"Centaur" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of heredity were brought together. In the language of science, there was one negative result and two positive. The first mentioned is a son Malcolm, whom I have not met. He has a commission in the cavalry, is a devil at billiards, can't read a map, and rides like a Centaur. ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... was obliged to sleep leaning against a tree; that Deer lived several hundred years; that the Badger had the legs of one side shorter than those of the other; that the Chameleon lived entirely on air, and the Salamander in fire; whilst the sphynx, satyr, unicorn, centaur, hypogriff, hydra, dragon, griffin, cockatrice, &c. &c. &c. were either the creations of fancy, or fabled accounts of creatures of whose real form, origin, nature, and qualities, but the most imperfect ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 539 - 24 Mar 1832 • Various
... creation. For ages the lion has been called the king of beasts. I knock off its coronet and put the crown upon the horse, in every way nobler, whether in shape or spirit or sagacity or intelligence or affection or usefulness. He is semi-human, and knows how to reason on a small scale. The centaur of olden times, part horse and part man, seems to be a suggestion of the fact that the horse is ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... could not read, but they recognised some word among the characters, and pointed it out to each other with uncouth murmurings. They were strange folk, with eyes like pebbles and squat frames and short, broad faces, but each horse and man moved in unison like a centaur. ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... a confused heap of Turks and Spanish soldiers lying in a corner, and at the back of the stage, between the farthest scene and the wall of the theatre, was the stable containing seven war horses and one centaur. Pasquale told me that the centaur was "un animale selvaggio" which I knew, but he did not tell me what part he took in the play. One of the horses, of course, was Baiardo, the special horse of Rinaldo. Baiardo is still living in the forest of Ardennes, ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... how it pitched, the human clothespin stuck to his seat, and apparently with as little concern as if he had been in a rowboat gently moved to and fro by the waves. Jed rode like a centaur, every motion attuned to those of the animal as much as if he were a part of it. No matter how it pounded or tossed, he stuck securely to the hurricane deck of ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... screamed for help with all her might, but nothing answered her save an echo. The situation seemed critical for Jacqueline. As to M. de Talbrun, he was quite at his ease, as if he were accustomed to make love like a centaur; while the girl felt herself in peril of being thrown at any moment, and trampled under his horse's feet. At last she succeeded in striking her aggressor a sharp blow across the face with her riding-whip. Blinded for a moment, he let her go, and she ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... that, in a state of waking reverie, the attention is so scattered that no impression is made to stand out clearly in consciousness. On the other hand, as soon as the mind focuses itself on a certain impression, for example, the report of a gun, the relation of two angles, or the image of a centaur, this stands out so clearly that it occupies the whole foreground of consciousness, while all other impressions hide themselves in the background. This single focal state of consciousness is, therefore, pre-eminently a state of attention while the former state of reverie, on account of its diffuse ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... gives the apple. The third is 'Europa and the Bull,' Europa being personified by Esperance. The Duke does not wish to look ridiculous in a bull's hide, so takes liberties with the legend and transforms the bull into a centaur. I have said 'Amen' to everything. Finally to complete the fete, which will no doubt be well attended and very profitable, there will be little shops of all kinds. Esperance is to sell flowers from the Duchess's gardens. I have my own idea on this point, which I shall later ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... results were so predominant in the career of the man, and poisoned it so deeply to the latest hour of his consciousness, that to attempt a biography of him without clear reference to them would have been like telling the story of Nessus the Centaur without mentioning the poisoned arrow of Heracles. But Lord Lytton ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... believe this to be the true explanation, for otherwise we should have had to imagine people with canine bodies, inasmuch as we see as many dogs as horses, if not more. But the fact is correct and the explanation may be that we imagine a centaur because of the appropriate size, the implied power, and because it is not a wide leap from a horseman to a centaur. In short, here also we see that the imagination prefers to work where difficulties are fewer. Thus, with the ease of imagining ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... destroy the germs of evil that Typhon had, during the winter, planted everywhere in nature. This passage of the Sun into Taurus, whose attributes he assumes on his return from the lower hemisphere or the shades, is marked by the rising in the evening of the Wolf and the Centaur, and by the heliacal setting of Orion, called the Star of Horus, and which thenceforward is in conjunction with the Sun of Spring, in his triumph over the ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... centaur race below Deriding wings above. Manful they meet and fight to overthrow All they are wearied of,— Manful they build, demolish, drive, are driven,— But you are free, who have more greatly striven, Yours is the light ...
— Perpetual Light • William Rose Benet
... who died from wearing the shirt (given him by his wife as a charm against his infidelities) stained with the blood of Nessus, the centaur, whom Hercules had slain with a poisoned arrow. Ovid, "Epist. Heroid. Deianira Herculi," and "Metam.," lib. ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... carried him on his back over a river which he was obliged to cross; that at his death he ascended to heaven through the skies, St. Anthony being an eye-witness of the event—St. Anthony, who was guided to the hermit Paulus by a centaur; that Didymus never spoke to a human ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... of destruction a trifle black in the lips, but bright on the cheeks and virgins all; Charlie on the roster though not in sight, the silken-satin standard well in view, rent and pierced, but showing seven red days of valor legended on its folds, and with that white-moustached old centaur, Maxime, still upholding it in action ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... last the French line was entirely broken, and we obtained the victory, which was immediately proclaimed with loud huzzas and acclamations. We took three prizes, La Modeste, of sixty-four guns, and Le Temeraire and Centaur, of seventy-four guns each. The rest of the French ships took to flight with all the sail they could crowd. Our ship being very much damaged, and quite disabled from pursuing the enemy, the admiral immediately quitted her, and went in the ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano
... transmitted his expose of the situation of the Swedes since the capture of Sweaborg and the recapture of Gothland, states that the Russians and Swedes had each eleven sail of the line: it was agreed that the Swedish fleet should be reinforced by two ships, the Centaur of 74 guns, Rear-admiral Sir Samuel Hood, and the Implacable 74, Captain Byam Martin, and take a position at Hango-udde, a small, ill-fortified harbour at the north-west point of Finland, round which the Russian flotilla must pass to attack Abo and Aland; and that ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez. Vol II • Sir John Ross
... under the name of lords and ladies, strut the stage, to the great delight of attorneys and their clerks in the pit, and of the citizens and their apprentices in the galleries; and which are no more to be found in real life than the centaur, the chimera, or any other creature of mere fiction. But to let my reader into a secret, this knowledge of upper life, though very necessary for preventing mistakes, is no very great resource to a writer whose province is comedy, or that kind of novels which, like this I am writing, ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... instead of wine or spirits. The horse then is his friend under all circumstances, and inseparable from him; he may be even said to live on horseback, he eats and sleeps without dismounting, till the fable has been current that he has a centaur's nature, half man and half beast. Hence it was that the ancient Saxons had a horse for their ensign in war; thus it is that the Ottoman ordinances are, I believe, to this day dated from "the imperial stirrup," and the display of horsetails at the gate of the palace is the Ottoman ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... dashed the enthusiasm of Captain Sarrasin. He liked a girl who rode, that was certain. Mrs. Sarrasin rode like that rarest of creatures, except the mermaid, a female Centaur, and if he had had a dozen daughters, they would all have been trained to ride, one better than the other. The riding, therefore, was clearly in the favour of Dolores, so far as Captain Sarrasin's estimate was concerned. But then the idea of ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... seemed impelled to exceed his bounds, and depart on an adventurous quest," from which we might infer that we are here concerned with a sort of double monster, half horse and half cavalier. With regard to a certain Eroica, this Centaur is very hard pressed, because he did not succeed in making it clear "whether it is a question of a conflict on the open field or in the deep heart of man." In the Pastoral there is said to be "a furiously raging storm," for which it is "almost too insignificant" ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Darke working Sorcerers that change the minde: Soule-killing Witches, that deforme the bodie: Disguised Cheaters, prating Mountebankes; And manie such like liberties of sinne: If it proue so, I will be gone the sooner: Ile to the Centaur to goe seeke this slaue, I greatly feare my monie is ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... They grouped the more brilliant of the stars into Constellations with simple outlines, and gave to each of these celestial provinces a name derived from mythology, history, or from the natural kingdoms. It is impossible to determine the exact epoch of this primitive celestial geography. The Centaur Chiron, Jason's tutor, was reputed the first to divide the Heavens upon the sphere of the Argonauts. But this origin is a little mythical! In the Bible we have the Prophet Job, who names Orion, the Pleiades, and the Hyades, 3,300 years ago. The Babylonian Tables, ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... Jocelyn preserved one characteristic, an unerring instinct for field-sports that no amount of drinking could impair. He could hit a flying bird with a stone, was a deadly shot for snipe or mallard, rode like a centaur, and fished with the instinct of a heron. It is probable that his consciousness of this faculty was at the bottom of his startling recovery. Possibly he was frightened to find a little of his skill failing. I only know that at the age of forty-eight, he pulled himself up short. His eyes, ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... "Borghese Gladiator" or Heros Combattant, actually, a warrior attacking a mounted Amazon. An inscription states that it is the work of Agasias of Ephesus. To the R. is a fine Marsyas, doomed to be flayed alive by order of Apollo; to L. 562, the Borghese Centaur, and near the exit, 529, the charming Diana of Gabii, a Greek girl fastening her mantle. We pass to the Salle du Tibre, in the centre of which stands the famous Diana and the Stag, acquired for Francis ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... is necessary for a prince to understand how to avail himself of the beast and the man. This has been figuratively taught to princes by ancient writers, who describe how Achilles and many other princes of old were given to the Centaur Chiron to nurse, who brought them up in his discipline; which means solely that, as they had for a teacher one who was half beast and half man, so it is necessary for a prince to know how to make use of both natures, and that one without the other is not durable. A prince, ...
— The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... scrap of rumor. No citizen came or went without being studied, characterized, accounted for, and every woman was scrutinized as closely as a stray horse, and if there was within her, the slightest wayward impulse some lawless centaur came to know it, to exult over it, to make test of it. Her every word, her minutest expression of a natural coquetry was enlarged upon as a sign of weakness, of yielding. Every personable female was the focus of a natural ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... the dingy form of a thin, upright clock in an oaken case; beyond the clock, a spit and a musket were fastened in parallels to the wall. Below those twin emblems of war and cookery were four shelves, containing plates of pewter and delf, and terminating, centaur-like, in a sort of dresser. At the other side of these domestic conveniences was a picture of Mrs. Lobkins, in a scarlet body and a hat and plume. At the back of the fair hostess stretched the blanket we have before mentioned. ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... funeral, my nation's tears, my burial in the glorious church. The ages remember me, and the poets sing my praise in immortal verse!" The strident wheels turned at the far end of the room and came back. The fantastic and frightful apparition, man and machinery blended in one—the new Centaur, half man, half chair—flew by me again in the dying light. "I am Shakespeare!" cried the frantic creature now. "I am writing 'Lear,' the tragedy of tragedies. Ancients and moderns, I am the poet who towers over them all. Light! light! the lines ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... upon a beautiful pedestal in the garden attracted him first. It proved to be the statue of a centaur. An inscription informed the unlearned visitor that it exactly represented Chiron, the beloved of Apollo and Diana, instructed by them in the mysteries of hunting, medicine, music, and prophecy. ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... said Parson Brush, more than once; "you ride like a centaur and none knows better how to use firearms, but there are Indians in these mountains and they sometimes approach nigh enough to be seen from New Constantinople. Then, too, your father brought word that other miners are working their way toward us. More than likely there are bad men among ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... Rubens, two portraits, one of himself, by Rembrandt, a magnificent Vandyck, and many lesser pictures. In the royal apartments, among other interesting or beautiful things, is Botticelli's Pallas and the Centaur, painted, as some have thought, to celebrate Lorenzo's return from Naples in 1480. It is, then, rather as a royal gallery than as a museum that we must consider the Galleria Palatina, a more splendid if ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... blue of the sky above, the boundless stretches of verdure beneath, made the drive a dream of delight. When the sun sank the constellations came out in this pure, dry African air with a brilliance unknown to Europe; and we tired our eyes in gazing on the Centaur and the Argo and those two Magellanic clouds by which one finds the position of the southern pole. Soon after dark we came to the top of the last high hill, and saw what seemed an abyss opening beneath. The descent was steep, but a beaten track ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... terrifying Vienna itself; and driving all the Court to Presburg, with (fabulous) "MORIAMUR PRO REGE NOSTRO MARIA THERESIA," but with actual armament of Tolpatches, Pandours, Warasdins, Uscocks and the like unsightly beings of a predatory centaur nature. Which fine Hungarian Armament, and others still more ominous, have been diligently going on, while Karl Albert sat enjoying his Homagings at Linz, his Pisgah-views Vienna-ward; and asking himself, "Shall we venture forward, and capture ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... severeness, I repeat, When faith is wavering makes the waverer pass Into more settled hatred of the doctrines Of those who rule, which hatred by and by Involves the ruler (thus there springs to light That Centaur of a monstrous Commonweal, The traitor-heretic) then tho' some may quail, Yet others are that dare the stake and fire, And their strong torment bravely borne, begets An admiration and an indignation, And hot desire to imitate; so the plague Of schism spreads; were there ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... wollte; aber mehr als Unsinn, Verbrechen gegen das heiligste aller Naturgesetze, wenn er ihm die Herrschaft ber sich einrumen, oder sich in ein schndes Bndnis gegen sich selbst mit ihm einlassen, eine Art von Centaur aus sich machen, und die Dienste, die ihm das Tier zu leisten gentigt ist, durch seiner ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... old Mr. Paddock to his daughter as they rode back, "if you love that young man of yours and want to keep him, make him promise to give up riding. A more reckless and more brilliant horseman I have never seen. He took that double jump at the gate and that stream like a centaur. But he will break his neck sooner or later, and he ought to be stopped." Young Paddock was so delighted with his prospective brother-in-law's great riding that that night in the smoking-room he made him a present of Satan before ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... as depraved as are the gods! They can never say that I am not a king's bastard. I act like a queen. Who was Rodope but a queen loving Pteh, a man with a crocodile's head? She raised the third pyramid in his honour. Penthesilea loved the centaur, who, being now a star, is named Sagittarius. And what do you say about Anne of Austria? Mazarin was ugly enough! Now, you are not only ugly; you are deformed. Ugliness is mean, deformity is grand. Ugliness is the ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... deity, perhaps, will reduce these [present evils], to your former [happy] state by a propitious change. Now it is fitting both to be bedewed with Persian perfume, and to relieve our breasts of dire vexations by the lyre, sacred to Mercury. Like as the noble Centaur, [Chiron,] sung to his mighty pupil: "Invincible mortal, son of the goddess Thetis, the land of Assaracus awaits you, which the cold currents of little Scamander and swift-gliding Simois divide: whence the fatal sisters have broken off ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... proceeded. Already a good horseman, he was now initiated into the arts of the manege, which, when carried to perfection, almost realise the fable of the Centaur, the guidance of the horse appearing to proceed from the rider's mere volition, rather than from the use of any external and apparent signal of motion. He received also instructions in his field duty; but I must own, that when his first ardour was past, his progress fell short in the ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... "Coelenterata" well if you can make sure of his doing it at all. He is a man of really great knowledge of the literature of Zoology, and if it had not been for the accident of being a procrastinating impracticable ass, he could have been a distinguished man. But he is a sort of Balaam-Centaur with the asinine stronger ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... her hands. She was much tempted by a centaur cut in a sardonyx, a very exquisite piece of workmanship, part, perhaps, of the scattered collection of Lorenzo the Magnificent. She took part in the bidding, communicating her offers to the auctioneer in a low voice without raising her eyes to him. Presently the competition stopped; ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... recognized as beautiful; although it can happen, as it did to Michael Angelo, that our appreciation of the actual form of the human body should be too keen and overmastering to allow us to relish even so charming and imaginative an extravagance. The centaur is another beautiful monster. The imagination can easily follow the synthesis of the dream in which horse and man melted into one, and first gave the glorious suggestion ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... say, in answer to a question as to her present feelings: 'I feel that I am carried away by a centaur!' The comparison had been used or implied to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the thoroughfares of Montreal, and receiving the set of sensations experienced by all new-comers and recorded in all books of Canadian travel—principally wondering at the incongruities of French and English nationality grafted together, and coherent as the segments of the fabled centaur—the active commerce of a British port carried on beneath the shadow of walled-in convents suggesting Belgium—friars endued with long black robes, passing soldiers clothed in the immemorial scarlet—a Rue Notre Dame and a St. James's Street in neighbourhood—the brothers witnessed another phase ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... brave as he was gentle and jolly, and as hardy as he was brave. At five years old he killed his first fox; at seven he could manage his horse like a young centaur; and at twelve he had his first successful bear hunt. He was as obstinate as he was hardy; he steadily refused to learn Latin or French—the languages of the court—until he heard that the kings of Denmark and Poland understood them, and then ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... a certain country from the Ogri and the Blue Centaur. When she sounded her trumpet, the sick were recovered and became both young and strong. She gave the princess Carpil'lona a bunch of gilly-flowers, which enabled her to pass unrecognized before those ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... casting down my eyes, it was this mandrake reviling a steed that had started at his portentous appearance. He seemed to want but his just stature to have rent the offending quadruped in shivers. He was as the man-part of a Centaur, from which the horse-half had been cloven in some dire Lapithan controversy. He moved on, as if he could have made shift with yet half of the body-portion which was left him. The os sublime was not wanting; ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... keep a thoroughbred horse in the stable at the end of the garden, and this horse was ordered as soon as the light failed. He would say, "Mes amis et mes amies, je regrette, mais mon cheval m'attend." And the women liked to see him mount, and many thought, I am sure, that he looked like a Centaur as he ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... one with Sk. ang[a]ra, 'coal.'[21] Hebe has been identified with yavy[a], young woman, but this word is enough to show that Hebe has naught to do with the Indian pantheon. The Gandharva, moon, is certainly one with the Persian Gandarewa, but can hardly be identical with the Centaur. Saram[a] seems to have, together with S[a]rameya, a Grecian parallel development in Helena (a goddess in Sparta), Selene, Hermes; and Sarany[u] may be the same with Erinnys, but these are not Aryan figures in ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... animal, a centaur; but on severe analysis proved two. The human half were sadly bedizened with those two metals, to clothe his carcass with which and line his pouch, man has now and then disposed of his soul: still the horse was the vainer brute ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... pace was a fast run, a compound of walk, trot, and canter, or rather of a trot and a canter, the latter broken down and frittered away through the instrumentality of a ferocious Mameluke bit, but as easy as an armchair; and this was, I speak it feelingly, a great convenience, as a sailor is not a Centaur, not altogether of a piece with his horse, as it were; yet both Captain Transom and myself were rather goodish horsemen for nauticals, although rather apt to go over the bows upon broaching—to suddenly. Don Ricardo's ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... Winthrop was a first-rate horseman, from the loving manner in which he describes and dwells on the perfections of the matchless stallion. None but one who knew every point of a horse, none but one of the Centaur breed, could have drawn Don Fulano,—just as none but a born skater could have written those inimitable skating-scenes in his story of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... Blurts of crimson light Splashed the white grains like blood. Past the cave's mouth Shone with a large, fierce splendor, wildly bright, The crooked constellations of the South; Here the Cross swung; and there, affronting Mars, The Centaur stormed aside a froth of stars. Within, great casks, like wattled aldermen, Sighed of enormous feasts, and cloth of gold Glowed on the walls like hot desire. Again, Beside webbed purples from some galleon's hold, A black chest bore the skull and bones in ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... was to get every foot of speed from his horse that could be coaxed. He rode like a Centaur, giving with his lithe, supple body to every motion of the animal. But though he took steep hillsides of shale on the run, the pony slithering down in a slide of rubble like a cat, the rider's alert eyes watched the footing keenly. He could afford if necessary ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... the "BruderHochzuRossMotiv" (Brothers on a High Horse Motive), announced by sparkling Tetrazzini chromatics, always at sixes and sevens, darting and dashing, centaur-like, in semi-demi-quavers, like horses' manes and tails mounting skyward, whinnyingly. Fatima's brothers have come to make a wedding visit to their beloved sister, whom they believe happily united ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... outlaw known as Jazz. The horse was a sorrel, and it knew all the tricks of its kind. It went sunfishing, tried weaving and fence-rowing, at last toppled over backward after a frantic leap upward. The rider, long-bodied and lithe, rode like a centaur. Except for the moment when he stepped out of the saddle as the outlaw fell on its back, he stuck to his seat as though he were ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... horsemanship, went on looking thoroughly English even on horseback. This is not said of him in the mocking spirit of the Llaneros—men of the great plains—who think that no one in the world knows how to sit a horse but themselves. Charles Gould, to use the suitably lofty phrase, rode like a centaur. Riding for him was not a special form of exercise; it was a natural faculty, as walking straight is to all men sound of mind and limb; but, all the same, when cantering beside the rutty ox-cart track to the mine he looked in his English clothes and with his imported saddlery ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... Krane, like a centaur, swirled by me to do the thing I ordered. Behind me rode Beverly Clarenden bareheaded, his face aglow with power. As I looked back the dust engulfed him for a moment, and then I heard an arrow sing, and ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... for you,' and he takes a soft pencil and a piece of smooth card-board, and in five minutes draws me an outline of a naked woman on a centaur's back, a creature of touching beauty no other hand in the world could produce—so aristocratically delicately English and of to-day—so severely, so nobly and classically Greek. C'est la chastete meme—mais ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... on account 162 of his sorrow for Sarpedon, rained drops of blood upon the earth, but it is a dogma of the philosophers that the divine is exempt from suffering; and they deny the myth of the horse-centaurs, giving us the horse-centaur as an example of non-existence. Now we could give many other examples of each 163 of the antitheses mentioned above, but for a brief argument, these are sufficient. Since, however, such anomaly of things is shown by this Trope also, we shall not be able ...
— Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism • Mary Mills Patrick
... Greeks, and the stones were filled with breath, and the clouds clothed with flesh; and then came the great spiritual battle between the Centaurs and Lapithae; and the living creatures became "Children of Men." Taught, yet, by the Centaur—sown, as they knew, in the fang—from the dappled skin of the brute, from the leprous scale of the serpent, their flesh came again as the flesh of a little child, and ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... On Gypsy she cantered, she trotted, she galloped, just as naturally and enjoyably as though she had been born on horseback. Then one epochal day, emulating Tess's example, she essayed to ride astride. It was wonderful. She could imagine herself a Centaur princess. And, curiously, she felt not at all embarrassed. Yet she was glad that, back there in the lot, she was screened by the big barn ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... That little goose means a centaur, and she called him a Cyclops," exclaimed Jo, with ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... for its fine collection of statues. The most remarkable among them were the Fighting Gladiator; Silenus and a Faun; Seneca, in black marble, or rather a slave at the baths; Camillus; the Hermaphrodite; the Centaur and Cupid; two Fauns, playing on the flute; Ceres; an Egyptian; a statue of the younger Nero; the busts of Lucius Verus, Alexander, Faustina and Verus; various relievos, among which was one representing Curtius; an urn, ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... young centaur; and Sosthene replied from the creaking caleche, "Adjieu, 'Thanase," while the rider bestowed his rustic smile upon the group. Madame Sosthene's eyes met his, and her lips moved in an inaudible greeting; but the eyes of her little daughter were in ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... performance which he printed was a prose publication, entitled, the Centaur not fabulous, in six Letters to a Friend on the Life in Vogue. The conclusion is dated November 29, 1754. In the third letter is described the deathbed of the "gay, young, noble, ingenious, accomplished, and most wretched Altamont." His last words ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... their places, came attempts to faithfully copy nature. To be sure, some specimens of the art era from which the Greeks had just emerged appeared at much later periods of their history; but these creations, as in the case of the Centaur, were usually representations of what were believed to be historical facts, rather than fantastic creations designed by the artist to startle the beholder. The Greek still gratified his passion for beauty of detail, while he was pursuing his new-born purpose of copying ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... the crimes of the Renaissance was not a mark of imagination; it was a mark, as all monstrosity is, of the loss of imagination. It is only when a man has really ceased to see a horse as it is, that he invents a centaur, only when he can no longer be surprised at an ox, that he worships the devil. Diablerie is the stimulant of the jaded fancy; it is the dram-drinking of the artist. Savonarola addressed himself to ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... pain or mortal combat, never daring to break the figure and decorum of their dance. Thus of the genius of one remarkable people we have a fourfold representation: and to the senses what more unlike than an ode of Pindar, a marble centaur, the peristyle of the Parthenon, and the ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... enough to fight for life. With supreme effort some went to the side of the ship and eagerly gazed at the blue, transparent abyss. Perhaps they imagined they saw a naiad flashing a pink shoulder through the waves, or an insanely joyous and drunken centaur galloping by, splashing up the water with his hoofs. But the sea was deserted and mute, and so ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... indistinct. This is true of objects that never were seen by the eye, that never could be seen. It is as true of what are called the highest flights of imagination as of the lowest flights. The mind must SEE the angel or the demon, the hippogriff or centaur, ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... performance which he printed was a prose publication, entitled "The Centaur Not Fabulous, in Six Letters to a Friend on the Life in Vogue." The conclusion is dated November 29, 1754. In the third letter is described the death-bed of the "gay, young, noble, ingenious, accomplished, ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... sent for the saddle had watched everything; so when Sedgwick dismounted he held out his hand and said, heartily: "I beg your pardon, Mr. Sedgwick, I was mistaken in you. You do more than ride. When mounted, you and the horse together make a centaur." ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... The Centaur Nessus, in dying by the arrow of Heracles, which had been dipped in the venom of the Hydra, persuaded the bride Deanira, whose beauty was the cause of his death, to keep some of the blood from the wound as a love-charm for her husband. Many years afterwards, when Heracles was returning from ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... haste, to be creeping like a snail. He drove his spurs deep into the sides of the frightened animal, which almost leaped through his girth. A less expert horseman would have been unseated; but an earthquake could not have thrown this Centaur out of ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... skylight, and at the moment at which our story opens was oblivious alike of the weather and his difficulties. He sat with his eyes fixed on his neighbour, and in those eyes a wondering, fatuous admiration. So might a mortal look if some strange hap brought him face to face with a centaur. ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... what metamorphosis they like. If they see a debauchee with long flowing locks and hairy as a beast, like the son of Xenophantes,[505] they take the form of a Centaur[506] in derision of his ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... stampede of many hundred maddened animals, or in the performance of a hundred other feats of reckless and daring horsemanship, the cowboy is absolutely unequalled; and when he has his own horse gear he sits his animal with the ease of a centaur. Yet he is quite helpless the first time he gets astride one of the small eastern saddles. One summer, while purchasing cattle in Iowa, one of my ranch foremen had to get on an ordinary saddle to ride out of town and see a bunch of steers. He is perhaps the best rider on the ranch, and will ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... his apostles in mosaic; turning to the side walls, they could see Nero, Galba, and six other Roman emperors, Diana hunting the stag, Hylas stolen by the nymphs, Cybele on the chariot drawn by lions, a lion attacking a centaur, the chariot of Apollo, figures performing mysterious Egyptian rites, and other such profanities, represented in opus sectile marmoreum, a sort of Florentine mosaic. This unique set of intarsios was destroyed in the sixteenth century by the French Antonian monks ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... you. Piso,' said Gracchus, 'that this slight girl can wield a lance or a sword, while centaur-like she grows to the animal she rides, as well as ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... a sign. Now the contemplation of the mere aspect, the beauty (or ugliness) of the aspect, does not itself necessitate or imply any such reference to a thing. Our contemplation of the beauty of a statue representing a Centaur may indeed be disturbed by the reflexion that a creature with two sets of lungs and digestive organs would be a monster and not likely to grow to the age of having a beard. But this disturbing thought ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... fresh young life, and in spite of the limpid springs in his eyes, Henri had a lion's courage, a monkey's agility. He could cut a ball in half at ten paces on the blade of a knife; he rode his horse in a way that made you realize the fable of the Centaur; drove a four-in-hand with grace; was as light as a cherub and quiet as a lamb, but knew how to beat a townsman at the terrible game of savate or cudgels; moreover, he played the piano in a fashion which would have enabled him to become an artist should he fall on calamity, and owned ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... CHIRON, a celebrated Centaur, in whose nature the animal element was subject to the human, and who was intrusted with the education of certain heroes of Greece, among others Peleus and Achilles; was endowed with the gift of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... half-caste, half-blood, half-breed; metis[Lat], crossbreed, hybrid, mule, hinny, mulatto; tertium quid[Lat], hermaphrodite. [mythical animal] phoenix, chimera, hydra, sphinx, minotaur; griffin, griffon; centaur; saggittary[obs3]; kraken, cockatrice, wyvern, roc, dragon, sea serpent; mermaid, merman, merfolk[obs3]; unicorn; Cyclops, "men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders" [Othello]; teratology. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... not noticed when, nearly ten years ago, he wrote, "The cavalry charger, on a Hounslow Heath parade, well fed, well groomed, goes through a field-day without injury, although carrying more than twenty stone weight; he and his rider presenting together, a kind of alderman centaur. But if in the field, half starved, they have, at the end of a forced march, to charge an enemy! The biped full of fire and courage, transformed by war-work to a wiry muscular dragoon, is able and willing, but the overloaded quadruped cannot ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... closing above the cleft in the woods masked the entrance of the "critter company." Once a gleam of scarlet from the guidon flashed on the sight. And again a detached horseman was visible in a barren interval, reining in his steed on the almost vertical slant, looking the centaur in literal presentation. The dull thud of hoofs made itself felt as a continuous undertone to the clatter of stirrup and sabre, and now and again rose the stirring mandate of the trumpet, with that majestic, sweet sweep of sound which so thrills the senses. They were coming indubitably, the troop ...
— The Raid Of The Guerilla - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... NESSUS, a Centaur who, for attempting to carry off Dejanira, Hercules' wife, was shot by Hercules with an arrow dipped in the blood of the HYDRA (q. v.), and who in dying handed to Dejanira his mantle, dipped in his poisoned blood, as a charm to ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... when the deep-toned sullen music—for such it is to us—of the artillery uttered its majestic bass to the sharp ringing fire of musketry. While, as wreath after wreath of the light morning mist floated away before the breeze, the glittering files and compact bristling squares, the centaur-like cavalry, and stealthy riflemen gliding along the windings of the copse, became apparent, stretching far into the distance; now hidden for a moment by the rolling vapour from a discharge of firearms, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... man was all bone and sinew and muscle. He rode like a Centaur, as if he were a part of the horse, as easily and gracefully as a chip does the waves. The outlaw was furious with hate, blind with a madness that surged through it; but all its weaving and fence-rowing could not shake the perfect ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... tack. As to horses, where was his equal at putting one over a jump? At the exact hair's-breadth of time, he had changed from human being to spirit. It was no longer Alan Donn and his horse when he dropped his hands on the neck. There was fusion. A centaur sprang.... On the links he remembered him, the smiling mask, the stance, the waggle, the white ball. The face set, the eyes gleamed.... The terrific explosion.... Not a man and a stick and a piece of gutta-percha, but the mind and will performing a miracle with matter.... ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... regions from whence a ray of light, according to an assumption not wholly improbable, requires millions of years to reach our earth—to distances for whose measurement the dimensions (the distance of Sirius, or the calculated distances of the binary stars in Cygnus and the Centaur) of our nearest stratum of fixed ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... anchor in the port of Trapani, and wondering when the tedious Libeccio will release him, he must perforce remember that here AEneas instituted the games for Anchises. Here Mnestheus and Gyas and Sergestus and Cloanthus raced their galleys: on yonder little isle the Centaur struck; and that was the rock which received ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... for little Maurice, a tyrannical little gentleman, who domineered over the entire household, and would have been grievously spoilt, if his mother had not taken all the crossing the stout little will upon herself. He had a gallant pair of legs, and the disposition of a young Centaur, he seemed to divide the world into things that could be ridden on, and that could not; and when he bounced at the study door, with 'Papa! gee! gee!' and lifted up his round, rosy face, and despotic blue eyes, ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... admixture of blood with the snake poison became a common practice. Even the use of animal fluids alone is recorded—e.g., the arrows of Hercules, which were dipped in the gall of the Lernaean hydra. Hercules himself at last fell a victim to the blood stained tunic of the dead Centaur Nessus. As late as the middle of the last century Blumenbach persuaded one of his class to drink 7 oz. of warm bullock's blood in order to disprove the then popular notion that even fresh blood was a poison. The young ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... so numerous as they were perfect in their way, in some of which, as in the Infant Hercules strangling the Serpent, he displayed great dramatic power. [Footnote: Lucian on Zeuxis.] Lucian highly praises his Female Centaur as one of the most remarkable paintings of the world, in which he showed great ingenuity in his contrasts. His Jupiter Enthroned is also extolled by Pliny, as one of his finest works. He acquired a great ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... who has never had any home but this pigskin seat, and mark you what a part of the horse he is. Hark back to these models when you are listening to the vapourings of a riding-master lately expatriated from the stables of Sir Henry. To ride well is to recreate the fabulous centaur ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... nothing attitudinizes. Ariadne is really asleep, and Hercules, in wine, really sinks to the ground; the dancing girl floats in the air as though in her native element; the centaur gallops without an effort; it is simple reality—the very reverse of realism—nature such as she actually is when she is pleasant to behold, in the full effusion of her grace, advancing like a queen ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... but smaller, though the panels are similar; two have small canopies. On the other face are foliage scrolls with animals within them; on Eve's side an ass, horse, camel, elephant, hippopotamus, and the Oriental motif of a griffin stooping over its prey; on Adam's side a woman riding on a horse, a centaur with a dart, a mermaid, a sea-horse, and at the bottom a griffin devouring a scroll, with a human head attached. Below the ornament are semi-nude caryatid figures on one side; on the other they have turbans and ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... your Minotaur, nor your Centaur, nor your satyr, nor your hyaena, nor your babion, but your mere ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... to the Centaur, where we host, And stay there, Dromio, till I come to thee. 10 Within this hour it will be dinner-time: Till that. I'll view the manners of the town, Peruse the traders, gaze upon the buildings, And then return, and sleep within mine inn; For with ...
— The Comedy of Errors - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... the greatness, And greatness worship; every house became An academy, and those parts We see departed in the practice now Quite from the institution. LOVEL. Why do you say so, Or think so enviously? do they not still Learn us the Centaur's skill, the art of Thrace, To ride? or Pollux' mystery, to fence? The Pyrrhick gestures, both to stand and spring In armour; to be active for the wars; To study figures, numbers and proportions, May ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... Boscawen's mizen-mast and topsail-yards were shot away, and the enemy hoisted all the sail they could carry. Mr. Boscawen having shifted his flag from the Namur to the Newark, joined some other ships in attacking the Centaur, of seventy-four guns, which, being thus overpowered, was obliged to surrender. The British admiral pursued them all night, during which the Souveraine and the Guerrier altered their course, and deserted their commander. At day-break, M. de la Clue, whose ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... and a Padlock mean the same; Excepting only when the former 's pick'd It ne'er can be replaced in proper frame; Spoilt, as a pipe of claret is when prick'd: But then their own Polygamy 's to blame; Why don't they knead two virtuous souls for life Into that moral centaur, man ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron |
