"Iago" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... blessed Saint Iago, He hath vowed immortal hatred To these circumcised intruders Who pollute the soil ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... if such there be, such horrors too must lie in the undiscovered caves of man's nature, of which all this outer world is but a typical analysis. By equally slow gradations may the inner eye descend from the truth of a Cordelia to the falsehood of an Iago. As these golden sands slope from the sunlight into the wallowing abyss of darkness, even so from the love of the child to his holy mother slopes the inclined plane of humanity to the hell of the sensualist. "But with one difference in the moral world," I said aloud, as I paced up and down ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... said Giddings, with an air of candor, "but look at it from a practical standpoint. If Othello hadn't been such a fool, Iago would have made his point all right. He had a right to be sore at Othello for promoting Cassio over his head, and his scheme was a good one, if Othello hadn't gone crazy. Iago is dominated by reason and the principle ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... a distant resemblance to "honest Iago" in Othello, though Molire has only faintly shadowed forth what Shakespeare has worked out in ...
— Don Garcia of Navarre • Moliere
... Spaniards certainly carried out their usual tactics of constantly taking aim at the horses of the French riders, for they have a proverb which says: "When the horse is dead the man-at-arms is lost." Their war-cry was: "Spain! Spain! St. Iago!" to which the other side replied by another furious onslaught to the shouts of "France! France!" And wherever the Good Knight passed, "Bayard! Bayard!" was the clarion note which cheered on his company, ever in the forefront of battle. ...
— Bayard: The Good Knight Without Fear And Without Reproach • Christopher Hare
... touching to witness these efforts, if little availing, Painfully made, to perform the old ritual service of manners? Shall not devotion atone for the absence of knowledge? and fervour Palliate, cover, the fault of a superstitious observance? Dear, dear, what do I say? but, alas! just now, like Iago, I can be nothing at all, if it is not critical wholly; So in fantastic height, in coxcomb exaltation, Here in the garden I walk, can freely concede to the Maker That the works of His hand are all very good: His creatures, ...
— Amours de Voyage • Arthur Hugh Clough
... a great deal, but spent most of his leisure in experiment. Mr. Adams remarks: "Edison and I were very fond of tragedy. Forrest and John McCullough were playing at the National Theatre, and when our capital was sufficient we would go to see those eminent tragedians alternate in Othello and Iago. Edison always enjoyed Othello greatly. Aside from an occasional visit to the Loewen Garden 'over the Rhine,' with a glass of beer and a few pretzels, consumed while listening to the excellent music of a German band, the theatre was the sum and substance ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... and out of place. In the scenes with Iago he equaled Salvini, yet did not in any one point surpass him. Nor did he in any way imitate him. The fury of the two Othellos is widely different. Salvini is the fiercer, for Rossi's rage has a background of intensest suffering. One is an enraged tiger, the other a wounded lion. Both are maddened—the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... the comic, there is much artistic representation of evil which can be classed neither as pathetic nor as tragic. Neither moral admiration nor idealization are aroused by the characters portrayed. They may be great criminals like Lady Macbeth or Iago, or the undistinguished and disorderly people of modern realistic literature, yet in either case we find them good to know. And we do so, not merely because we enjoy, as disinterested onlookers, the spectacle ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... Hamlet, the fool in Lear, even the humours in Love's Labour Lost and The Merchant of Venice have offended. I avow myself an impenitent Shakesperian in this respect also. The constant or almost constant presence of that humour which ranges from the sarcastic quintessence of Iago, and the genial quintessence of Falstaff, through the fantasies of Feste and Edgar, down to the sheer nonsense which not unfrequently occurs, seems to me not only delightful in itself, but, as I have hinted already, one of the chief ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... 111: "Now, John," cried Constable, one evening after he had told one of his best stories, "now, John, is that true?" His object evidently was, in Iago's phrase, to let down the pegs; but Rigdum answered gayly, "True, indeed! Not one word of it!—any blockhead may stick to truth, my hearty—but 't is a ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... these comedies. Failure seems everywhere. In "Julius Caesar" the virtue of Brutus is foiled by its ignorance of and isolation from mankind; in Hamlet even penetrating intellect proves helpless for want of the capacity of action; the poison of Iago taints the love of Desdemona and the grandeur of Othello; Lear's mighty passion battles helplessly against the wind and the rain; a woman's weakness of frame dashes the cup of her triumph from the hand of Lady Macbeth; lust and self-indulgence blast the heroism ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... fellow, this one), and Domizia the lady—loosen all these on dear foolish (ravishing must his folly be) golden-hearted Luria, all these with their worldly wisdom and Tuscan shrewd ways." Florence, in short, plays collectively somewhat the part of Iago to this second Othello, but of an Iago (need it be said) immeasurably less deeply rooted in malignity than Shakespeare's. It was a source of weakness as well as of strength in Browning as a dramatist ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... lesson to me, so you may take warning by my experience, and, if ever she invites you to ride with her, as she did me, beware! beware! her flashing eyes, her floating hair!—do not accept, or, before accepting, take Iago's advice, and put money in your purse: PUT MONEY IN YOUR PURSE! I'll ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... Chapman's Bussy d'Ambois, the villains are simply a dramatist's infernal machines. Shakespeare's own plays contain numerous examples of inadequacy of motive—the casting-off of Cordelia by her father, for instance, and in part the revenge of Iago. But, if we accept the first act of King Lear as an incident in a fairy-tale, the motive of the Passion of Lear in the other four acts is not only adequate out overwhelming. Othello breaks free from mechanism of Plot in a similar ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... Tryans and Mr Gilfils—the question might call for full discussion, and a contrast might be unfavourably drawn between the author and him whose emphatic praise it is that he "holds the mirror up to nature." But the great artist for all time brings before us not only an Iago and an Edmund, an Angelo and an Iachimo, a Regan and a Goneril, but a Miranda and an Imogen, an Isabella and a Viola, a Cordelia and a Desdemona, with every conceivable intermediate shade of human character and life; ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... hands!" From rank to rank—from line to line—sped the santon; and, as the mystic banner gleamed before the soldiery, each closed his eyes and muttered an "amen" to his adjurations. And now, to the cry of "Spain and St. Iago," came trampling down the relentless charge of the Christian war. At the same instant, from the fortress lately taken by Ponce de Leon, the artillery opened upon the Moors, and did deadly havoc. The Moslems ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Trinculo in The Tempest, would give a piece of silver to see a strange fish, though no one will give a doit to relieve a lame beggar. The English are quarrelsome, Master Slender testifies, at the game of bear-baiting. They are great drinkers, says Iago, 'most potent in potting; your Dane, your German, and your swag-bellied Hollander are nothing to your English'. They are epicures, says Macbeth. They will eat like wolves and fight like devils, says the Constable of France. An English nobleman, according ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... Never, Iago. Like to the Pontic sea, Whose icy current and compulsive course Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on To the Propontic and the Hellespont: Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace, Shall ne'er look back, ne'er ebb to ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... describes him: through the brilliant chapters in his opening volume, as more fully later on through Mr. Lane Poole's admirable biography, the Great Eltchi is known to English readers. He moves across the stage with a majesty sometimes bordering on what Iago calls bombast circumstance; drums and trumpets herald his every entrance; now pacing the shady gardens of the Bosphorus, now foiling, "in his grand quiet way," the Czar's ferocious Christianity, or torturing his baffled ambassador by scornful concession of ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... drew crowded audiences to the theatres, and some of whose gay and spirited verses still live in the memory of hundreds of thousands. From Henry Carey descended that Edmund Kean, who, in our time, transformed himself so marvellously into Shylock, Iago ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Miss Kelly's! Oh my stars! To think of him, all that time—Macbeth in disguise; Richard the Third grown straight; Hamlet as he appeared on his seavoyage to England. What an artful villain he must be, never to have made any sign of the melodrama that was in him! What a wicked-minded and remorseless Iago to have seen you doing Kitely night after night! raging to murder you and seize the part! Oh fancy Miss Kelly 'getting him up' in Macbeth. Good Heaven! what a mass of absurdity must be shut up sometimes within the walls of that small theatre ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... per se, and stands alone), it is not itself—it has no self—it is everything and nothing—it has no character—it enjoys light and shade—it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated—it has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things, any more than from its taste for the bright one, because they both end in speculation. A poet is the most unpoetical ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... Yet in the portraiture of gigantic crime, poets have rightly found their sphere and fulfilled their destiny of teachers. Those terrible truths which appall us in the guilt of Macbeth or the villany of Iago, have their moral uses not less than the popular infirmities of Tom Jones, or the every-day hypocrisy of Blifil. Incredible as it may seem, the crimes herein related took place within the last seventeen years. There has been no exaggeration as to their extent, no great departure from their ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the Northwest side of the sayd Ile in a faire Baie of eight fadomes water and faire sand, but here we staied not, but the fourth day weighed and sailed to another Iland called S. Iago, which lieth off the said Iland of Maiyo East and by South, and about fiue leagues one from the other. Being come within the Westermost point, we saw a faire road, and a small towne by the water side, and also ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt
... Like Iago, he saw the indistinct outline of a glorious and a most malicious plot; it lay crude in his head and heart at present; thus much he saw clearly, that, if he could time Mrs. Vane's arrival so that she should pounce upon the Woffington at her husband's ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... that there is more than a little exaggeration in more than one point of the story. The Abbe Birotteau is surely a little too much of a fool; the Abbe Troubert an Iago a little too much wanting in verisimilitude; and the central incident of the clause about the furniture too manifestly improbable. Taking the first and the last points together, is it likely that any one not quite an idiot should, in the first place, remain so entirely ignorant of the ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... playhouse, often force men upon parts without consulting their judgment, and sometimes without any regard to their talents. Thus the man, as well as the player, may condemn what he himself acts; nay, it is common to see vice sit as awkwardly on some men, as the character of Iago would on the honest face of Mr ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... Isabella of Castile, who bear on their armor the cross of St. Iago, never enter the temples of Mohammed, except to level them to the earth ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... of this disinterested, this passive evil, because nothing but the conscious is literary. Shakespeare, in his Othello, a drama which has always appeared false and absurd to me, emphasizes the disinterested malice of Iago, imparting to him a character and mode of action which are beyond those of normal men; but then, in order to accredit him to the spectators, he adds also a motive, and represents him as ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... and you will be happy," or "Virtue is its own reward"—that, like Topsy, "never was born, only jist growed." From the earliest times it has been the popular tendency to call this or that cardinal virtue, or bright and shining excellence, a jewel, by way of emphasis. For example, Iago says,— ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... skins, owls, fly-flappers, red ochre, and numerous other minor valuables. These we brought in triumph to the camp. It always distressed me to have to fire at these savages, and it was only when our lives were in most imminent danger that we did so, for, as Iago says, though in the trade of war I have slain men, yet do I hold it very stuff o' the conscience to do no contrived murder. I lack iniquity, sometimes, to do me service. We then went on with our work, though expecting ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles |
