"Pyrrhic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... learning; would not relax his grasp on aught He held in hand, while losing it; pressed advance, Pricked for her lees the veins of wasted France; Who, had he stayed to husband her, had spun The strength he taxed unripened for his throw, In vengeful casts calamitous, On fields where palsying Pyrrhic laurels grow, The luminous the ruinous. An incalescent scorpion, And fierier for the mounded cirque That narrowed at him thick and murk, This gambler with his genius Flung lives in angry volleys, bloody lightnings, flung His fortunes to the hosts he stung, With victories ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a time held his ground, but when he perceived that the Pyrrhic soldiers had come, and recognized his inability on account of the winter to maintain an opposition, he set out for Apulia. The Tarentini laid an ambush at a narrow passage through which he was obliged to go, and by their arrows, javelins ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... Jupiter commanded Vulcan to split open his skull with a sharp axe, and how the warlike virgin leaped in full maturity from the cleft in the brain, thoroughly armed and ready for deeds of martial daring, brandishing her glittering weapons with fiery energy, and breaking at once into the wild Pyrrhic dance. We refer to this myth, bearing, as it doubtless does, an important moral in its bosom, as suggestive of the sudden and gigantic proportions of a traffic which has recently loomed up in the region of Western Pennsylvania. The petroleum trade has ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... PYRRHIC DANCE, the chief war-dance of the Greeks, of quick, light movement to the music of flutes; was of Cretan or Spartan origin. It was subsequently danced for display by the Athenian youths and by women to entertain company, and in the Roman ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... understood by the initiated, and, as it were, by hieroglyphic action, their historical events, their projected enterprises, their hunting, their ambuscades, and their battles, resembling in some respects the Pyrrhic dances of the ancients."—Washington Irving's Columbus, ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... afore-mentioned taf, fun, mus, to which we may now add fafah, 'i'iy, 'u'uw, form a Sabab khafif, corresponding to the classical long quantity (-). Two moved letters in succession, like mute, 'ala, constitute a Sabab sakil, for which the classical name would be Pyrrhic (U U). As in Latin and Greek, they are equal in weight and can frequently interchange, that is to say, the Sabab khafif can be evolved into a sakil by moving its second Harf, or the latter contracted into the former, by ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... forget Pyrrhic victory, Parthian dart, and Homeric laughter; quos deus vult and nil de mortuis; Sturm und Drang; masterly inactivity, unctuous rectitude, mute inglorious Miltons, and damned good-natured friends; the ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm |
