"Euripides" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to you,—who not only suggested, but imposed on me as a task, what has proved the most delightful of May-month amusements—I shall seem honest, indeed, but hardly prudent; for, how good and beautiful ought such a poem to be!—Euripides might fear little; but I, also, have an interest in the performance: and what wonder if I beg you to suffer that it make, in another and far easier sense, its nearest possible approach to those Greek qualities of goodness and beauty, by laying itself gratefully at your feet?—R. B., London, ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... in his famous 'Dissertation on the Phoenissae,' notices such a dispute as having arisen upon the diction of Euripides. The question is old and familiar as to the quality of the passion in Euripides, by comparison with that in Sophocles. But there was a separate dispute far less notorious as to the quality of ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... of two verses from Euripides," I answered; "but, my lord, they will not serve me, as I have changed ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the whole shell of the theatre. Plato affirms it was capable of containing thirty thousand persons. It contained statues of all the great tragic and comic poets, the most conspicuous of which were naturally those of AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, among the former, and those of Aristophanes and Menander among the latter. On the southwest side of the Acropolis is the site of the Odeum, or musical theatre of Herodes Atticus, named by him the theatre of Regilla, in honor of ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... personal, in which specific application is made of all this in the lampooning of poets and others, Jonson's contemporaries. The method of personal attack by actual caricature of a person on the stage is almost as old as the drama. Aristophanes so lampooned Euripides in "The Acharnians" and Socrates in "The Clouds," to mention no other examples; and in English drama this kind of thing is alluded to again and again. What Jonson really did, was to raise the dramatic lampoon to an art, and make out of a casual burlesque and bit of ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... of the theatre, and rested near the top, enjoying the grand spectacle of luxurious architecture around; then descended, and walked along its proscenium; but neither reciting passages of Euripides nor of Terence, as some enthusiasts might indulge themselves in doing, before an imagined audience of tetrarchs, centurions, or legionaries, ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... a Tragedy, which some have imputed to Seneca, and others have denied to be his, but it is thought by most learned men to be an imitation of that play of Euripides, which bears the same name, and tho, in contrivance and economy, they differ in some things, yet in others they agree, and Scaliger scruples not to prefer the Latin to the Greek ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... the ridiculous or absurd; but as laws operate in civil agency not to the excitement of virtue, but the repression of wickedness, so judgment in the operations of intellect can hinder faults, but not produce excellence. Prior is never low, nor very often sublime. It is said by Longinus of Euripides, that he forces himself sometimes into grandeur by violence of effort, as the lion kindles his fury by the lashes of his own tail. Whatever Prior obtains above mediocrity seems the effort of struggle and of toil. He has many vigorous but few happy lines; he has every thing by purchase, and nothing ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... with his tongue and keeps another in his breast. Which high expression was grounded on divine reason; for a lying mouth is a stinking pit, and murders with the contagion it venteth. Beside, nothing is lasting that is feigned; it will have another face than it had, ere long. {41} As Euripides saith, "No lie ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... born in Norfolk; was a prodigy of learning and critical acumen; edited the plays of AEschylus and four of Euripides, but achieved little in certification to posterity of his ability and attainments; was a man of slovenly and intemperate habits, and died of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... remind you of only one thing in that direction; and say even this merely because it has a direct bearing upon some of the practical questions connected with play-writing which I purpose to discuss. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—perhaps we should give the entire credit, as some authorities do, to Aeschylus—taught the future world the art of writing a play. But they did not create the laws of dramatic construction. Those laws exist in the passions and sympathies of the human race. They existed thousands ...
— The Autobiography of a Play - Papers on Play-Making, II • Bronson Howard
... through the mother were changed from the female to the male line, the father having in the meantime become the only recognized parent. In the Eumenides of Aeschylus, the plea of Orestes in extenuation of his crime is that he is not of kin to his mother. Euripides, also, puts into the mouth of Apollo the same physiological notion, that she who bears the child is only its nurse. The Hindoo Code of Menu, which, however, since its earliest conception, has undergone numberless mutilations to suit the purposes of the priests, declares that "the mother ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... the lower school, and numbered upwards of forty boys. Young gentlemen of all ages from nine to fifteen were to be found there, who expended such part of their energies as was devoted to Latin and Greek upon a book of Livy, the "Bucolics" of Virgil, and the "Hecuba" of Euripides, which were ground out in small daily portions. The driving of this unlucky lower-fourth must have been grievous work to the unfortunate master, for it was the most unhappily constituted of any in the school. Here stuck the great stupid boys, who, for the life of them, could ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... Riders to the Sea there are more poignance, beauty of form and richness of language than in any piece of dramatic writing since Elizabethan times. Yeats, when he first heard Synge's early one-act play, The Shadow of the Glen, is said to have exclaimed "Euripides." A half year later when Synge read him Riders to the Sea, Yeats again confined his enthusiasm to a single word:—"AEschylus!" Years have shown that Yeats's appreciation was not as ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... widely known than Kalidasa; and for this the reason is deeper-seated. The austerity of Bhavabhuti's style, his lack of humor, his insistent grandeur, are qualities which prevent his being a truly popular poet. With reference to Kalidasa, he holds a position such as Aeschylus holds with reference to Euripides. He will always seem to minds that sympathize with his grandeur[3] the greatest of Indian poets; while by other equally discerning minds of another order he will be admired, but not ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... of the Athenian republic—the first keeper of a circulating library. Every tyro is aware that this Sams or Ebers of antiquity lent out to Ptolemy of Egypt, for a first-rate subscription of fifteen talents, the works of Euripides, Eschylus, and Sophocles; thereby affording a precedent for the abominable practice, fatal to bookmakers and booksellers, which has converted the waters of Castalia into their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... deficient in every tragic element; it has intuition neither for tragic event nor for tragic character; it affords not a single tragic page in its poems and novels; it is incapable, after the most laborious and conscientious study of Euripides and Seneca, utterly and miserably incapable of producing a single real tragedy, anything which is not a sugary pastoral or a pompous rhetorical exercise. The epic poets of the Italian Renaissance, Pulci, Boiardo, Berni, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... Squire, for whom you once entertained so much respect, seems to your crazy, classic fancy a very humdrum sort of personage. Frank, although as noble a fellow as ever sat a horse, is yet—you cannot help thinking—very ignorant of Euripides; even the English master at Dr. Bidlow's school, you feel sure, would balk at a dozen problems you ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... of Aeschylus and Sophocles the numbering of lines agrees with that in the translations of Plumptre and in the original. In the plays from Euripides the numbering is that of the lines in the cheap ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... from obscure internal injuries as the body does after a great shock. She understood what bitter tragedies threaten the business man no less than the monarch, the warrior, the poet, and the lover, though there has not been many an AEschylos or Euripides or Dante to make poetry of the Prometheus chained to the rocks of trade with the vulture pay-roll gnawing at his profits; the OEdipos in the factory who sees everything gone horribly awry; or the slow pilgrim through the business hell ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... dramatic as was consistent with its original form. His portraits of men have a sort of similarity; but it is the similarity not of a painting, but of a bas-relief. It suggests a resemblance; but it does not produce an illusion. Euripides attempted to carry the reform further. But it was a task far beyond his powers, perhaps beyond any powers. Instead of correcting what was bad, he destroyed what was excellent. He substituted crutches for stilts, bad sermons for ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... is Jim of the Pericles type— He is modern right up from the toe to the pipe; And being no reader or roamer, He hasn't Euripides much in the head; And let it be carefully, tenderly said, He ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... Antony, Lepidus, the Manicheans, Bayle and Galileo, Anitus, Socrates, Demosthenes, Eschinus, Marius, Busiris, Diogenes, Caesar, Cromwell, Constantine, the Labarum, Domitius, Machiavel, Thraseas, Cicero, Cato, Aristophanes, Riscius, Sophocles, Euripides, Tacitus, Sydney, Wisnou, Possidonius, Julian, Argus, Pompey, the Teutates, Gainas, Areadius, Sinon, Asmodeus, Salamanders, Anicetus, Atreus, Thyestus, Cesonius, Barca and Oreb, Omar and the Koran, Ptolomy ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... on those silent plains I had my Horace and my Euripides in the field. The unattainable eternal cities lent their charm and glory to the valley whose childhood horizon I had not crossed. But now no country boy thinks of the ancient or the mediaeval. It is the nearer city ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... of poesy in others, which he could not be if he were not himself a poet. And at the touch of him every one becomes a poet, even though he had no music in him before (A fragment of the Sthenoaoea of Euripides.); this also is a proof that Love is a good poet and accomplished in all the fine arts; for no one can give to another that which he has not himself, or teach that of which he has no knowledge. Who will deny that the creation of the animals is his doing? Are ...
— Symposium • Plato
... form rather than in expression. He taught the true method of grouping, by making each figure the perfect representation of the class to which it belonged. His works were deficient in those qualities which elevate the feelings and the character. He was the Euripides rather than the Homer of his art. He exactly imitated natural objects, which are incapable of ideal representation. His works were not so numerous as they were perfect in their way, in some of which, as in the Infant Hercules strangling the Serpent, he displayed great dramatic ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... than his deal with these things they will not rob his heroes of a single power to uplift or inspire. In Greece, after Eschylus and his stupendous deities, came Sophocles, who restrained them with a calm wisdom, and Euripides, who made them human, but still the mysterious Orphic deities remain and stir us when reading the earlier page. Mr. O'Grady would not have the Red Branch cycle cast in dramatic form or given to the people. They are too great to be staged; and he quotes, mistaking the gigantic for the heroic, a ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... to her home in Athens on the night when Balaustion learns that her adored Euripides is dead. She and her husband, Euthukles, are "sitting silent in the house, yet cheerless hardly," musing on the tidings, when suddenly there come torch-light and knocking at the door, and cries and laughter: "Open, open, Bacchos[94:1] bids!"—and, ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... of the same kind, which may be cited without in any way wishing to advance what Professor Courthope[39] very justly calls "the mean charge of plagiarism," is Tennyson's line, "His honour rooted in dishonour stood." Euripides[40] expressed the same idea in the ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... public policy of Athens. During the rest of his career "there was," says the historian Thucydides, "in name a democracy, but in reality a government in the hands of the first man." And the Athens of his day was the home of AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Anaxagoras, Zeno, Protagoras, Socrates, as well as Myron and Phidias; while there flourished at the same time, but elsewhere in Greece, Herodotus, Hippocrates, Pindar, Empedocles, and Democritus. The centre of this splendid group ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... l. 201, Artemis.]—Her name was terrible, because of its suggestion. She demanded the sacrifice of Agamemnon's daughter, Iphigenia. (See Euripides' two plays, Iphigenia in Tauris and Iphigenia in Aulis.) In other poets Agamemnon has generally committed some definite sin against Artemis, but in Aeschylus the death of Iphigenia seems to be merely one of the results of his acceptance ...
— Agamemnon • Aeschylus
... dance-song, which had descended from earlier times still remained the principal feature of the representation. It was the drama that crystallized out of the music and dance, not the music that was called in to support or adorn the drama. Not until the time of Euripides did the chorus become a secondary element of the representation, and from this time on the drama begins to decline, becoming more and ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... understanding this, says, "My life stands in the level of your dreams, which I'll lay down." To her she says, "can life be no commodity" when love, "the crown and comfort of her life," is gone. So Alkestis (see any translation of Euripides, in Bohn edition, literal prose translation, vol. i. p. 223) says she "was not willing to live bereft" of Admetos, therefore she did not spare herself to die for him, "though possessing the gifts of bloomy youth wherein" she "delighted." This point of correspondence may have ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... thou didst our Lyly{4} outshine, Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line. And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek, From thence to honor thee I would not seek For names, but call forth thund'ring schylus,{5} Euripides, and Sophocles to us, Pacuvius, Accius,{6} him of Cordova dead, To life again, to hear thy buskin tread, And shake a stage; or when thy socks{7} were on, Leave thee alone for a comparison Of all that insolent ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... just taken, or when in the middle of the night he is worn out by revising endless exercises, underlining the mistakes in red and allotting marks, or weighed down by the wise men of old—Thucydides, Sophocles, Euripides, the ideas of Plato, wiles of Pindar, fearfully corrupt strophe of chorus, wondrous guesses of Teutons and fancies of philologists, when men swoon in the inexplicable wanderings of the endless examination of Homer, when the brain reels among such toil—then he hails the pipe, help of ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... is told of Brutus,[340] that when he fell on his sword, after the battle of Philippi,[341] he quoted a line of Euripides,[342]—"O virtue! I have followed thee through life, and I find thee at last but a shade." I doubt not the hero is slandered by this report. The heroic soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness. It does not ask to dine nicely, and to sleep ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... improper frame of mind for a person visiting the land of AEschylus and Euripides; add to which, we have been abominably overcharged at the inn: and what are the blue hills of Attica, the silver calm basin of Piraeus, the heathery heights of Pentelicus, and yonder rocks crowned by the Doric columns of the ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the shelf of dramatists, is between Victor Hugo and Jerome K. Jerome. Sudermann follows Harriet Beecher Stowe. Maeterlinck shoulders Percy Mackaye. Shakespeare is between Sardou and Shaw. Euripides and Clyde Fitch! Upton Sinclair and Sophocles! Aeschylus and F. Anstey! D'Annunzio and Richard Harding Davis! ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... not wrought mischief enough in the past, degrading so much noble genius, corrupting the purity of Mozart, reducing Handel to a writer of high-class singing-exercises, and defrauding the world of the only inspiration worthy of Sophocles and Euripides, the poetry of the great poet Gluck? Is it not enough to have dishonored a whole century in idolatry of that wicked and contemptible wretch the singer, without persecuting an obscure young composer of our days, whose only wealth is his love of nobility in art, and perhaps ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... hen?" (women's opinions) says the Hindi proverb; also "A virgin with grey hairs!" (i.e. a monster) and, "Wherever wendeth a fairy face a devil wendeth with her." The same superficial view of holding woman to be lesser (and very inferior) man is taken generally by the classics; and Euripides distinguished himself by misogyny, although he drew the beautiful character of Alcestis. Simonides, more merciful than Ecclesiastes, after naming his swine-women, dog-women, cat-women, etc., ends ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... at all abashed, said that he meant not Sophocles, but Euripides. Whereupon Porson drew from another pocket a copy of Euripides and challenged the upstart to find the quotation in question. Full of confusion, the fellow thrust his head out of the window of the coach and cried to ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... then the whole story is told. It seems to me, on the contrary, that the whole story is not thus told. I feel the omnipresence of mystery in such wise as to make it far easier for me to adopt the view of Euripides, that what we call death may be but the dawning of true knowledge and of true life. The greatest philosopher of modern times, the master and teacher of all who shall study the process of evolution for many a day to come, holds that the conscious soul is ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... of father and daughter been uttered with a holier tenderness than by Euripides, as in this most lovely passage, or in the "Supplicants," after the voluntary death of Evadne. ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... classical scholarship which is, or was, the pride of our great public schools, and he took great pleasure in translations from the classics. He translated into verse the 'Agamemnon' of AEschylus, and the 'Bacchanals' of Euripides, and also a great number of small and much less known poems. He held the professorship of poetry at Oxford from 1821 to 1831, and as his lectures, according to the custom which then prevailed, were delivered in Latin, he had the happy thought of diversifying them by English metrical translations ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... founded inside the imperfect thing we call society. And these two, nature and society, are continually getting into each other's way, wrecking each other's plans, frustrating each other's schemes. The woman almost never is able to adjust her life so as fully to satisfy both. She is between two fires. Euripides understood this when he put into Medea's mouth a cry as modern as any that ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... to gratify Everybody. He saw everything; read all the notable books; kept himself acquainted with the leading contents of the journals and magazines; conducted a large correspondence; read new French, German, and Italian books of mark; read and translated Euripides and AEschylus; knew all the gossip of the literary clubs, salons, and the studios; was a frequenter of afternoon-tea parties; and then, over and above it, he was Browning: the most profoundly subtle mind that has exercised itself ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... perdere prius dementat.—Malone, in a note in Boswell's Johnson (p. 718., Croker's last edition), says, that a gentleman of Cambridge found this apophthegm in an edition of Euripides (not named) as a translation ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 24. Saturday, April 13. 1850 • Various
... so obscure in sense, and in spirit so poor. But the Greeks who have escaped the contagion, are those whom we follow; and they alone are worthy of our imitation. In familiar discourse, they still speak the tongue of Aristophanes and Euripides, of the historians and philosophers of Athens; and the style of their writings is still more elaborate and correct. The persons who, by their birth and offices, are attached to the Byzantine court, are those who maintain, with the least ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... progress. To be sure, clear intimations, scattered here and there in Greek literature, indicate faith that man in the past had improved his lot. Aeschylus saw men lifted from their hazardous lives in sunless caves by the intervention of Prometheus and his sacrificial teaching of the arts of peace; Euripides contrasted the primitive barbarism in which man began with the civilized estate which in Greece he had achieved—but this perceived advance never was erected into a progressive idea of human life as a whole. Rather, the original barbarism, from which the ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... Pelopidas's liberality and kindness, Epameinondas alone could not be induced to share his wealth; he thereupon shared the other's poverty, priding himself on simplicity of dress and plainness of food, endurance of fatigue, and thoroughness in the performance of military service; like Kapaneus, in Euripides, who "had plenty of wealth, but was far from proud on account of his wealth," for he felt ashamed to be seen using more bodily luxuries than the poorest Theban citizen. Epameinondas, whose poverty was hereditary, ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... went out to the colonies. Whoever aspired to become a leader in politics, in art, in literature, or in philosophy, made his way to the capital, and so, with almost bewildering suddenness, there blossomed the civilization of the age of Pericles; the civilization which produced aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus, and Thucydides; the civilization which made possible ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... actors used to declaim, under a mask, the verses of Euripides and Menander. Now they no longer recite dramas, they act in dumb show; and of the divine spectacles with which Bacchus was honoured in Athens, we have kept nothing but what a barbarian—a Scythian even—could understand—attitude and gesture. The tragic mask, the mouth of which was provided ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... have heard how Medea, in Euripides, compassionates her sex on their hard lot—on the intolerable pangs they endure in travail? And by the way—Medea's words remind me did you ever have a child, when you were a woman, or ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... chorus in the play of Euripides, which was undergoing mutilation at his fingers' ends, so he went on translating till he heard, "That will do. Maxwell!" and then he relapsed into his private meditations. After all, he had not struck the blow, Marriner's trying to drag him into a share of the responsibility was all nonsense. They ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... and he was obliged to use those owned by others, and which were much inferior to copies he could have purchased had he possessed money. He was early struck with the beauty of the Greek writers—and more especially the Greek tragedians. He wandered in the woods with Sophocles and Euripides in his hands, and many years after could recite their chief plays from memory. He got hold of the Greek romance of Theogines and Chariclea, but the priests would not tolerate such reading and committed the volume ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett |
