"Olympian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and hesitated: before 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 make ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... every 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, as the Athenians, and Lacedaemonians ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... days about Godwin and Horne Tooke, and shuddered over each fresh incarnation of Mrs. Radcliffe. Soame Jenyns was dead, indeed, in the flesh, but his influence stalked at nights under the lamps and where disputants were gathered together in country rectories. Dr. Parr affected the Olympian nod, and crowned or checkmated reputations. "A flattering message from Dr. P——" sends our Diarist into ecstasies so excessive that a reaction sets in, and the "predominant and final effect upon my mind has been depression rather than ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... this kingdom, Anatole France is surely the reigning king. From the Olympian disenchantment of his tolerant urbanity, all eruptive seriousness foams back spray-tossed and scattered. And yet such a master of the art of "suspended judgment" was he, that he permits himself to dally ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... 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
... traditions. It is also plain enough that with this diversity there had been antagonism. As sources illustrative of these propositions which lie at the base of all true comprehension of the religion—which may be called Olympian from its central seat—I will point to the numerous signs of a system of nature-worship as prevailing among the Pelasgian masses; to the alliance in the war between the nature-powers and the Trojans as against the loftier ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... Simaetha. Those of Megara, In hot retaliation, seize a brace Of equal strumpets, hurried forth perforce From Dame Aspasia's house of recreation. So this was the beginning of the war, All over Greece, owing to these three strumpets. For Pericles, like an Olympian Jove, With all his thunder and his thunderbolts, Began to storm and lighten dreadfully, Alarming all the neighborhood of Greece; And made decrees, drawn up like drinking songs, In which it was enacted and concluded That the Megarians should remain excluded From every place ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... of his first enthusiasm of rewarded adventure: 'I will describe you all the outer life and ways of these Lycians, down to their very sandal-thongs,' whereto the be-corresponded one rejoins—'Shall I get next week, then, your dissertation on sandal-thongs'? Yes, and a little about the 'Olympian Horses,' and God-charioteers ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... purer realms above: Their father is the Olympian Jove. Ne'er shall oblivion veil their front sublime, Th' indwelling god is great, nor fears the wastes ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... her feet, with cajoling words and gestures really touching to behold. She was very happy too to have him by her side, but she was a little embarrassed none the less, looking upon him as an all-powerful, strange being, exalting him in her artless innocence to the level of an Olympian encompassed by thunder-bolts and lightning-flashes, possessing the gift of omnipotence. She talked to him, inquired if he was still satisfied with his friends, with the condition of his affairs, but did not dare to ask the question she had ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... pleasure, at first, in the thought of working from under cover, in the sense of operating always in the dark, unknown and unseen. It gave a touch of something Olympian and godlike to his movements. But as time went by the small cloud of discontent on his horizon grew darker, and widened as it blackened. He was avid of something more than power. He thirsted not only for its operation, but ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... to the old Hellenes Thee of yore the gods had given Another Muse, another Grace Had crowned the Olympian heaven. ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... instituted the games, in emulation of Hercules, being ambitious that as the Greeks, by that hero's appointment, celebrated the Olympian games to the honor of Jupiter, so, by his institution, they should celebrate the Isthmian to the honor of Neptune. At the same time he made an agreement with the Corinthians, that they should allow those that came from Athens to the celebration of the Isthmian games as much space ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... waiting to put a sack upon his back. The working of the marble is remarkable and, after all, is a fine piece of study which would do honor to any other sculptor except Michael Angelo; but there is lacking that Olympian mastership which characterizes the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... 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 scent ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... some beautiful writing in this fourth scene, which may be read after Mr. Wordsworth's equally beautiful reference to the Olympian gods and goddesses, in the fourth book of the "Excursion," entitled "Despondency Corrected." The last explains more completely than the other the attributes of the ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... of boys, who put out their legs to trip me up in my passage through their ranks; and surmounting all difficulties, found myself within three feet of the master's high desk, or pulpit, from which he looked down upon me like the Olympian Jupiter ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... affords many subjects for the intending pantomime: Oenomaus, Myrtilus, Cronus, Zeus, and that first Olympian contest. Arcadia, no less rich in legendary lore, gives him the flight of Daphne, the transformation of Callisto into a bear, the drunken riot of the Centaurs, the birth of Pan, the love of ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... he despatched letters to many famous cities, containing laws and ordinances; and appointed certain of his companions— under the name of death-messengers—to scatter abroad these missives. Finally, at the close of the Olympian games he erected a funeral pile; and when it was all ablaze, he threw himself into it, and perished in the flames. "There is very strong reason for believing" says Dr. Lightfoot, "that Lucian has drawn his picture, at least in part, from the known circumstances ...
— The Ignatian Epistles Entirely Spurious • W. D. (William Dool) Killen
... for us at aunt Dorothy's tea-table; and I enjoyed that aldermanic banquet, a Yorkshire tea, under circumstances that elevated it to an Olympian repast. ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... broad flat wash. Now and again, lazily, I lean back to watch the witless hoverings of a big butterfly, or sleepily listen to the increasing sound of the tom-toms and the yells of the beaters, whose voices, as those of demons of the pit, rend the peaceful air and add to my sense of Olympian aloofness! ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... it was! Homeric, in effect; a struggle of men with gods, for what were the gods but forces of nature personified'? If the God of the Falling Tide did not figure in the Olympian circle he is none the less a mighty divinity. Davies left his post. and rowed stroke. Under our united efforts the dinghy advanced in strenuous leaps, hurling miniature-rollers on the bank beside us. My palms, seasoned as they were, were smarting with watery ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... At first the fine ladies of their political party called on them as a homage of condescending gratitude for the public support which the Neuchatel family gave to their sons and husbands, but they soon discovered that this amiable descent from their Olympian heights on their part did not amount exactly to the sacrifice or service which they had contemplated. They found their host as refined as themselves, and much more magnificent, and in a very short time it was not merely the wives of ambassadors and ministers of state that were found at ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... 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
... 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
... her appearance and manner. Lothair thought he had never seen any one or any thing so serene; the serenity, however, not of humbleness, nor of merely conscious innocence; it was not devoid of a degree of majesty; what one pictures of Olympian repose. And the countenance was Olympian: a Phidian face, with large gray eyes and dark lashes; wonderful hair, abounding without art, and gathered ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... circle; I will become a Greenlander; I will go and preach the religion of Mohammed to the inhabitants of Patagonia; I will brush up the gods of Rome; dust that old mythology; compound and simplify the whole into a good, comfortable, believable system, and proclaim Olympian Jove in the deserts of Amazonia. I will be a Turk, an Indian, a Pirate; I will be any thing. What do I care, and who shall say me nay? This sensation of freedom is too delicious to be interrupted by any companionship. And for ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... moon. Beside her lay her lyre. She snatched the shell, And waked wild music from its silver strings; Then tossed it sadly by.—'Ah, hush!' she cries; 'Dead offspring of the tortoise and the mine! Why mock my discords with thine harmonies? Although a thrice-Olympian lot be thine, Only to echo back in every tone The moods of nobler ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... passes to sleep, Still full of the feats that he did, Long ago in Olympian wars, He closes it down with the sweep Of its slow-turning luminous lid, Its cover of darkness and stars, Wrought once by Hephaestus of old With ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman
... Townsend, and find a moment later that some are paying only $1 for the same accommodations. Competition is the mother of these pleasant surprises, but it is worth thrice the original price—the enjoyment of this twilight cruise. More after-glow, much more, with the Olympian Mountains lying between us and the ocean. In the foreground is a golden flood with scarlet ripples breaking through it—a vision splendid and long continued. Air growing quite chilly; strong draughts at some of the turns in the stream. Surely, in this case, ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... Lincoln's reply gives the least hint that condescension had been displayed. He is wholly unruffled, distant, objective. There is also a quiet tone of finality, almost the tone one might use in gently but firmly correcting a child. The Olympian impertinence of the Thoughts had struck out of Lincoln the first flash of that approaching masterfulness by means of which he was to ride out successfully such furious storms. Seward was too much the man of the world not to see what had happened. ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... anti-clerical, but with an Olympian irony, not bitterness. The central figure is an aged, childless widow, whose enormous wealth is eagerly awaited by a host of distant relatives. She changes her mind, and starts to give away her property to the Church, with natural disappointment to the ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... 425, while he himself preferred to connect it with an event of 453. The inscription on the pedestal is indecisive on this point. It runs in these terms: "The Messenians and Naupactians dedicated [this statue] to the Olympian Zeus, as a tithe [of the spoils] from their enemies. Paeonius of Mende made it; and he was victorious [over his competitors] in making the acroteria for the temple." The later of the two dates mentioned by Pausanias has been generally accepted, though ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... maid-servant brought in the trout, which proved to be piping hot and of a golden-brown; and the two men commenced a dinner which, as compared with the famous, or infamous one, of the London restaurant, was Olympian. The landlord himself brought in a bottle of claret, which actually was sound, and another of port, in a wicker cradle, which even Howard deigned to approve of; and the two men, after they had lingered over their dinner, got into ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... most blessed of ministering angels, without which surely the heart of humanity had long since broken, by which man is able to look with a comical eye upon terrors, as it were taking themselves so seriously, coming with such Olympian thunders and lightnings to break the spirit of a mere ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... Wotan, whose 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, ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... one, we were called up to the platform, where he sat enthroned in all the majesty of the Olympian king-god. One by one, the manuscripts were read by their youthful authors,—the criticisms uttered, which marked them with honor or shame,—gliding figures passed each other, going and returning, while a hasty exchange of glances, betrayed the flash of triumph, or the ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... emporia at the mouths of the Tiber and Po. The cities we have just named are those which appear as holding primitive religious intercourse with Greece. The first of all barbarians to present gifts to the Olympian Zeus was the Tuscan king Arimnus, perhaps a ruler of Ariminum. Spina and Caere had their special treasuries in the temple of the Delphic Apollo, like other communities that had regular dealings with the shrine; and the sanctuary ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... barricade as though there had been over their hive, enormous, dark bees of violent progress. Was it a thicket? Was it a bacchanalia? Was it a fortress? Vertigo seemed to have constructed it with blows of its wings. There was something of the cess-pool in that redoubt and something Olympian in that confusion. One there beheld in a pell-mell full of despair, the rafters of roofs, bits of garret windows with their figured paper, window sashes with their glass planted there in the ruins awaiting the cannon, wrecks of chimneys, cupboards, tables, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... while others looked out from the roofs and windows, and inquired what was the matter. Every part of the city was filled with lights and noises of various kinds. Assemblies of armed men were formed in the open spaces. Those who had no arms tore down from the temple of the Olympian Jupiter the spoils of the Gauls and Illyrians, which had been presented to Hiero by the Roman people, and hung up there by him; at the same time offering up prayers to Jupiter, that he would willingly, and without feeling offence, lend those consecrated weapons to those who were arming ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... and finer fed Feast and revel o'er our head, And we titmen are only able To catch the fragments from their table. Theirs is the fragrance of the fruits, While we consume the pulp and roots. What are the moments that we stand Astonished on the Olympian land! ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... of Greece in two great valleys that opened to the sea. The Greeks had little regard for them, rating them as half barbarians; but since the kings of Macedon called themselves sons of Herakles they had been permitted to run their horses in the races of the Olympian games. This gave ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... the imagination, Wordsworth was enabled to depict his own love in 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
... all 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, ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... was all that followed after, Light the derision of the sky, Light the divine Olympian laughter Of kindlier gods in days gone by: Low to her lover whispered Venus, "The shameless net be praised for this— When night herself no more could screen us It snared us one more ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... son of James Oppenheim, author of "The Olympian," was recently asked what work he was going to do when he became a man. "Oh," Ralph replied, "I'm not going to work at all." "Well, what are you going to do, then?" he was asked. "Why," he said seriously, "I'm just going to write ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... The Assembly, where the laws were proposed, debated, and made. 2. The Juries, on which citizens sat and where the laws were applied. 3. The Theater, where the great masterpieces of Greek literature were performed. 4. The Olympian and other Games, which were great religious ceremonies of a literary as well as an athletic and artistic character, and to which Greeks from all over Hellas came. 5. The city life itself, among an inquisitive, imaginative, and ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... are gone by when a SWINBURNE or BYRON Were loved for their love-locks and famed for their frizziness, When Olympian craniums, worthy of MYRON Or ANGELO, bowed to the hair-dresser's business, When Macassar's luxuriant essences fed At once metrical ...
— Punch, Or the London Charivari, Volume 101, November 21, 1891 • Various
... hundred years after Rossbach Frederick had the strange good fortune to captivate the wayward genius of Carlyle. It is difficult to understand how Carlyle, who all through life hesitated between the Christian Puritanism of John Knox and the Olympian paganism of Goethe, could have been fascinated by the Potsdam cynic. We can only seek for an explanation in the deeply rooted anti-French and pro-German prejudices of Carlyle. Frederick was the arch-enemy of France, and that ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... many ways his predecessor in influence, whom with persistent inconsistency he alternately eulogised and disparaged, the half Scot Lord Byron. One had by nature many affinities to the Latin races, the other was purely Teutonic: but the power of both was Titanic rather than Olympian; both were forces of revolution; both protested, in widely different fashion, against the tendency of the age to submerge Individualism; both were to a large extent egoists: the one whining, the other roaring, against the "Philistine" restraints of ordinary society. ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... burst," sent Pas de Charge past them like lightning. The Irish mare gave a rush and got alongside of him; the King would have done the same, but Cecil checked him and kept him in that cool, swinging canter which covered the grassland so lightly; Bay Regent's vast thundering stride was Olympian, but Jimmy Delmar saw his worst foe in the "Guards' Crack," and waited on him warily, riding ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... nothing; silent and proud he sat in the midst of his family circle; stoically listened to the ringing of the bell, and saw strangers enter his counting-room, too proud to show any excitement. He wrapped himself in an Olympian silence, and barricaded himself from the curious questions of his children by the stern ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... Heliopolis inland Egypt is broad, and the land is all flat and without springs of water 11 and formed of mud: and the road as one goes inland from the sea to Heliopolis is about the same in length as that which leads from the altar of the twelve gods at Athens to Pisa and the temple of Olympian Zeus: reckoning up you would find the difference very small by which these roads fail of being equal in length, not more indeed than fifteen furlongs; for the road from Athens to Pisa wants fifteen furlongs of being fifteen hundred, while ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... at his watch. Another tall man, rather 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 gathering in ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... returns to a general eulogy of the Jewish Law, on account of the faithful allegiance which it commands, and denounces the pagan idolatry in the manner of the Greek rationalists, who had made play with the Olympian hierarchy. While the inherent excellence of the Jewish Law is dependent on the sublime conception of God, the inherent defect of the Greek religion is that the Greek legislators entertained a low conception ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... them while reclining in a boat, with a blue sky overhead and a sapphire sea all around, can know how good mackerel can taste. To Vernon, who possessed the appetite of the convalescent, the meal was an Olympian feast. ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... draperies. Small blame it is therefore to Tegner that Schiller's poems furnished him with frequent suggestions and sometimes also with metres. Schiller had, in "The Gods of Greece," sung a glorious elegy on the Olympian age which stimulated his Swedish rival to write "The Asa Age," in which he regretted, though in a rather half-hearted way, the disappearance of Odin, Thor, and Freya. The poem, it must be admitted, falls much below Tegner at his best. Schiller's ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... effects must have been, everywhere within the illumination of that great lake of fire, covering an area of nearly two hundred square miles—that great lake of white, boiling, earthy matter, brilliantly lighting the long antarctic night. Think of those mountains, with the Olympian offshoot six miles in height; and of the peak called Mount Olympus, looming up ten thousand feet above even that great mountain-range. Try to picture the valleys, the chasms, the overhanging cliffs, the many smaller active craters, ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... relations, and friends, either at the expense of the public, or by private individuals, who regaled not only their families and friends, but often a great part of the spectators. Alcibiades,(157) after having sacrificed to the Olympian Jupiter, which was always the first care of the victor, treated the whole assembly. Leophron did the same, as Athenaeus reports;(158) who adds, that Empedocles of Agrigentum, having conquered in the same games, ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... 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 ...
— Gaudissart II • Honore de Balzac
... 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, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... family, could not enjoy life without some youthful protege about his person. Accordingly in 1463 he made his valet, a lad of no education and of base birth, Cardinal and Bishop of Parma at the age of twenty. His merit was the beauty of a young Olympian. With this divine gift he luckily combined ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... life closes in around it, and the burned-out case, falling back to earth, lies useless and uncared for, slowly smoldering into ashes. Once, breaking loose from our prison bonds, we dare, as mighty old Prometheus dared, to scale the Olympian mount and snatch from Phoebus' chariot the fire of the gods. Happy those who, hastening down again ere it dies out, can kindle their earthly altars at its flame. Love is too pure a light to burn long among the ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... social potentates whose least doings Mrs. Spragg and Undine had followed from afar in the Apex papers, and who had come to seem so much more remote since only the width of the Central Park divided mother and daughter from their Olympian portals. ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... at Olympian Springs, Bath County, Kentucky, flakes of a substance that looked like beef fell from the sky—"from a clear sky." We'd like to emphasize that it was said that nothing but this falling substance was visible in the sky. It fell in flakes of various sizes; some two inches square, one, three or ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... present day, how much more must it have been so before the invention of printing, at a time when it was more usual to listen to books read aloud than to read them oneself? Plutarch journeyed to Rome just as Herodotus went to Athens, or as he is said to have gone to the Olympian festival, in search of an intelligent audience of educated men. Whether his object was merely praise, or whether he was influenced by ideas of gain, we cannot say. No doubt his lectures were not delivered gratis, and that they ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... De Launay or mademoiselle, the high gods must have laughed in irony as old Jim Banker raved and flung his hands toward their Olympian fastness. ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... 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: he might ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... 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, whose silence ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... were), by whom good wine was known and appreciated; especially certain exquisite Madeira, of the Bingham and Butler names, the like of which it was believed the world could not produce; but this was Olympian nectar, for the gods alone; and the usual custom of the best society, at the early three-o'clock dinner, was water-drinking. Nor had the immense increase of the German population then flooded Philadelphia with perennial streams from innumerable "lager beer" cellars ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... lay 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
... was looking at his sons being in their turn crowned as victors at Olympia, with his grandchildren about him, embraced him and said, "Die, Diagoras; for you cannot rise to Olympus and be a god there." Yet I do not suppose that any one would compare all the Olympian and Pythian prizes together with one of Pelopidas's achievements, of which he performed many, and lived the most part of his life esteemed and looked up to, and at last, in his thirteenth Boeotarchy, when fighting gloriously against a tyrant, he died in defence ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... marked thee, prince, with curious eye, Foreboding of some mystery deep enshrined Within thy laboring breast. This day, impatient, Thy lips have burst the seal; and unconstrained Confess a lover's joy;—the gladdening chase, The Olympian coursers, and the falcon's flight Can charm no more:—soon as the sun declines Beneath the ruddy west, thou hiest thee quick To some sequestered path, of mortal eye Unseen—not one of all our faithful train Companion of thy ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... lifetime. There were pipes and there were kilts! (I didn't suppose they ever really wore them outside of the theatre!) When you have seen the kilts swinging, Salemina, you will never be the same woman afterwards! You never expected to see the Olympian gods walking, did you? Perhaps you thought they always sat on practicable rocks and made stiff gestures, from the elbow, as they do in the Wagner operas? Well, these gods walked, if you can call the inspired gait a walk! If there ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the shafts, and a second harnessed in some way at the side, so as to assist in pulling, but without bearing any share of the load. On this shutter eight men and boys balanced themselves; enough for the Olympian height of a four-in-hand. Eight fellows perched round the edge like shipwrecked mariners, clinging to one plank. They were so balanced as to weigh chiefly on the axle, yet in front of such a mountain of men, such a vast bundle of ragged clothes, ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... like a goddess, and disdain me from Olympian heights," he said. "I had the wit to guess it would ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... freedom? What is happiness? Freedom is the maximum of self-government finally becoming automatic, and the minimum of government from without finally reduced to the vanishing-point. Happiness is the ultimate bourne, the Olympian goal, the intense and burning star towards which we travel. Does not its light even now fall upon us? even now we are palely happy. And how shall we know the road? and what if, in the night-time, we turn irremediably aside? How are they to be attained, true Liberty ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... their flight. Johnny's father and mother "moved"—that was the brief, unadorned, sufficing formula. It was all accepted as inevitable; hardly for a boy a little past twelve, like myself, to question the movements of Olympian elders; nor even, in fact, to feel an abiding interest in them when I had seen them but three or four times in all. I never speculated—never asked where they had come from; never considered the ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... a nobler antiquity. We speak rather of those times when Rome was Roman—when the spirit which framed the speech still pervaded the commonwealth which used the speech. To the citizen of that time the idea of the chief of the Olympian gods was not of a rollicking despot, angry and jovial by turns, a delighter in thunderbolts, a cloud-compeller, a reckless adulterer: he was the awful personification of the majesty of law, mighty to impose ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... retort, "It's the only word that expresses it! You know as well as I do that she cared no more for Ephraim Smith than for the first man she might have solicited on the street—nor so much! God! It makes me sick to look at her and think of the price she paid for her present damn Olympian serenity." ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... overthrown the unjust—once more, as in an Olympian contest, first offering up a prayer to the saviour Zeus, let him try a fall. A wise man whispers to me that the pleasures of the wise are true and pure; all others are a shadow only. Let us examine ...
— The Republic • Plato
... of the ritual should be assigned. [13] In this connection note the extremely instructive remarks of Miss Harrison in the chapter on Herakles in the work referred to above. She points out that the Eniautos Daimon never becomes entirely and Olympian, but always retains traces of his 'Earth' origin. This principle is particularly well illustrated by Adonis, who, though, admitted to Olympus as the lover of Aphrodite, is yet by this very nature forced to return to the earth, and descend to the realm ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... handling her appearances. He presents her to us in what are almost the old-fashioned stage terms: the productions energetic and full of painstaking detail but dominated by a dream that is a theatrical hybrid. It is neither good moving picture nor good stage play. Yet Mary could be cast as a cloudy Olympian or a church angel if her managers wanted her to be such. She herself was transfigured in the Dawn of Tomorrow, but the film-version of that play was merely ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... continued Saturn, 'you must confess that, in our case, the conqueror did not assume a material form very remarkable for its dignity. Had Creation resolved itself into its original elements, had Chaos come again, or even old Coelus, the indignity might have been endured; but to be baffled by an Olympian juste milieu, and to find, after all the clamour, that nothing has been changed save the places, is, you will own, ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... compares, e.g., the Laestrygonians, Cyclopes, Circes, and Calypsos of Homer, with the giants, paynims, sorceresses encountered by the champions of romance; the Greek aoixoi with the minstrels; the Olympian games with tournaments; and the exploits of Hercules and Theseus, in quelling dragons and other monsters, with the similar enterprises of Lancelot and Amadis de Gaul. The critic is daring enough to give the Gothic manners the preference over the heroic. Homer, he ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... twilight, that brief, that exquisite interval, which flings its purporoseate veil between the palace gates of day and night. You might have fancied it the car of Diana rolling on to some Olympian festival, and preceded by Venus, the only other planet visible in the sky. What a canopy!—Not the gaudiest velabrum that the ostentatious munificence of her Caesars extended above its gilded cordage, ever equalled the empyrean pomp of this soft sky. Never could the artificial ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... moves, for a mean and a measure Of motion, — not faster than dateless Olympian leisure Might pace with unblown ample garments from pleasure to pleasure, — The wave-serrate sea-rim sinks unjarring, unreeling, Forever revealing, revealing, revealing, Edgewise, bladewise, halfwise, wholewise, — 'tis done! Good-morrow, lord Sun! With several voice, with ascription ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... paper; if Mr. Phillips, the Cassandra in masculine shape of our long prosperous Ilium, had never uttered his melodious prophecies; if the silver tones of Mr. Clay had still sounded in the senate-chamber to smooth the billows of contention; if the Olympian brow of Daniel Webster had been lifted from the dust to fix its awful frown on the darkening scowl of rebellion,—we might have been spared this dread season of convulsion. All this is but simple Martha's faith, without the reason she could have ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... 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
... of his peaceful possession after supper made the meal, so far as Lyveden was concerned, an Olympian banquet. The assemblage, indeed, was remarkable, and the hostess—a very Demeter—must have been the oldest present by some twenty years. The sprightliness of Hermes alone, in the guise of the man called Berry, kept a lively table in roars ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... within, still fiercer and more fell, Wide-yawning with her fifty throats, doth dwell A Hydra. Tartarus itself, hard by, Abrupt and sheer, beneath the ghosts in Hell, Gapes twice as deep, as o'er the earth on high Towers up the Olympian steep, ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... through literature into politics. The ease with which he drifted from one to the other is also still to be evaluated. Did it show a certain slackness, a certain aimlessness, at the bottom of his nature? Had it, in a way, some sort of analogy—to compare homespun with things Olympian—to the vein of frivolity in the great Caesar? One is tempted to think so. Surely, here was one of those natures which need circumstance to compel them to greatness and which are not foredoomed, Napoleon-like, to seize greatness. Without encroaching upon the biographical ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... description, and particularly to those who have been nursed as it were in the bosom of matter, the pupils of experiment, the darlings of sense, and the legitimate descendants of the earth-born race that warred on the Olympian gods. To such as these, who have gazed on the dark and deformed face of their nurse, till they are incapable of beholding the light of truth, and who are become so drowsy from drinking immoderately of the cup ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... Renaissance Italy our 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 ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... 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, this objection summarily set aside; none of these beings are by hypothesis absolutely perfect, and, therefore, of their existence ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... 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 lyre Awakes the numbers fraught with living fire; Full ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... The simplicity of her apparel, the opulence of her form, her imposing stature, and the extraordinary sense of vigorous life that seemed to emanate from her like a perfume exhaled by a flower, made her beautiful with a beauty of a rustic and olympian order. To watch her reaching up to the clothes-line with both arms raised high above her head, caused you to fall a musing in a strain of pagan piety. Excellent Mrs. Hermann's baggy cotton gowns had some sort of rudimentary frills at neck and bottom, but ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... circumstances this would have meant to him even more than the mere formal triumph; for though he had worked honestly and single-heartedly for the prizes of his academic career, he had also worked for them as an athlete might have striven for his laurels in the Olympian Games, or a knight of the Age of Chivalry might have fought for his laurels to lay them at ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... "Olympian Deity," he cried, "I must kneel to you!" And so he did, gaily adoring, with a kiss for the hem of her robe. They started in the highest spirits, Stefan correct this time in an immaculate evening suit which Mary ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... of which the impression is not wholly lost even on posterity. It was a saying of Mr. Fox, that no man ever yet was so wise as Thurlow looked. His countenance was fraught with sense; his aspect stately and commanding; his brow broad, massy, and armed with terrors like that of the Olympian Jove, to which indeed it was often compared. His voice loud, sonorous, and as rolling thunder in the distance, augmented the effect of his fierce and terrible invective. Few indeed were they who did not quail before his frown; fewer still who would abide his onset in debate. Perhaps ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various |
