometimes answered that in this way we may prove the existence of anything, —Titans, Chimaeras, or the Olympian Gods; we have but to define them as existing, and the proof is complete. But in this objection there is really nothing of weight; none of these beings are by hypothesis absolutely perfect, and, therefore, of their existence we can conclude nothing. With greater ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... direct imitation of Cornelius Nepos, the pseudo-Suetonius, Valerius Maximus, Plutarch (Mulierum virtutes), Jerome (De viris illustribus), and others: or they wrote of imaginary triumphal processions and Olympian assemblies, as was done by Petrarch in his 'Trionfo della Fama,' and Boccaccio in the 'Amorosa Visione,' with hundreds of names, of which three-fourths at least belong to antiquity and the rest to the Middle Ages. By and by this new and comparatively modern element was treated with greater emphasis; ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... let vs altogether to our Troopes, And giue them leaue to flye, that will not stay: And call them Pillars that will stand to vs: And if we thriue, promise them such rewards As Victors weare at the Olympian Games. This may plant courage in their quailing breasts, For yet is hope of Life and Victory: Foreslow no longer, make we ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... history of all the religions of the Aryan race, which was missed indeed by every careful observer, but which formerly could be supplied by guess-work only. How the Persians came to worship Ormuzd, how the Buddhists came to protest against temples and sacrifices, how Zeus and the Olympian gods came to be what they are in the mind of Homer, or how such beings as Jupiter and Mars came to be worshipped by the Italian peasant:—all these questions, which used to yield material for endless and baseless speculations, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... brags of our armies, and our skill, and our prowess both by land and sea, and our amazing importance to ourselves and to others,—which importance has reached such a height at the present day as to make of us a veritable spectacle for Olympian laughter,— and we draw out our little sums of life from the Eternal exchequer, and add them up and try to obtain the highest interest for them, always forgetting to calculate that in making up the sum total, that mysterious "Unknown ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... boy, and as a man his fame as a wrestler was coincident with the Tennessee Valley. It was a manly sport which gave him great pleasure, just as would the physical development of one of his race horses. Had he lived in the early days of Greece, he would have won in the Olympian wrestling match. ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... favour, he would have likened her full, clear eyes, with their white-encircled, gray irises, to moonflowers. With none of the goddesses whose traditional charms have become coldly classic would the discerning rhymester have compared her. She was purely Paradisaic, not Olympian. If you can imagine Eve, after the eviction, beguiling the flaming warriors and serenely re-entering the Garden, you will have her. Just so human, and still so harmonious ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... gods; the Senate will proclaim the emperor deposed and the Republic restored. Theodosius will come out against us. But the Idea for which we go forth to fight will hover before us, will stir the hearts of those soldiers and officers who would gladly—ah! how gladly-sacrifice to the Olympian gods and who only kiss the wounds of the crucified Jew under compulsion. They will desert from the labarum, which Constantine carried to victory, to our standards; and those standards are all there, ready for use; they have been made in this city and are lying hidden in ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... attributed to Xenophanes, the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy, (540-500) the writer enumerates the various ways, in which other animals are superior to man. "If by the will of God there were an equality and community in life, so that the herald of the Olympian games should not only call men to the contest, but also bid all animals to come, no man would carry off a prize; for in the long race the horse would be the best; the hare would win the short race; the deer would be best in the double race. No man's fleetness would count for anything, and no ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... over O'Halloran's face. He looked at me, and then, at Nora; and then there came forth a peal of laughter which would have done honor to any of the gods at the Olympian table. This time the laughter was pure, and fresh, and ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... thus we make inroads upon the vitality of the race from two directions. We preserve the feeble and extirpate the strong. He who, in view of this amazing folly can believe in a constant, even slow, progress of the human race toward perfection ought to be happy. He has a mind whose Olympian heights are inaccessible—the Titans of fact can never scale them to ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... it appears to one at least of those unfortunate "outsiders" for whose judgment or whose "meddling" Mr. Whistler has so imperial and Olympian a contempt.... ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... gods—but it is questionable if the men found it so. They had their revenge, however, for weary of plaguing puny mortals, who whimpered and cried when they saw they could not escape, the inevitable Nemesis turned her attention from actors to spectators, and made a clean sweep of the whole Olympian hierarchy. She smashed their altars, pulled down their statues, and after she had completed her malicious work, found that she had, vulgarly speaking, been cutting off her nose to spite her face, for she, too, ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... undertook the reconstruction of the Capitolium, for which purpose he caused some columns of the temple of the Olympian Jupiter to be removed from Athens to Rome. Sulla's work was continued by Lutatius Catulus, and finished by Julius Caesar in 46 B. C. A second restoration took place in the year 9 B. C. under Augustus, a third A. D. 74 under Vespasian, and the last in the year 82, under ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... but the smart vigour of my palm about your ears. You have forgot since I took your heels up into air, on the very hour I was born, in sight of all the bench of deities, when the silver roof of the Olympian palace rung again ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... these colours lurked the unconquerable chalk, and wherever the soil was poor it emerged. The grassy track, so gay with scabious and bedstraw, was snow-white at the bottom of its ruts. A dazzling amphitheatre gleamed in the flank of a distant hill, cut for some Olympian audience. And here and there, whatever the surface crop, the earth broke into little embankments, little ditches, little mounds: there had been no lack of drama to solace ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... in his most deliberate, most Olympian tone. "I believe you're entirely mistaken, I believe ... I've been informed that the Systeme Groenlandais is one of the healthiest places in the Polar regions. There are interested ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... was discovered in which many eminent Romans were engaged. The poet Lucan, Seneca, the philosopher and defender of matricide, together with many others, were put to death. In A.D. 67 Nero traveled to Greece, and performed on the cithara at the Olympian and Isthmian games. He also contended for the prize in singing, and put to death a singer whose voice was louder than his own. Stained with every crime of which human nature is capable, haunted by the shade of the mother he had murdered, and filled ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... gentleman was very rich. His coat of glossy velvet was lined with gold lace. His flowing sleeves and ruffled cuffs gave grace to all the movements of his arms and hands. Immense wigs adorned his brow with almost the dignity of Olympian Jove. A glittering rapier, with its embossed and jewelled ...
— Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam • John S. C. Abbott
... their curly heads forward, as if to bid me not forget them. Then they all ran away and left me standing in a long, endless hall with endless columns, and white figures all about,—in the niches, on the floor, on the walls,—each Olympian in beauty, in grandeur, in power to lift the entranced soul to the high region where itself was created, and to which it always pointed. The white figures melted and warmed into masses and alcoves, and innumerable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... the Titan, as shaggy of mind as of limb,— E. the clear-eyed Olympian, rapid and slim; The one's two thirds Norseman, the other half Greek, Where the one's most abounding, the other's to seek; C.'s generals require to be seen in the mass,— E.'s specialties gain if enlarged ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... mankind, and of the Roman discipline. He signalized his youth by deeds of valor, and displayed a matchless dexterity, as well as strength, in every martial exercise, and even in the less honorable contests of the Olympian games. [52] Those qualities were more nobly exerted in the defence of his benefactor Licinius. [53] That officer, in the sedition which occasioned the death of Probus, was exposed to the most imminent danger, and the enraged soldiers were forcing their way into his ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... have clung to Shelley's mind to the end, and made him rebellious against everything bearing the paternal name. He assailed the Father of the Hebrew theocracy with amazing bitterness, and joined Prometheus in cursing and dethroning Zeus, the Olympian usurper. With him, tyrant and father were synonymous, and he has drawn the old Cenci, in the play of that name, with the same fierce, unfilial pencil, dipped in blood and wormwood. Shelley was by nature, self-instruction, and inexperience of life, impatient and full of impulse; and the sharp and ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... cannot be hoisted by engineering. And, after all that filling and emptying of water-casks, and pumping and puffing, and straining of every fibre for a twelvemonth past, Britannic Majesty had to sit down again, panting in an Olympian manner, with that expensive long sword of his still ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... walk a man stepped. It was Adam Holcomb. He stood directly in front of Pasquale and his bride, blocking the way. There was a strange light in his eyes. It was as if he looked from the present far into the future, as if somehow he were a god, an Olympian who held in his ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... dread decree of Jove Your child is doomed to be eternal Queen [24] Of Tartarus,—nor may she dare ascend The sunbright regions of Olympian Jove, Or tread the green Earth 'mid attendant nymphs. Proserpine, call to mind your walk last eve, When as you wandered in Elysian groves, Through bowers for ever green, and mossy walks, Where flowers never die, nor wind disturbs The sacred calm, ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... more and helps to bind The gaping veins, lest penetrating showers, Or fierce sun's ravening might, or searching blast Of the keen north should sear them. Well, I wot, He serves the fields who with his harrow breaks The sluggish clods, and hurdles osier-twined Hales o'er them; from the far Olympian height Him golden Ceres not in vain regards; And he, who having ploughed the fallow plain And heaved its furrowy ridges, turns once more Cross-wise his shattering share, with stroke on stroke The earth assails, and makes the field his thrall. Pray ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... I've never confessed to you. Yes. It is true that I was cruel to you—deliberately. I did want to hurt you. And do you know why? I wanted to shatter that Olympian serenity of yours. You were too strong, too self-confident. You had the air of a being that nothing could hurt. You were like ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... cast the heavy burden on the God, Whose wrath, they deem'd, had verily waxed hot Against the painful race on earth that trod, And in God's hand was Helen but the rod To scourge a people that, in unknown wise, Had vex'd the far Olympian abode With secret sin ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... on The threshold of the Olympian dawnings, Aurora's front eternal shone With lustre of ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... please himself and me! Primo Cantante! Scherzo! Andante! Piano, pianissimo! Presto, prestissimo! Hark! are there nine birds or ninety and nine? And now a miraculous gurgling gushes Like nectar from Hebe's Olympian bottle, The laughter of tune from a rapturous throttle! Such melody must be a hermit-thrush's! But that other caroler, nearer, Outrivaling rivalry with clearer Sweetness incredibly fine! Is it oriole, redbird, or bluebird, Or some strange, un-Auduboned new bird? All one, sir, both this ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... to him. Ah! Signor, what our unhappy country needs to-day is a new Empedocles! Would you not like me to show you the way to his statue, Excellence? I will be your guide among the ruins here. I will show you the temple of Castor and Pollux, the temple of the Olympian Jupiter, the temple of the Lucinian Juno, the antique well, the tomb of Theron, and the Gate of Gold! All the professional guides are asses; but we—we shall make excavations, if you are willing—and we shall discover treasures! I know the science of discovering ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... of the nations. In order to receive them, indeed, Rome had performed on them a cruel operation: they were enervated, bleached. Those great centralized deities became in their official life the mournful functionaries of the Roman Empire. But the decline of that Olympian aristocracy had in no wise drawn down the host of home-born gods, the mob of deities still keeping hold of the boundless country-sides, of the woods, the hills, the fountains; still intimately blended with the life of the country. These gods abiding in the heart of oaks, in waters ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... various sectarian houses, the mood of which is doubtless reverent—though all the while the rippling water beckons to the high and dry canoes, and a gathering of many-tinted clouds is summoned in the windy west to tingle with Olympian laughter and Universal song. How much more wisely (if I may talk in Greek terms for the moment) the gods take Sunday, than their followers on ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... and he studied Jack in a long glance, which he masked just in time to save it from being a stare. Jack was conscious of the scrutiny. He flushed slightly and waited for some word to explain it; but none came. Jasper Ewold's Olympian geniality returned ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... partner or clerk, had evidently the supreme control of affairs. He swayed in his own hands the thunder-bolts of this Olympian power. Nothing daunted him. The grandeur of his enterprises dazzled the public mind. His calm antagonism to the great houses of London filled them with surprise. A new power had seized a high place in the commercial world, and the old gods—the ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... sympathy the heart o'erflow: Far through the boundless realms of thought he springs, From earth upborne on Pegasean wings, While distant poets, trembling as they view His sunward flight, the dazzling track pursue; His magic voice, that rouses and delights, Allures and guides to climb Olympian heights. 30 But I, alas! through scenes bewilder'd stray, Far from the light of his unerring ray; While, all unused the wayward path to tread, Darkling I wander with prophetic dread. To me in vain the bold Maeonian ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... comprehension. He first declares atheism an open choice, and then he brands it with the most odious epithet in the accepted vocabulary of the hour. Danton followed practically the same line, though saying much less about it. 'If Greece,' he said in the Convention, 'had its Olympian games, France too shall solemnise her sans-culottid days. The people will have high festivals; they will offer incense to the Supreme Being, to the master of nature; for we never intended to annihilate the reign of superstition in order to set up the ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... the Iconoclasts, says,—"The Olympian Jove, created by the muse of Homer and the chisel of Phidias, might inspire a philosophic mind with momentary devotion; but these Catholic images were faintly and flatly delineated by monkish artists in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... drops his vengeful ire; Perch'd on the sceptre of the Olympian King, The thrilling darts of harmony he feels, And indolently hangs his rapid wing, While gentle sleep his closing eye-lids seals; And o'er his heaving limbs, in loose array To every balmy gale ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... rather, I think, because they are supposed to be obtained, either by an aptness of nature, which cannot be taught, or only by continual custom, which is soon prescribed which though it be not true, yet I forbear to note any deficiences; for the Olympian games are down long since, and the mediocrity of these things is for use; as for the excellency of them it serveth for the most part but ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... to deliver urbi et orbi, "Here I reign more tranquilly than at Lahore"? Perhaps but for this immortal analytical study, archaeologists might begin to puzzle their heads about him five hundred years hence, and set about writing quartos with plates (like M. Quatremere's work on Olympian Jove) to prove that Napoleon was something of a Sofi in the East before he became "Emperor of the French." Well, the wealthy shop laid siege to the poor little entresol; and after a bombardment with banknotes, entered and took possession. ...
— Gaudissart II • Honore de Balzac
... canonization of the Condes, it has now become the fashion to denigrate them to an equal excess. The traditional figure of the Grand Conde, Olympian and sublime, has been exposed by pitiless documentary evidence. La Bruyere's latest and most learned editor, M. Emile Magne, gives a terrible picture of the Prince's meanness and dirtiness; Harpagon in an ostler's jacket, he calls him, en souquenille. But to dwell on all this ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... the wall. Thus it threw shadows of these obscure and homely figures every evening with as much care over each contour as if it had been the profile of a court beauty on a palace wall; copied them as diligently as it had copied Olympian shapes on marble facades long ago, or the outline of Alexander, ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... contradictions in her character, imputed in the passage above cited, by assigning the different incidents, which have doubtless caused an intelligent woman to falter in her judgment, to their proper place in the order of time. For as, during the Olympian contests, swift-footed Spartan boys, to typify the transmission of Truth, ran with a lighted torch, and, as each fell breathless, another took up the flambeau and bore it on, bright and rapid, to the ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... Against intrusion. Who can measure Man? How should I guess his mortal will outran Defeat so far that danger could allure For its own sake? — that he would all endure, All sacrifice, all suffer, rather than Forego the daring dreams Olympian That prophesy to him of ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... would once have thrilled Elenko with rapture, if this had not been checked by awe at her own presumption. The idea that a Deity, other than some disgraced offender like Prometheus, could be the object of her compassion, would never have entered her mind. And now she pitied the whole Olympian cohort most sincerely, not so much for having fallen as for having deserved to fall. She could not conceal from herself how grievously they were one and all behind the age. It was impossible to make Zeus ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... descended the last, splendescent as god of Olympus. When for ten minutes already the fourwheel had stood at the gateway; He, like a god, came leaving his ample Olympian ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... practice, the Parthians were, naturally, tolerant of a variety of creeds among their subjects. Fire altars were maintained, and Zoroastrian zeal was allowed to nourish in the dependent kingdom of Persia. In the Greek cities the Olympian gods were permitted to receive the veneration of thousands, while in Babylon, Nearda, and Nisibis the Jews enjoyed the free exercise of their comparatively pure and elevated religion. No restrictions seem to ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... look upon it as a Syro-Phoenician importation, and the result of an assimilation established in remote antiquity between the Deluge of Deucalion and that of Khasisatra, as described by the author of the treatise 'On the Syrian Goddess.' Close to the temple of the Olympian Zeus a fissure in the soil was shown, in length but one cubit, through which it was said the waters of the Deluge had been swallowed up. Thus, every year, on the third day of the festival of the Anthesteria, a day of mourning consecrated to the dead—that is, on the thirteenth ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... diocese'—were brilliantly illuminated by electric lamps and furnished magnificently throughout, in keeping with their palatial appearance. The ceilings were painted in the Italian style, with decently-clothed Olympian deities; the floors were of parquetry, polished so highly, and reflecting so truthfully, that the guests seemed to be walking, in some magical way, upon still water. Noble windows, extending from floor to roof, were draped with purple curtains, and stood open to ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... studied sequence of effects ranging from the translucent outline of Capri and the fantastically blue mountains of the coast, to Vesuvius lifting its torch above the plain—this prodigal response to fancy's claims suggested the boundless invention of some great scenic artist, some Olympian Veronese with sea and sky for a palette. And then the city itself, huddled between bay and mountains, and seething and bubbling like a Titan's cauldron! Here was life at its source, not checked, directed, ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... him a cordial welcome, though, of course, no one of them had ever heard of him or knew anything about him except that he "represented an idea." His manoeuvres among them were so successful that he got them twice to Varvara Petrovna's salon in spite of their Olympian grandeur. These people were very serious and very polite; they behaved nicely; the others were evidently afraid of them; but it was obvious that they had no time to spare. Two or three former literary ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... greatest dramatists learned that cheerful and serious love of life, that solemn and manly facing of death, that sense of the finiteness of man, the inexhaustibleness of nature, which shines out in such grand, paganism, with such Olympian serenity, as of the bent brows and smiling lips of an antique Zeus, in Shakespeare, in Marlowe, in Beaumont and Fletcher, even in the sad and savage Webster. But with the abstract, with the imbibed modes of thought and feeling, with the imitated forms, the Elizabethans ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... landscape was a hideous Walhalla, a fit abode for the savage giant gods of the old Scandinavians. Thor and Woden would have been at home in it. The Cyclops and Titans would have been too little for it. The Olympian deities could not be conceived of as able or willing to exist in such a hideous chaos. No creature of the Greek imagination would have been a suitable inhabitant for it except Prometheus alone. Here his eternal agony and boundless despair might ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... fierce struggles within and without naturally deflected historical scholarship from the path marked out by Ranke, who had grown to manhood in the era of political stagnation following the downfall of Napoleon. The master's Olympian serenity was deplored by the group of hot-blooded scholars who are collectively known as the Prussian School, and who were firmly convinced that the principal duty of historians was to supply guidance and encouragement to their fellow-countrymen in the national and international problems of ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... rush of stirring glorious memories swept over her mind as she gazed on the lofty summit of the Acropolis, covered with memorials of the ancient art, and associated with the great events of Athenian history. The Parthenon, or Temple of Pallas; the Temple of Theseus; that of Olympian Jove; the Tower of the Winds, or so-called Lantern of Demosthenes; and the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates,—all these she saw, and wondered at. But they have been so frequently described, that we may pass them ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... of their national popularity and their direct influence on the education of the people, a description of the Olympian games is not out of place in a history of education. At first they were religious in character. They were celebrated in honor of Zeus, at Olympia, in Elis, which became the Holy Land of Greece. They took place once in four ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... was the meaning of his pitiful little effort—an orphan asylum! It seemed to Montague that the gods must shake with Olympian laughter when they contemplated the spectacle of Jim Hegan and his orphan asylum: Jim Hegan, who could have filled a score of orphan asylums with the children of the men whom he had ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... city almost hath its peculiar walks, cloisters, terraces, groves, theatres, pageants, games, and several recreations; every country, some professed gymnics to exhilarate their minds, and exercise their bodies. The [3272]Greeks had their Olympian, Pythian, Isthmian, Nemean games, in honour of Neptune, Jupiter, Apollo; Athens hers: some for honour, garlands, crowns; for [3273]beauty, dancing, running, leaping, like our silver games. The [3274]Romans had their feasts, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... glimpse of the great Talbot Potter, the girls who caught it may thank that conjunction of Olympian events which brings within the boundaries of one November week the Horse Show and the roaring climax of the football months and the more dulcet, yet vast, beginning of the opera season. Some throbbing of attendant multitudes coming to the ears of Talbot Potter, ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... estimation in which the sculptures of the Parthenon should be held, it is superfluous to say more than all writers on art have agreed in saying. Here we have master-pieces, beyond which the sculptors of the many ages that have passed away since Phidias laboured at his Jupiter in the Olympian grove have never reached. High praise this to say of a man who has been twenty-two centuries in his grave, that he accomplished in the utmost perfection those ideals to which his imitators have vainly aspired. It appears that Phidias had his troubles, ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... me by a liveried footman,—Madam Waldoborough's footman, O heaven! I was thrown into great trepidation by the stupendous event, and eagerly inquired if Madam herself was in her carriage, and was immensely relieved to learn she was not; for, unspeakably gratifying as such condescension, such an Olympian compliment, would have been under other circumstances, I should have felt it more than offset by the mortification of knowing that she knew, that her own eyes had beheld, the very humble quarter in which a lack of means had ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... South Bromfield started to cap the pose, as low persons always do in these boarding-houses, but Father changed the subject, in a slightly peppery manner. Father could be playful with Mother, but, like all men who are worth anything, he could be as Olympian as a king or a woman author or a box-office manager when he was afflicted by young men who chewed gum and were chatty. He put his gold-bowed eye-glasses on the end of his nose and looked over them so wealthily ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... of little things for Jack made Olympian merriment in Newspaper Row, for several men were in my office when I opened it. Jack is ten years old, small for his age, but quietly precocious. I cannot write more of him now. Address your next letter not to the office but to——; and when I open that ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... working to-day, without a due sense of its central place in all that goes on around us, is a spectator in the blur and bewilderment of this modern world, as helpless in it, and as childish and superficial in it, as a Greek god at the World's Fair, gazing out of his still Olympian eyes ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... under Prince Ipsilanti, who had served in the Russian army, to march into the provinces on the Danube; but they were not helped by the Russians, and were defeated by the Turks. Ipsilanti fled into Austria; but another leader, called George the Olympian, lived a wild, outlaw life for some years longer, but as he had no rank the Greeks were too proud to join him. At last he shut himself up in the old convent of Secka, and held it out against the Turks for ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of Mycenae. In a set Garden beside a channelled rivulet, Culling a myrtle garland for his brow, He walked: but hailed us as we passed: "How now, Strangers! Who are ye? Of what city sprung, And whither bound?" "Thessalians," answered young Orestes: "to Alpheues journeying, With gifts to Olympian Zeus." Whereat the king: "This while, beseech you, tarry, and make full The feast upon my hearth. We slay a bull Here to the Nymphs. Set forth at break of day To-morrow, and 'twill cost you no delay. But come"—and so he ...
— The Electra of Euripides • Euripides
... English translation). Christianity is an incomparable heavenly wisdom, the teacher of which is the Logos himself. "It produces neither poets, nor philosophers, nor rhetoricians; but it makes mortals immortal and men gods, and leads them away upwards from the earth into super-Olympian regions." Through Christian knowledge the soul returns to its Creator: [Greek: dei ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... and Hegel. The doctrines of transmission and inheritance have attacked the independence of the individual. Science finds no ego, self or will that can maintain itself against the past. Heredity rules our lives like that supreme primeval necessity that stood above the Olympian gods. "It is the last of the fates," says Wilde, "and the most terrible. It is the only one of the gods whose real name we know." It is the "divinity that shapes our ends" and hurls down the deities of freedom and choice. Science dissolves the personality into temperaments and susceptibilities, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... spirit or sense of a soul that was soft to the spirit and soul of our senses Sweetens the stress of surprising suspicion that sobs in the semblance and sound of a sigh; Only this oracle opens Olympian, in mystical moods and triangular tenses,— 'Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is dark till the dawn of the day ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... greatest affairs, and in all the highest spheres of public action; and to his eloquence his countrymen paid the singular homage, with which the Greeks crowned that of Pericles, who alone was called Olympian for his grandeur and his power. He died with the turning tide from the old statesmanship to the new, then opening, now closed, in which Mr. Chase and his cotemporaries have done their work and made ...
— Eulogy on Chief-Justice Chase - Delivered by William M. Evarts before the Alumni of - Dartmouth College, at Hanover • William M. Evarts
... fairy-tales of pampered opera-singers acting with such Olympian independence; but never a music-hall artist on tour. He must be very rich ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... aside thy mantle! Clothe thee with nakedness, O Soul, that art its priestess! For lo, thy body is thy temple. Pass unto me a magnet's stream, O amber of the flesh, And let me drink of nectar drawn From Nakedness Olympian! ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... nothing of which it is not the interpretation and ultimatum in its final form. The laws which rule the world as forces are, in it, thoughts and liberties. All the grand imaginations of men, all the glorified shapes, the Olympian gods, cherubic and seraphic forms, are but symbols and adumbrations of what it contains. As the sun, having set, still leaves its golden impress on the clouds, so does the absolute nature of man throw up and paint, as it were, on the sky testimonies of its power, remaining itself unseen. Only, therefore, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... along the wall, wrapped in their dark cloaks; and over all the scene, one snowtopped peak rose white on the horizon, like some classic virgin assisting at an Olympian solemnity. ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... or the artist will never sit calmly on Olympian heights, as we have become accustomed to represent them to ourselves. The thinker or the artist should suffer in company with the people, in order that he may find salvation or consolation. Besides this, he will suffer because he is always and eternally in turmoil and agitation: ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... her lay the dry, dusty road, the solitary journey by land and sea, the doubtful welcome at home. And here by her side stood the wealthy lover, the very embodiment of protecting power—is not every girl's first lover in her eyes as Olympian Jove?—eager to take upon himself the burden of her life, to ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... excelsis, to imagine what aspect it might have worn, if it had been its destiny to deny itself at some heroic call, and to confront with nobleness an extreme emergency, and to be victor (as Plato has it) in an Olympian contest of the soul. For, indeed, the "fervent, not ungovernable, love," which is the ideal that Protesilaus is sent to teach, is on a great scale the same affection which we have been considering in domesticity and peace; it is love considered not as a revolution ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers |
