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Cassandra   /kəsˈændrə/   Listen
Cassandra

noun
1.
(Greek mythology) a prophetess in Troy during the Trojan War whose predictions were true but were never believed.






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"Cassandra" Quotes from Famous Books



... suffer a post to pass without thanking you for them. Mr. Whittier's volume is quite what might have been expected from the greatest of Quaker writers, the worthy compeer of Longfellow, and will give me other extracts to go with "From Massachusetts to Virginia" and "Cassandra Southwick" in my own book, where one of my pleasures will be trying to do justice to American poetry, and Dr. Holmes's fine "Astraea." We have nothing like that nowadays in England. Nobody writes now in the glorious resonant metre of Dryden, and ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields

... much of the poetic impulse as well as knowledge of mediaeval art. He occupied himself in these and following years mainly in the making of designs for pictures—the most important of them being Dante's Dream, Hamlet and Ophelia, Cassandra, Lucretia Borgia, Giotto painting Dante's Portrait, The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee, The Death of Lady Macbeth, Desdemona's Death-song and a great subject entitled Found, ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine

... Charles the Second's reign the age of chivalry was totally at an end, yet the sentiments, which had ceased to be motives of action, were not so obsolete as to sound totally strange to the public ear. The French romances of the lower class, such as "Cassandra," "Cleopatra," etc., were the favourite pastime of the ladies, and retained all the extravagancies of chivalrous sentiment, with a double portion of tedious form and metaphysical subtlety. There were occasionally individuals romantic enough ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott

... the sky, she went through the list of her cousins' names: Eleanor, Humphrey, Marmaduke, Silvia, Henry, Cassandra, Gilbert, and Mostyn—Henry, the cousin who taught the young ladies of Bungay to play upon the violin, was the only one in whom she could confide, and as she walked up and down beneath the hoops of the pergola, she did begin a little ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf

... take the Greek women instead of Shakespeare's; and instance, for chief ideal types of human beauty and faith, the simple mother's and wife's heart of Andromache; the divine, yet rejected wisdom of Cassandra; the playful kindness and simple princess-life of happy Nausicaa; the housewifely calm of that of Penelope, with its watch upon the sea; the ever patient, fearless, hopelessly devoted piety of the sister and daughter, in Antigone; the bowing ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... doorway with an august severity of pose that would have befitted Cassandra at the porch. Her unsparing tirade had provoked an outburst of laughter, but not from Robbie. There were two other occupants of the parlor—Reuben Thwaite, who had never been numbered among the regenerate, and ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine

... Mufti in Don Sebastian talk nonsense. Lee is called to a severe account for his incivility to Tiresias. But the most curious passage is that in which Collier resents some uncivil reflections thrown by Cassandra, in Dryden's Cleomenes, on the calf Apis and his hierophants. The words "grass-eating, foddered god," words which really are much in the style of several passages in the Old Testament, give as much offence to this Christian divine as they could have given to ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... that the cause lies in the infection of old sin, old cruelty. There is no doubt somewhere a [Greek: protarchos hAte ], a "first blind deed of wrong," but in practice every wrong is the result of another. And the Children of Atreus are steeped to the lips in them. When the prophetess Cassandra, out of her first vague horror at the evil House, begins to grope towards some definite image, first and most haunting comes the sound of the weeping of two little children, murdered long ago, in a feud that was not theirs. From that point, more than ...
— Agamemnon • Aeschylus

... refusing them, knowing the use that will be made of them. But how will it be if a competent judge orders me to restore them, when I cannot prove to him what I know of the evil consequences that restitution will have, Apollo perchance having given to me, as to Cassandra, the gift of prophecy under the condition that I shall not be believed? I should then be compelled to make restitution, having no alternative other than my own destruction: thus I cannot escape from contributing towards the evil. Another comparison: Jupiter promises Semele, the Sun ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz

... archaic Etruscan form, the kynokephallos ape, the sacred asp or uraeus of Egypt, the winged sun of Thebes and the bull Apis; on others are figures copied from Assyrian originals; on others are Herakles fighting the lion, Herakles stealing the tripod of Apollo and discovered by the latter; Ajax and Cassandra, a Harpy, etc. Some of these have been found in tombs and other places with the color changed to an opaque white by the action of fire. These have been burned with the body of their owner ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer

... peace and prosperity, until its felicity merged in the glories of the millennium. If Mr. Calhoun had never proclaimed his heresies; if Mr. Garrison had never published his paper; if Mr. Phillips, the Cassandra in masculine shape of our long prosperous Ilium, had never uttered his melodious prophecies; if the silver tones of Mr. Clay had still sounded in the senate-chamber to smooth the billows of contention; if the Olympian brow of Daniel Webster had been lifted from the dust to ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... STORY. Cimon, loving, waxeth wise and carrieth off to sea Iphigenia his mistress. Being cast into prison at Rhodes, he is delivered thence by Lysimachus and in concert with him carrieth off Iphigenia and Cassandra on their wedding-day, with whom the twain flee into Crete, where the two ladies become their wives and whence they are presently ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio

... Cleopatra or Cassandra or any books of the kind? The author selects some well-known event, he then adapts it to his purpose, adorns it with details of his own invention, with people who never existed, with imaginary portraits; thus he piles fiction on fiction to lend a charm to ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau

... the end he preached the moral law of which he had been the apostle through life. His last message to his countrymen, written when the pen was falling from his hand, was a warning to Italian workingmen to beware of the false gods of the new socialism. When others saw darkness he saw light; now, Cassandra-like, he saw darkness when others saw light; yet he did not doubt the ultimate triumph of the light, but he no longer thought that his eyes would see it, and he ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco

... with this most important matter, uttering Cassandra-like warnings into ears wilfully deaf. The States had gone as far as possible in concession. To go farther would be to wreck the great cause upon the very quicksands which he had so ceaselessly pointed out. "We hope that nothing further will be asked of us, no scruples be felt as to ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... hee proves 245 How vaine are mens fore knowledges of things, When heaven strikes blinde their powers of note and use, And makes their way to ruine seeme more right Then that which safetie opens to their sight. Cassandra's prophecie had no more profit 250 With Troyes blinde citizens, when shee foretolde Troyes ruine; which, succeeding, made her use This sacred inclamation: "God" (said shee) "Would have me utter things uncredited; For which now they approve what I presag'd; 255 They count me ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman

... the Renaissance have been gathered principally from the suppressed churches and convents. The most noticeable are: the mausoleums of Pope UrbainV., of Cardinals Lagrange and Brancas, and of Marshal Palice. Within railings are: Cassandra by Pradier, afaun by Brian, and a bather by Esparcieux, all in the finest white marble. Upstairs is a valuable collection of Roman glass and bronzes, and 20,000 coins and medals, including a complete set of the seals and medals of the Popes during their residence ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black

... Helen and Cassandra; The sack of Troy, and the weeping for Hector— Rearing stark up 'mid all this beauty In the thick, dull ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various

... whose tall arches spring Light, sinewy, graceful, firm-set as the wing From Michael's white shoulder, is hewn and defaced By iconoclast axes in desperate waste, And its wrecks seek the ocean it prophesied long, Cassandra-like, crooning its mystical song? Then the legends go with them,—even yet on the sea A wild virtue is left in the touch of the tree, And the sailor's night-watches are thrilled to the core 50 With the lineal offspring ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... they disguised themselves in it, in hopes to deceive the main body of the Greeks by this means, so as to mingle among them unobserved, and thus attack and destroy such small parties as they might meet without being themselves attacked by the rest. They saw the princess Cassandra, the young daughter of king Priam, dragged away by Greek soldiers from a temple where she had sought refuge. They immediately undertook to rescue her, and were at once attacked both by the Greek party who had the princess ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... said Clovis; "you see, the satisfaction of putting a violent end to Cassandra must have been considerably damped by the fact that she had foretold what was going to happen to her. She probably dies with an intensely irritating 'what-did-I-tell-you' smile on her lips. By the way, of course all the killing will be done in the ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki

... Cimon, by loving, waxes wise, wins his wife Iphigenia by capture on the high seas, and is imprisoned at Rhodes. He is delivered by Lysimachus; and the twain capture Cassandra and recapture Iphigenia in the hour of their marriage. They flee with their ladies to Crete, and having there married them, are ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio

... the imagination of the world that even the glories of war are an empty delusion. Euripides shows us, as the centre of his drama, women battered and broken by inconceivable torture—the widowed Hecuba, Andromache with her child dashed to death, Cassandra ravished and made mad—yet does he show that theirs are the unconquered and unconquerable spirits. The victorious men, flushed with pride, have remorse and mockery dealt out to them by those they fought for, and go forth to unpitied death. Never surely can a great tragedy seem more real ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides

... said, softly, "but it is true. You are the untidy little thing with a pigtail who used always to be playing games with the boys when you ought to have been at school. Come, I am glad to see you. Why do you come to me like a Cassandra of the Family Herald? Your father was my companion for a while, but we were never intimate. I certainly neither robbed ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... which Measure for Measure is taken is certainly worse, for Promos (Angelo) is made to marry Cassandra (Isabella) and after the marriage is to die, but Cassandra, 'tyed in the greatest bondes of affection to her husband, becomes an earnest suter for ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford

... day came, as come it would, the people would start up, as from a dream, and ask themselves if these things could have been true. All his eloquence was in vain. He was looked upon as a false prophet, or compared to the hoarse raven, croaking omens of evil. His friends, however, compared him to Cassandra, predicting evils which would only be believed when they came home to men's hearths, and stared them in the face at their own boards. Although, in former times, the house had listened with the utmost attention to every ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay

... these alterations were, many a pious and noble heart was wounded, many a man was asking himself in his perplexity where things would end, and still more sadly, where, if these quarrels deepened, would lie his own duty. Now the Nun of Kent grew louder in her Cassandra wailings. Now the mendicant friars mounted the pulpits exclaiming sacrilege; bold men, who feared nothing that men could do to them, and who dared in the king's own presence, and in his own chapel, ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude

... guiltless suffering with the guilty, and because of their connection with the guilty, until the palaces of the Henries and the Edwards become as haunted with horrors as were the halls of the Atridae. The "pale nurslings that had perished by kindred hands," seen by Cassandra when she passed the threshold of Agamemnon's abode, might have been paralleled by similar "phantom dreams," had another Cassandra accompanied Henry VII. when he came from Bosworth Field to take possession of the royal abodes at London. She, too, might have spoken, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... June; and in September, an extract from the diary of another member of the family indirectly discloses the fact that the book had by that time been published. This extract is a brief reference to a letter which had been received from Cassandra Austen, begging her correspondent not to mention that Aunt Jane wrote Sense and Sensibility. Beyond these minute items of information, and the statement—already referred to in the Introduction to Pride and Prejudice—that she considered herself overpaid for ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen

... "Fancy me acting Cassandra at my time of life and none to believe me!" he muttered. Then, louder: "I warn you all! I know that fellow Monty. If he comes out of this alive it'll be because we haul him out by the ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy

... never rise as high as the round three hundred thousand. Shudder at it, O People; but it is as true as that ye yourselves, and your People's-friend, are alive. These prating Senators of yours hover ineffectual on the barren letter, and will never save the Revolution. A Cassandra-Marat cannot do it, with his single shrunk arm; but with a few determined men it were possible. "Give me," said the People's-friend, in his cold way, when young Barbaroux, once his pupil in a course of what was called Optics, went to see him, "Give me two hundred Naples Bravoes, armed each with ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... I hope you have enjoyed yourself since I saw you last? Mr. Corbet, how do you do? And Cassandra, my darling death-like old prophetess, what have you to predict for Ambrose Gray," for such was the name by ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... referred to what they intended to do. His mother, whose affection for him had always been shown in excessive and depressing commiseration of him in even his lightest moments, that afternoon seemed to add a prophetic and Cassandra-like sympathy for some vague future of his that would require all her ministration. "You won't need them new boots, Milty dear, in the changes that may be comin' to ye; so don't be bothering your poor father in his worriments over his ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte

... redistributed some of the chief parts. Vittoria's first husband, for example, becomes Camillo; her mother, named Cornelia instead of Tarquinia, is so far from abetting Peretti's murder and countenancing her daughter's shame, that she acts the role of a domestic Cassandra. Flaminio and not Marcello is made the main instrument of Vittoria's crime and elevation. The Cardinal Montalto is called Monticelso, and his papal title is Paul IV. instead of Sixtus V. These are details of comparative indifference, in which a playwright ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds

... Trojan horse, but the besiegers are treacherously introduced at a gate ubi extrinsecus portam equi sculptum caput erat. Antenor and AEneas receive their reward; but the latter is banished because he has concealed Polyxena, who is massacred when discovered by Neoptolemus. Helenus, Cassandra, and Andromache go free: and the book ends with the beautifully precise statements that the war, truces and all, lasted ten years, six months, and twelve days; that 886,000 men fell on the Greek side, and 676,000 on the Trojan; that AEneas set ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury

... sensible mother she rejects the suit of simple and uncouth Pero Marques for that of a gentleman (escudeiro) whose pretensions are far greater than his possessions. The mother gives them a house and retires to a small cottage. But the escudeiro married confirms the wisdom of the Sibyl Cassandra (I. 40). He keeps his wife shut up 'like a nun of Oudivellas.' The windows are nailed up, she is not allowed to leave the house even to go to church. Thus the hopes and ambitions of Ines Pereira de ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente

... I read "Agamemnon" of Aeschylus; and then, in the prophetic horror with which Cassandra surveys the regal abode in Mycenae, destined to be the scene of murders so memorable through the long traditions of the Grecian stage, murders that, many centuries after all the parties to them—perpetrators, sufferers, avengers—had become dust and ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... mind how to proceed, when another letter reached her. It was written in a bold, clear, round hand. It bore no date or superscription, but the envelope is stamped: "New York, Feb. 12, 12 o'c." The letter might have been written by a love-crazed Cassandra. It was ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe

... The inspired man is a seer—he has insight and foresight; and these objects of mental sight are to him more real and certain than any others. But he is unable to prove their reality or justify them to the sceptic. And hence his fate is often that of Cassandra,—to be a true prophet, but not to be believed, until by and by the strength of his own conviction wins its way, and produces faith ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke

... Lycurgus dipped in the cupboard "between meals," and Aristides came home from school without shoes, leaving those important articles at the threshold, for the delights of a barefooted walk down the ditches. Octavia and Cassandra were "keerless" of their clothes. So that with but one exception, however the "Prairie Rose" might have trimmed, pruned, and trained her own natural luxuriance, the little shoots came up defiantly wild and straggling. That one exception ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte

... Shakespeare wrote his play, Cinthio's romance had been twice rendered into English by George Whetstone. Whetstone had not only given a somewhat altered version of the Italian romance in his unwieldy play of 'Promos and Cassandra' (in two parts of five acts each, 1578), but he had also freely translated it in his collection of prose tales, 'Heptameron of Civil Discources' (1582). Yet there is every likelihood that Shakespeare also knew Cinthio's play, which, unlike his romance, was untranslated; the leading ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee

... not die alone, Lest their shrill happy laughter come to me Walking the cold and starless road of Death 255 Uncomforted, leaving my ancient love With the Greek woman. I will rise and go Down into Troy, and ere the stars come forth Talk with the wild Cassandra, for she says A fire dances before her, and a sound 260 Rings ever in her ears of armed men. What this may be I know not, but I know That, wheresoe'er I am by night and day, All earth and air seem ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson

... "Very good, old father Cassandra, go and tell your client that we haven't a penny," thought Solonet, who, in the solitude of his study, had strategically massed his forces, drawn up his propositions, manned the drawbridge of discussion, and prepared the point at which the opposing party, ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac

... really partisans of that heartless creed. When called upon to consider the interests of the future generations, we declared that "sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof," and stigmatise as visionaries and dreamers all who seek to withdraw our attention from the present. A modern Cassandra who confidently predicts the near exhaustion of our coal-fields, or graphically describes a crushing national disaster that must some day overtake us, may attract some public attention; but when we learn that the misfortune is not to take place in our time, we placidly ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace

... Feb. 26. Vittorio Gnecchi's opera "Cassandra" given at the Metropolitan Opera House, Philadelphia, by the Chicago-Philadelphia Opera Company, with Rosa Raisa, J. Claussen, and ...
— Annals of Music in America - A Chronological Record of Significant Musical Events • Henry Charles Lahee

... nor humorous would the partisan Press allow me to be. Certainly I was applauded by some for having held steadfastly to my prophecy, despite temptations which would have made Cassandra succumb. I was flattered by being held up as an exception among the prophets. From Mr. Gladstone to Mr. T. P. O'Connor politicians had prophesied and were hopelessly wide of the mark. Mr. Chamberlain, speaking at Birmingham that week, said, "The gravity of the weighty ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss

... painting materials, the fishing tackle), a promising expedition of unusual charm cut off, so to speak, in the flower of its youth—these were the more immediately obvious of the calamities which we now confronted. I preached upon them, with Cassandra eloquence, while we ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross

... "Then Priam's daughter, Cassandra, who had the gift of prophecy, cried out, 'Oh, blind of eye and heart, that you cannot see in this young shepherd the child whom you sent to sleep the sleep of death ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin

... divine, the startling whirl of incongruous juxtaposition, which of a truth must to many readers seem as amazing as if the Pythia on the tripod should have struck up a drinking-song, or Thersites had caught the prophetic strain of Cassandra. ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle

... was impetuous and terrible, she poured out the sentiment with an enchanting harmony; and it was this particular excellence for which Dryden made her the above-recited compliment, upon her acting Cassandra in his Cleomenes. She was the first person whose merit was distinguished by the indulgence of having an annual benefit play, which was granted to her alone in King James's time, and which did not become common to ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... all because Ajax violated Cassandra. Where is the reason or justice in all this? Nor do we praise the Thracians who to this day, in honour of Orpheus, mark their wives;[844] nor the barbarians on the banks of the Eridanus who, they say, wear mourning for Phaeethon. And I think it would be still more ridiculous if the people living ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch

... which they can neither justify nor analyse. The expression of their anxiety forms the stream in which the plot flows—every thing, even news of joy, takes a colouring from the depth of their gloom. On the arrival of the king, they retire before Cassandra, a more regularly commissioned prophetess; who, speaking first in figure, then in plain terms, only ceases that we may hear the voice of the betrayed monarch himself, informing us of the striking of the fatal blow. Here then the very simplicity of the fable constitutes its especial beauty. ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various

... Cassandra {552} Southwick. The New Wife and the Old. The Virginia Slave Mother. Randolph of Roanoke. Barclay of Ary. The Witch of Wenham. Skipper Ireson's Ride. Marguerite. Maud Muller. Telling the Bees. My Playmate. Barbara Frietchie. Ichabod. ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... nineteenth century, and, in our time, Ferrero, all pointed out the inevitable dangers of the excessive mechanization of human society. The prophecies were unhappily as little heeded as those of Cassandra. ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck

... found, not very many years ago, by men digging deep on the hill where Troy once stood. The women, too, were given to the princes, and Neoptolemus took Andromache to his home in Argos, to draw water from the well and to be the slave of a master, and Agamemnon carried beautiful Cassandra, the daughter of Priam, to his palace in Mycenae, where they were both slain in one night. Only Helen was led with honour to ...
— Tales of Troy: Ulysses the Sacker of Cities • Andrew Lang

... Boon) Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey exhibits the highest-handed method of treating Romance that ever I met. For consider the situation to be resolved. Dane Peignton was engaged to Teresa, but in love with Lady Cassandra Raynor, whose husband, I regret to add, was still alive. Dane and Cassandra had never told their love, and concealment might have continued to prey on their damask cheeks, if Mrs. Vaizey had not (very naturally), wished to give us a big ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, July 1, 1914 • Various

... He swelled out his chest, remarking to Willoughby: "I do not wonder at your scared expression of countenance, my friend. To discover yourself engaged to a girl mad as Cassandra, without a boast of the distinction of her being sun-struck, can be no specially comfortable enlightenment. I am opposed to delays, and I will not have a breach of faith ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... foolish tears of vain regret we dry our eyes, and hunt Cassandra, to listen to the muttering of the thunder that is gathering to avenge us—in Troy. Bride and bridegroom, face to face— Cuthbert! So you looked, when we parted, when you strained me to your heart, and swore that before ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson



Words linked to "Cassandra" :   Greek mythology, prophetess



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