"Promethean" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in season and out of season, forgetting private gain for public weal, has laboured with Promethean and sacrificial ardour to instil the love of reasonable letters into countless thousands; to whom, and to whose colleagues, amid the perishable caducity of human affairs, is largely due the pullulation of literary taste; in honouring whom we seek to honour the ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... moons will suffer the fate that overtook the earth's satellite, and in their turn become barren and death-stricken, while the great orb that once nurtured them with its light and heat receives the Promethean fire and begins to bloom ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... facts, and pass through the same phases, they culminate in a partial ideality, and this involves a simple and comprehensive law of the phenomena in question, and even a moral or providential order. For example, we may trace the Promethean myth to the end of the Hellenic era, and the different phases and final extinction of this particular myth ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... power—the humiliations of vanity—had never been disguised from my sight. Intellectual ambition had inspired me. I now regarded it equally as a delusion. I coveted light solely for my own soul to bathe in. I would have drawn down the Promethean fire; but I would no longer have given to man what it was in the power of circumstance alone (which I could control not) to make his enlightener or his ruin—his blessing or his curse. Yes, I loved—I love still;—could I live for ever, I should for ever love knowledge! It is a companion—a ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... engage; I will explore th' historic page; Sweet poetry shall soothe my soul; Philosophy each pang control: The muse I'll seek—her lambent fire My soul's quick senses shall inspire; With finer nerves my heart shall beat, Touch'd by heav'n's own Promethean heat; Italia's gales shall bear my song In soft-link'd notes her woods among; Upon the blue hill's misty side, Thro' trackless deserts waste and wide, O'er craggy rocks, whose torrents flow Upon the silver sands below. Sweet land of melody! ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... qualities, and to fancy Him under human attributes is superfluous; and Mr. Browning dismisses this theology, with the intellectual curiosities and intellectual discontents which he knows in the present case to have accompanied it, in a modification of the Promethean myth—such a one as the more "human" Euripides might have imagined. "When the sun's light first broke upon the earth, and everywhere in and on this there was life, man was the only creature which did not rejoice: for he said, I alone am incomplete in my completeness; I am subject to ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... to blaze-up? Neither, in this our Life-element, are sparks anywhere wanting. Without doubt, some Angel, whereof so many hovered round, would one day, leaving 'the outskirts of AEsthetic Tea,' flit nigher; and, by electric Promethean glance, kindle no despicable firework. Happy, if it indeed proved a Firework, and flamed-off rocketwise, in successive beautiful bursts of splendour, each growing naturally from the other, through the several stages of a happy Youthful ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... half-past five to six, Our long wax-candles, with short cotton wicks, Touched by the lamplighter's Promethean art, Start into light, and make the lighter start; To see red Phoebus through the gallery-pane Tinge with his beams the beams of Drury Lane; While gradual parties fill our widened pit, And gape, and gaze, ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... the profound, melancholy motif in the first movement of his symphony in D minor came to him. This symphony gradually grew into the great vision of his life, and, many years later, one of his women admirers gave it the modifying title of Promethean. The first time the theme sounded in his ears he roared like a wild beast, but with joy. It seemed to him that music was ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... said, "your father had the Promethean spirit: I have not. The flesh that is daily torn from me does ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... never does desert Mr. Micawber. Considering her mental powers, by the way, an illogical conclusion for her would be manifestly inappropriate. Shakespeare, indeed, having seen a life whole, sees it to an end: sees it out, and Falstaff dies. More than Promethean was the audacity that, having kindled, quenched that spark. But otherwise the grotesque man in literature is immortal, and with something more significant than the immortality awarded to him in the sayings of rhetoric; he is predurable ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... humanity of our race has been enduring Promethean agonies. But even as Prometheus unflinchingly bore the cruelties of pain, of heat and of cold, of hunger and of thirst, and the tortures inflicted by an obscene bird of prey, so have endured the men of our nation and of those nations with ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... melancholy Muse withal Resumes her music in a sadder tone, Meanwhile the sunbeam strikes upon the wall, Conceive that lovely siren to live on, Ev'n as Hope whisper'd, the Promethean light Would kindle up the ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... Africa by the richness of a swelling Nile—the black forest of pines changed into a laughing vineyard by skill, enterprise, and culture—the mechanism of Frankenstein's man of clay, energized at length by the spark Promethean. ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... and stood low down in their catalogues as of fifth or sixth magnitude, will all at once flame out, having kindled and caught fire somehow, and will blaze in the heavens, outshining Jupiter and Venus. And so some poor, vulgar, narrow nature, touched by this Promethean fire of pure love that leads to perfect sacrifice, will 'flame in the forehead of the morning sky' an undying splendour, and a light ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... your respect and duty! But come along with me. I'll write a note to Mrs. Malaprop, and you shall visit the lady directly. Her eyes shall be the Promethean torch to you; come along, I'll never forgive you, if you don't come back stark mad with rapture and impatience; if you don't, 'egad, I'll marry ...
— Standard Selections • Various |
