"Olympics" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for word to the very latest of these kinds of intellectual exhibitions. "None were ignorant," he says, "of the name of Herodotus; nor was there a single person in Greece who had not either seen him at the Olympics, or heard those speak of him that came from thence: so that in what place soever he came the inhabitants pointed with their finger, saying 'This is that Herodotus who has written the Persian Wars in the Ionic dialect, this is he who has celebrated ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... a decree that the animal should be kept at the public charge as long as it lived. Many have shown particular marks of regard in burying animals which they had cherished and been fond of. The graves of Cimon's mares, with which he thrice conquered at the Olympic games, are still to be seen near his own tomb. Xanthippus, whose dog swam by the side of his galley to Salamis, when the Athenians were forced to abandon their city, afterwards buried it with great pomp ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst
... fondness for horse-racing, or rather chariot-racing, induced him to appear also as a charioteer. First he practised in his extensive private park or gardens, which were situated across the Tiber on the ground now approximately occupied by St. Peter's and the Vatican. When he appeared at the Olympic games driving a team of ten horses, he was thrown out of the car, and had to be lifted into it again. Though he was eventually compelled to abandon the race, he was, of course, crowned victor all the same. He dabbled also in painting ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... off all the crowns and the judges' compliments at the end of the day. She loved the race for its own sake, this young athlete; and though she took the crowns and the compliments very much as a matter of course, she had come to look on life as nothing but an endless round of Olympic games. And just as she forgot each successive event in the excitement of the next, she also had forgotten the losers and those who were tumbled in the dust. Until ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... applause by his picture, representing the nuptials of Alexander and Roxana, which he publicly exhibited at the Olympic Games, that Proxenidas, the president, rewarded him, by giving him his daughter in marriage. This picture was taken to Rome after the conquest of Greece, where it was seen by Lucian, who gives an accurate description of ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... the daring dithyrambic, and is borne on in numbers exempt from rule: whether he sings the gods, and kings, the offspring of the gods, by whom the Centaurs perished with a just destruction, [by whom] was quenched the flame of the dreadful Chimaera; or celebrates those whom the palm, [in the Olympic games] at Elis, brings home exalted to the skies, wrestler or steed, and presents them with a gift preferable to a hundred statues: or deplores some youth, snatched [by death] from his mournful bride—he elevates both his strength, ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... the modern prize fight and boxing championship has something of the gladiatorial spirit. The enormous interest in the Dempsey-Carpentier contest is evidence of the increasingly debauched taste of the world's democracies. The Olympic Games have much more to be said in their favour. But whilst they encourage professional athleticism it can hardly be said that they encourage Europe to be more athletic. The Sokol movement in Czecho-slovakia and the ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... herald publish that Dioxippus had conquered men at the Olympic games. "Say slaves and wretches," said he to them. "It is I who ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... that front tales of a big concrete oval, once erected in the small Duchy of Luxemburg, close to the town of Arion, which town was near a large area of forest. It had been constructed about the era when a revival of old-time Olympic games had roused more or less interest in a modern worldwide participation in the same, as a sort of antique revival of ancient times. Several celebrations had come off, notably at Athens, at Paris, and elsewhere. Then the interest died out but this ...
— Our Pilots in the Air • Captain William B. Perry
... ice with successions of 898, till they amounted to as many sextillions, with their homogeneous sequences. He then enclosed the line with an oval, and returned to the bank through an admiring circle, who, if they had been as numerous as the spectators to the Olympic games, would have greeted him with as loud shouts of triumph as saluted ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... desires seek abnormal satisfactions. The most brutal prize-fighter is compelled to recognize the connection between purity and vigor, and becomes virtuous when he goes into training, as the heroes of old observed chastity, in hopes of conquering at the Olympic Games. The very word ascetic comes from a Greek word signifying the preparatory exercises of an athlete. There are spiritual diseases which coil poisonously among distorted instincts and disordered nerves, and one would be generally safer in standing sponsor for the soul of the gymnast ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... sing? What happy man to equal glories bring? Begin, begin thy noble choice, And let the hills around reflect the image of thy voice. Pisa does to Jove belong, Jove and Pisa claim thy song. The fair first-fruits of war, th' Olympic games, Alcides offer'd up to Jove; Alcides too thy strings may move! But, oh! what man to join with these can worthy prove? Join Theron boldly to their sacred names; Theron the next honour claims; Theron to no man gives place, Is first in Pisa's and in Virtue's race; Theron there, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... member or to cut off running water from the city. This latter rule was the foundation of the law of riparian rights—one of the oldest and most continuous in Western civilization. The inspiration for the great national Olympic Games came from ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... you a long time," interrupted one of the Milesians. "You are the first man to bring us news of the Olympic games!" ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... merit. We must contribute something more than mere contrivances for the saving of labor, which we have been only too ready to misapply in the domain of thought and the higher kinds of invention. In those Olympic games where nations contend for truly immortal wreaths, it may well be questioned whether a mowing-machine would stand much chance in the chariot-races,—whether a piano, though made by a chevalier, could compete successfully for the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... artists of themselves, cast each in one flawless mould, works of art, which stand before us as an immortal presentment of the gods. Of this modelling also are those bodily works of art, the victors in the Olympic games; yes, and even Phryne, who, as the most beautiful of women, ascended naked out of the water, in ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... beautiful young females, crowned with flowers, who accompanied Bonaparte's carriage, and which at that period, when the Revolution had renewed all the republican recollections of Greece and Rome, looked like the chorus of females dancing around the victor at the Olympic games. ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... the commonwealth which he founded. They cannot, by any means, be brought to an agreement as to the very age in which he lived; for some of them say that he flourished in the time of Iphitus, and that they two jointly contrived the ordinance for the cessation of arms during the solemnity of the Olympic games. Of this opinion was Aristotle; and for confirmation of it, he alleges an inscription upon one of the copper quoits used in those sports, upon which the name of Lycurgus continued uneffaced to his time. But Eratosthenes and Apollodorus and other chronologers, computing the time ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... wonderful century which has just closed. Every department of human activity will be represented there, and perhaps I may be allowed, as honorary president of the athletic association which, under European management, started to revive the memory of the Olympic games, to say that I am glad that, in addition to paying proper heed to the progress of industry, of science, of art, we have also paid proper heed to the development of the athletic pastimes which are useful in themselves as showing that ...
— American Boy's Life of Theodore Roosevelt • Edward Stratemeyer
... hundred years ago" in Yorkshire, and incidentally he also made records. For instance, he cleared four-and-twenty feet at a "run-jump," and with this in my mind I find it satisfactory to think that he lived in another century, or I might find myself regretting the eclipse of the Olympic Games. As an upholder of law and order I ought to be (I am not) ashamed to admire a man who, to say the least of it, was a very prickly thorn in the side of the police. My excuse is that Jack Sincler and his brother Lishe were ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914 • Various
... paying no attention to them. The first Lacedaemonian embassy was to order the Athenians to drive out the curse of the goddess; the history of which is as follows. In former generations there was an Athenian of the name of Cylon, a victor at the Olympic games, of good birth and powerful position, who had married a daughter of Theagenes, a Megarian, at that time tyrant of Megara. Now this Cylon was inquiring at Delphi; when he was told by the god to seize the Acropolis of Athens on the ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... freedom from the adventitious ornaments of an exaggerated rhetoric or a sentimental morality, the golden age of Greece. We seem to stand within the Parthenon, to gaze upon the Venus of Cnidus, to be jostled by the gay crowd at the Olympic games. It was indeed a golden age, when all that was beautiful in nature was reverently and assiduously nurtured, and all that was noble and natural in art was magnificently encouraged; an age in which refinement and nobility were not accidents, ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... the Asses and Men are concerned, seem to me altogether extraordinary and unaccountable. Why they should keep Running Asses at Coleshill, or how making Mouths turns to account in Warwickshire, more than in any other Parts of England, I cannot comprehend. I have looked over all the Olympic Games, and do not find any thing in them like an Ass-Race, or a Match at Grinning. However it be, I am informed that several Asses are now kept in Body-Cloaths, and sweated every Morning upon the Heath, and that all the Country-Fellows within ten Miles ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Wibbley-wob Championship, and the Spiropole, Spillikins, Puff-Feather, and Animal Grab Championships? Has it come to your notice that our croquet pair beat America last Thursday by eight hoops? Did you happen to hear that we won the Hop-skip-and-jump at the last Olympic Games? You've been out in the woods, ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... near the site of the former Syb'aris. Here he lived the rest of his life, dying about the year 420. Lucian relates that, on completing his work, Herodotus went to Olympia during the celebration of the Olympic games, and there recited to his countrymen the nine books of which his history was composed. His hearers were delighted, and immediately honored the books with the title of the Nine Muses. A later account of this ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... B.C.) caused universal regret. But long before this catastrophe the Spartans gave Xenophon possession of an estate at Skillus, near the famous Olympia, which combined the pleasures of seclusion and of field sports with those of varied society when the stream of visitors assembled for the Olympic games (every four years). He himself tells us that he and his family, in company with their neighbors, had excellent sport of all kinds. He was not only a careful farmer, but so keen at hunting hares that he declares ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... the infuriated men and seemed to reflect. Presently he turned to me, as the host turns to the honourable guest. "Quiller," he said, "these savages want to kill each other. We shall have to close the Olympic games. Let us say that you have won, and no tales told. ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... wanted to go to see the ruins of the enormous temple of Jupiter where chariot races were run and the Olympic games wuz fought that Paul speaks of so many times in his letters ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... help it. What, more than anything else, engaged the attention of De Vigny, was the false position of two beings towards a factitious society: the soldier, now that standing armies are the mode, and the poet, now that Olympic games or pastimes are not the mode. He has treated the first best, because with profounder connoissance du fait. For De Vigny is not a poet; he has only an eye to perceive the existence of these birds ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli |
