"Protagonist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the public arena one must to the uttermost spend and be spent. It was a magnificent and enduring trail that Dr. Shaw blazed. Everywhere her endeavors had the impersonal and unselfish touch that marks the great protagonist of new ideals. She was a gallant and stirring figure in the history of this country and leaves the government of the United ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... seemed to me that Browning felt something of this. Shakespeare hurls Hamlet into active life, and makes him realise his mission by effort. Browning might have given us a Hamlet who would have realised his mission by thought. Incident and event were to him unreal or unmeaning. He made the soul the protagonist of life's tragedy, and looked on action as the one undramatic element of a play. To us, at any rate, the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] is the true ideal. From the high tower of Thought we can look out at the world. ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... strictures we may ignore as irrelevant to our present purpose, as inevitable but not incurable faults that have been and are being eliminated in the slow but certain growth of a beneficent power in modern civilization. In reply to such criticisms, the protagonist of modern philanthropy might justly point to the honest and sincere workers and disinterested scientists it has mobilized, to the self-sacrificing and hard-working executives who have awakened public attention to the evils of poverty and the menace to the race ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... buffo[obs3], buffoon, farceur, grimacer, pantaloon, columbine; punchinello[obs3]; pulcinello[obs3], pulcinella[obs3]; extra, bit-player, walk-on role, cameo appearance; mute, figurante[obs3], general utility; super, supernumerary. company; first tragedian, prima donna[Sp], protagonist; jeune premier[French]; debutant, debutante[French]; light comedian, genteel comedian, low comedian; walking gentleman, amoroso[obs3], heavy father, ingenue[French], jeune veuve[French]. mummer, guiser[obs3], guisard[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... American Disease was given to it. Various theories about the effects of climate, sunlight per square inch and unit of time, oxygen content of the air, and so on, were offered up upon the altar of scientific explanation. Sir Arbuthnot Lane, famous protagonist of Lane's intestinal kink, said that all Americans were neurasthenic. Neurasthenia became one of the most popular of diagnoses, and ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... of mysticism, even a facile supernaturalism, but Conrad, from first to last, faces squarely the massive and intolerable fact. His stories are not chronicles of men who conquer fate, nor of men who are unbent and undaunted by fate, but of men who are conquered and undone. Each protagonist is a new Prometheus, with a sardonic ignominy piled upon his helplessness. Each goes down a Greek route to defeat and disaster, leaving nothing behind him save an unanswered question. I can scarcely recall an exception. Kurtz, Lord Jim, Razumov, Nostromo, Captain ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... Deus ex machina. For, in spite of apparent exceptions, the tendency of the transition from heroic to democratic ages is to transfer both in war and in politics the decisive influence from the individual to the mass, from the protagonist to the private; and modern warfare, with its complexity and its science, has become mainly a matter of mechanics. Its hero is the mob, and its generals fight far away in the rear of the line of battle; ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... the dawn of great triumphs to come. The House was just entering on its career of success. The day of Buller's was at an end. There only remained to them the remnants of their earlier glory. Where they had stood the House was about to stand. And in that hour of triumph Gordon himself would be the protagonist. ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... course of the negotiations which were then hastily improvised, Germany, who strove hard to gain credit for the role of disinterested peacemaker, gradually revealed herself as the chief protagonist, whereas Austria was little more than a pawn in the game. Disguising her eagerness to provoke one of the two desired solutions, Russia's abandonment of Serbia or her declaration of war, Germany succeeded in misleading ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... of his three fictions. In the first place, we are asked to move more steadily in the aristocratic atmosphere where the novelist did not breathe to best advantage. Again, Richardson was an adept in drawing women rather than men and hence was self-doomed in electing a masculine protagonist. He is also off his proper ground in laying part of the ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... self-disparagement (!) that moves me to humbly acknowledge (!) my inferiority to this immortal mind. I have availed myself of the only alternative left, when I recognized the impossibility of rivalling this protagonist among the dramatis personae of the great Drama of English Fiction, and have done something of which he speaks very tenderly and delicately somewhere in his prolific writings, one's "best." He says, "one man's best is as good as another man's," not in its results, (I know by experience), ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... natural but hardly just that Cranmer should be judged on the basis of the impression created by his last month of life. That the protagonist in a great Cause should recant in the face of death seems to argue an almost incredible degree of pusillanimity, and suggests that pusillanimity and subservience are the key to his career. Nevertheless, but for that short hour of abasement nobly and humbly retrieved, ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... relief came to Father Letheby, his suspense and agitation increased. It was a matter of intense surprise that our good friends from Kilkeel seemed to have forgotten their grievance; and a still greater surprise that their foreman and self-constituted protagonist could deprive himself of the intense pleasure of writing eloquent objurgations to the priest. But not one word was heard from them; and when, in the commencement of the autumn, Father Letheby received a letter from the Board of Works, stating that the Inspector of the Board of Trade ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan |
