"Gordian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... born of Roman parents at Lycopolis in Egypt. It is from his writings we get the best account of Ammonius' doctrine. He was with the latter until 243; then joined Gordian III's expedition against Persia, with a view to studying Persian and Indian philosophies at their source. But Gordian was assassinated; and Plotinus, after a stay at Antioch, made his way to Rome and opened a school ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... shook his head, still smiling. But at this instant Jack, who had listened with intense interest to the duel of words, struck in and cut the Gordian knot. ...
— The Rogue Elephant - The Boys' Big Game Series • Elliott Whitney
... rhyme.[228] But though to poets we allow, No matter when acquired or how, From truth unbounded deviation, Which custom calls Imagination, Yet can't they be supposed to lie One half so fast as Fame can fly; Therefore (to solve this Gordian knot, A point we almost had forgot) 510 To courteous readers be it known, That, fond of verse and falsehood grown, Whilst we in sweet digression sung, Fame check'd her flight, and held her tongue, And now pursues, with double force And double speed, her destined course, Nor stops ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... to tell you," he says, cutting the Gordian knot at a clean stroke. "I could not make the proper explanation this morning, but now, you must pardon what has been done in haste." And he tells the story briefly, leaving out ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... taken Mrs. Prest into my confidence; in truth without her I should have made but little advance, for the fruitful idea in the whole business dropped from her friendly lips. It was she who invented the short cut, who severed the Gordian knot. It is not supposed to be the nature of women to rise as a general thing to the largest and most liberal view—I mean of a practical scheme; but it has struck me that they sometimes throw off a bold conception—such as a man would not have risen to—with singular serenity. "Simply ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... yielded at last to the necessity of self-preservation, and permitted his wife to remove his frogged overcoat, and to unwind him from a system of silk wraps to which the Gordian knot was a slip-noose. This done, he sat down before the dressing-case, and Mme. Remy, after tying a bib around his neck, proceeded to dress his hair and put brilliantine on his moustache. Her husband enlivened the operation by ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... his majority, when, after his accepting the inheritance, a great debt, unknown at the time of acceptance, had come to light. This was but the bestowal of an especial favour on a single individual; the Emperor Gordian subsequently extended the privilege, but only to soldiers, to whom it was granted as a class. We, however, in our benevolence have placed this benefit within the reach of all our subjects, and drafted a constitution as just as it is splendid, ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... quickly interposed some delightful circumstance about the excursion, and called upon the first to corroborate his testimony; neither, in Alexander's place, would have done anything but assure the other that the Gordian knot was very ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... explain, by various profound theories, the efficient causes of asserted mesmeric cures, a member of the Church of England, and popular preacher at Liverpool, the Rev. Hugh M. Neill, M.A., has cut the Gordian knot, by a sermon preached at St Jude's Church, on April 10th, 1842, and published in Nos. 599 and 600 of the Penny Pulpit, price twopence. By this sermon it appears to have occurred to the philosophic mind of the reverend divine, that mesmeric marvels may be ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... imprinting every detail upon her memory: the dull red carpet, the antique chairs, the stairway hung with old engravings, climbing upward to the room which she was never again to enter as before. The temptation assailed her to cut once and for all the Gordian knot, and obeying its impulse, she began to walk ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... ancient bishops of Antioch, after St. Ignatius, was St. Babylas, who succeeded Zebinus in the year 237, and governed that church with great zeal and virtue, about thirteen years, under the emperors Gordian, Philip, and Decius. Philip, an Arabian by birth, and of mean extraction, raised by the young emperor Gordian to be prefect of the praetorian guards, perfidiously murdered his master at the head of his victorious army in Persia, ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... creeds is not to be put on and laid aside at will, like a garment. Granted that these same doctrines of Zoroaster are faint adumbrations of the Hebrew creed, the Gordian knot is by no means loosed. That prologue in 'Faust' horrified you yesterday; yet, upon my word, I don't see why; for very evidently it is taken from Job, and Faust is but an ideal Job, tempted in more subtle manner than by the loss of flocks, houses, and children. ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... great, when these champions were immediately overthrown and killed. They did not, however, despair: substituting the two governors of Rome, Pupienus and Balbinus, and associating to them the younger Gordian, they resolved to make a stand; for the severities of Maximin had by this time manifested that it was a contest of extermination. Meantime, Maximin had broken up from Sirmium, the capital of Pannonia, ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... storm which sweeps the parish of her story. So in her later novels which have essayed such problems as divorce, the compulsions of love, the inevitable clash of parents and children, she tugs at Gordian knots with the patient fingers of goodwill when one slash with the intelligence would cut her difficulties away. Suppose it possible, for instance, that the heroine of The Awakening of Helena Richie could have been courageous enough to go to her lover to await the death ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... splendour, the pale moon drop from her orb, the sea forget to ebb and flow, and all things change their course, than Sabra prove inconstant to Saint George of England. Let, then, the priest of Hymen knit that gordian knot, the knot of wedlock, which death alone has ...
— The Seven Champions of Christendom • W. H. G. Kingston
... Anglicization is inevitable, why should we not cut the Gordian knot, and conduct our ministry wholly in the English language? This would greatly simplify our tasks, besides removing from us ...
— The Lutherans of New York - Their Story and Their Problems • George Wenner
... assumption of sudden and violent catastrophes and revolutions of the whole earth, and its inhabitants—theories which are restrained by no reference to existing analogies, and in which a desire is manifested to cut, rather than patiently to untie, the Gordian knot. ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... companion at bed and board and in all other situations? The wife is not a commodity which, when once bought, you can exchange or return; the marriage bargain, once struck, is irrevocable. It is a noose which, once thrown about the neck, turns to a Gordian knot, and cannot be unloosed till cut asunder by the scythe ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... why man cannot fly may be answered in a very simple and yet satisfactory manner: He has not been organically constructed for that purpose. That may seem like cutting the Gordian knot, but, after all, it is the only explanation that can be given. You might as well ask why man cannot clutch a perch with his foot after the manner of a bird or a monkey, for the response would be the same—his foot was made for walking, and not for prehensile purposes. On the other hand, ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... make me Caesar! I was mixing my philosophy with surgery and medicine while Pertinax was sucking at his mother's breast in a Ligurian hut. Rome, my son, is sick of too much mixed philosophy. She needs a man of iron—a riser to occasion—a cutter of Gordian knots, precisely as a sick man needs a surgeon. The senate will vote, as you say, at the praetorian guard's dictation. You have been clever, my Sextus, with your stirring of faction against faction. They are mean men, all so full of mutual suspicion as to heave a huge sigh when ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... well above the horizon of our thoughts and can be seen as two. No contradiction, no consciousness; no cross, no crown; contradictions are the very small deadlocks without which there is no going; going is our sense of a succession of small impediments or deadlocks; it is a succession of cutting Gordian knots, which on a small scale please or pain as the case may be; on a larger, give an ecstasy of pleasure, or shock to the extreme of endurance; and on a still larger, kill whether they be on the right side or the wrong. Nature, as I said ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... stated, if any one should ask what course Napoleon ought to pursue, it was easy to reply "that the mass of the French army being already assembled in Bavaria, it should be thrown upon the left of the Prussians by way of Grera and Hof, for the gordian knot of the campaign was in that direction, no matter ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... incidentally touches upon the latter, he shows by the manner in which he formulates his sentences that he regards the relation of grace to free-will as a great mystery. But he does not try to solve this mystery in the manner in which Alexander the Great cut the Gordian knot. He does not declare: Grace is everything, free-will is nothing. If the power of grace destroyed the freedom of the human will, their mutual relation would be no problem.(700) Possibly St. Augustine in the heat of controversy now and then expressed himself ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... perhaps five or ten minutes; and then when you do succeed in tearing him away and pull him out with the hook buried deep in his loose, pendulous, wrinkled and corduroyed throat, he instantly resolves himself into a quivering Gordian knot, winding the line in and about his coils and knotting it into such knots that can never ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... it kills us; and more often than not it is but the shadow of a sword, after all; a bogie that has kept us off many an evil track—perhaps even a blessing in disguise! And in the end, down comes some other sword from somewhere else and cuts for us the Gordian knot of our brief tangled existence, and solves the riddle ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... (see uncertainty); intricacy; entanglement; cross fire; awkwardness, delicacy, ticklish card to play, knot, Gordian knot, dignus vindice nodus, net, meshes, maze; coil, &c. (see convolution); ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... mortify an appetite. But the task before us, which is to co-endure with our existence, is rather one of microscopic fineness, and the heroism required is that of patience. There is no cutting of the Gordian knots of life; each must ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... so constantly arises to perplex the conscience in private life as this—which, in principle, is almost beyond solution. Sometimes, indeed, the coarse realities of law step in to cut that Gordian knot which no man can untie; for it is an actionable offence to give a character wilfully false. That little fact at once exorcises all aerial phantoms of the conscience. True: but this coarse machinery applies only to those cases in which the servant has been guilty ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... indeed, confronted by a very Gordian knot of problems. He laughed a little as he made the simile to himself, until he reflected that he was not an Alexander armed with a sword who could disperse the problems at one blow. His, indeed, would be the laborious ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... finall causes is in the Legislator. To him therefore there can not be any knot in the Law, insoluble; either by finding out the ends, to undoe it by; or else by making what ends he will, (as Alexander did with his sword in the Gordian knot,) by the Legislative power; which ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... immediate experience."[262] "Man must die to solve the problem of Deity's existence."[263] "The existence of God is a problem to which the mathematics of human intelligence seems to me to furnish no solution,"[264] "a problem without a solution, a hieroglyphic without an interpretation, a gordian knot still untied, a question unanswered, a thread still unravelled, a labyrinth untrod."[265] That there is here a strong expression of Skeptical Atheism is evident; but is there not something more? Does not Skeptical Atheism insensibly ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... original entrance, and only one of the number leading to the arbour in the centre. For a long time the girls amused themselves with trying to discover the proper clue. Cicely, like Hansel, dropped pebbles to show which paths she had already traced; Lindsay essayed to cut the Gordian knot by creeping through the hedge; and it was only after many and repeated trials that they were at last able to solve ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... the little district attorney rejoined, "it's a matter of tangled motives throughout. I—I had no sword to cut the Gordian knot ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... prophet. In the same way it may be said that a teacher of law is an inverted moralist (viz., a teacher of the duties of justice), or that politics are inverted ethics, if we exclude the thought that ethics also teaches the duty of benevolence, magnanimity, love, and so on. The State is the Gordian knot that is cut instead of being untied; it is Columbus' egg which is made to stand by being broken instead of balanced, as though the business in question were to make it stand rather than to balance it. In this respect the State is like the man who thinks that he can produce fine weather ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer |
