"Mythical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... called in Cora Quemalusi, after the principal one of the five mythical men who in ancient times lived in the Sierra del Nayarit. Reports say an idol now hidden was once found here. A few miles east of Santa Teresa is a deep volcanic lake, the only remnant of the large flood, the Coras say. It is called "Mother," or "Brother," the last ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... and Mantegna's in the Eremitani, although, as Mr. Sumner said, the gray old city is well worth a visit for many other reasons. The antiquity of its origin, which its citizens are proud to refer to Antenor, the mythical King of Troy, accounts for the thoroughly venerable appearance of some quarters. It is difficult, however, to believe that it was ever the wealthiest city in upper Italy, as it is reported to have been under the reign of Augustus. During the Middle Ages it was one of the most famous of European ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... actors, and a chorus itself interwoven into the scene. Its subjects were from the beginning, and always continued to be, persons either divine or heroic above the level of historical life, and borrowed from what was called the mythical past. 'The Persae' of Aeschylus, indeed, forms a splendid exception; but the two analogous dramas of his contemporary, Phrynichus, 'The Phoenissae,' and 'The Capture of Miletus,' were not successful enough ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... Knickerbocker is one evidence of the vitality of Irving's happy imaginings. In 1809 he had invented a mythical Dutch historian of New York named Diedrich Knickerbocker and fathered upon him a witty parody of Dr. Mitchill's grave "Picture of New York." To read Irving's chapters today is to witness one of the rarest and most agreeable of phenomena, namely, the actual beginning of a ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... works seem founded on astronomy vaporized under the influence of the idea that there are millions of universes all equally transitory and unsubstantial. There is no reason, so far as I see, to regard Gotama as a mythical solar hero, but the celestial Buddhas[78] clearly have many solar attributes. This is natural. Solar deities are so abundant in Vedic mythology that it is hardly possible to be a benevolent god without having something of the character ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... become rather incredulous about our approaching relief. It has become such a regular thing, this siege life, and all other kinds of life are somehow so far away and so impossible after what we have gone through, that we look upon the outer world as something mythical.... Some men have their minds a little unhinged; two are absolutely mad. One, a poor devil of a Norwegian missionary, who has been living in misery for years in a vain effort to make converts, became so dangerous long ago that he had to be locked up, and even bound. But one night he managed to ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... the uniquely decorated walls, upon which hung, here, the shrieking prospectus of a mythical gold-mine; there a small but venomous political placard, and on all sides examples of the uncouth or unusual in paid print; exploitations of grotesque quackeries; appeals, business-like, absurd, or even passionate, in the form of "Wants;" threats thinly disguised as "Personals;"' dim suggestions ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... outset of his journey in taking his sister to such a place, from the scene he had on his previous visit seen enacted in it. But the domiciliary selection having a contingency attached to it similar to that which stultified the choice of that immortal, though, we fear, mythical individual, yclept Hobson, he had no alternative but to run the risk of annoyance in this favourite hostel. William, therefore, was happy at the thought that there would be no fear of molestation; and, ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... lemon tree on which grew real lemons. Another store had a large Santa Claus in its window every Christmas—not that Phoebe Metz had ever been taught to believe in that patron saint of the children—oh, no! Maria Metz would have considered it foolish, even sinful, to lie to a child about any mythical Santa Claus coming down the chimney Christmas Eve! Nevertheless, the smiling, rotund face of the red-habited Santa in the store window seemed so real and so emanative of cheer that Phoebe delighted in him each ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... "that I am not myself acquainted with one of these mythical personages that I might return you the value of your marvelous information. If I dared think, however, that it would be in any way acceptable, I could offer you the diversion of a restaurant dinner-party for that night. ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... originated during the Revolution by Gov. Tryon to capture or murder Washington. They communicate their knowledge to Gen. Putnam and are commissioned by him to play the role of detectives in the matter. They do so, and meet with many adventures and hairbreadth escapes. The boys are, of course, mythical, but they serve to enable the author to put into very attractive shape much valuable knowledge concerning one ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... with two, the Cock and The Golden Eagle, in the latter portion of the seventeenth century. At the former Evelyn dined on one occasion with the councillors of the Board of Trade; at the latter, on January 30th, 1735, occurred the riot connected with the mythical Calf's Head Club. How the riot arose is something of a mystery. It seems, however, that a mob was gathered outside the tavern by the spreading of the report that some young nobles were dining within on a calf's head in ridicule of the execution ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... What else could have brought her creeping like a somnambulist down the stairway to demonstrate her tormentor's demoniacal sovereignty? And if he could call her to him in such wise, then all the weird tales of the romancers, all the half-mythical doings of Mesmer and Charcot, were true, and the feet of Bulwer Lytton's remorseless lover solidly set upon the rock ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... are the blocks of such gigantic size. The Greeks of the historical period Viewed these imposing structures with as much astonishment as do we, and attributed them (of at least those in Argohs) to the Cyclopes, a mythical folk, conceived in this connection as masons of superhuman strength. Hence the adjective Cyclopian or Cyclopean, whose meaning varies unfortunately in modern usage, but which is best restricted to walls of the Tirynthian type; that is to say, walls built of large blocks not ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... another stumbling-block. The geological difficulties of the Mosaic cosmogony were also at that time exciting attention. It was a novelty to me, that Arnold treated these questions as matters of indifference to religion; and did not hesitate to say, that the account of Noah's deluge was evidently mythical, and the history of Joseph "a beautiful poem." I was staggered at this. If all were not descended from Adam, what became of St. Paul's parallel between the first and second Adam, and the doctrine of Headship and Atonement founded on it? If the ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... Swinburne, Clough, Rossetti, and James Rhoades supply the models, and I have been credibly informed that the law is as good as the versification. Mr. Swinburne was in those days the favourite butt of young parodists, and the gem of the book is the dedication to "J.S." or "John Stiles," a mythical person, nearly related to John Doe and Richard Roe, with whom all budding jurists had in old days to make acquaintance. The disappearance of the venerated initials from ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... the peasants worshipped it much as their pagan ancestors would have done. It was but the culmination of a process long at work—a process in which the historical element was strangely mingled with the mythical.[1] Since the Balkan Wars, King Constantine had been identified in the peasant mind with the last Byzantine Basileus—his namesake, Constantine Palaeologus, slain by the Turks in 1453; who, according to a widely believed legend, lay in an enchanted ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... tradition, in itself probable, is that he wrote poetry when a very young man). Thirty-two epigrams in the Anthology are ascribed, some doubtfully, to one Plato or another; a few of obviously late date to a somewhat mythical PLATO JUNIOR ({o Neoteros}), and one to PLATO THE COMEDIAN (fl. 428-389), the contemporary and rival of Aristophanes. In a note to i. 5 in this selection something is said as to the authenticity of the ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... value of cocoa as food for ordinary mortals as well as for mythical beings cannot be better summed up than in the words of Professor Lankester, Superintendent of the Food Collections ...
— The Food of the Gods - A Popular Account of Cocoa • Brandon Head
... and very black; but he had his pride. He would not be seen smoking a huqa for anything; and he looked down on natives as only a man with seven- eighths native blood in his veins can. The Vezzis Family had their pride too. They traced their descent from a mythical plate-layer who had worked on the Sone Bridge when railways were new in India, and they valued their English origin. Michele was a Telegraph Signaller on Rs. 35 a month. The fact that he was in Government employ made Mrs. Vezzis lenient to the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... poet who continued to appear and disappear alternately for above 400 years, and who visited all the mythical nations of the earth. When not in the human form, he took the form ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... never forgotten by Joe. Each day he had risen early and gone forth and worked till late at night, making a canvass in good earnest. House after house he penetrated, knocking at doors, inquiring for a mythical Mrs. (or Mr.) Parsons (this to hush the almost universal fear that he had come to collect the rent or the instalment on the furniture or clothes of the family). In this way he started conversation. He found first that the immediate neighborhood ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... drop of water, a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other," but when I heard Fleming Stone's reply to my half-laughing challenge, I felt that he had outdone the mythical logician. With a mild twinkle in his eye, but with a perfectly ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... thought it improbable. The verses were very silly; and, recalling the big, blundering boy who had written them, Billy began to wonder—somewhat forlornly—whither he, too, had vanished. He and the girl he had gone mad for both seemed rather mythical—legendary as King Pepin. ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... gold," and "rich in silver;" two mythical islands, often mentioned in documents of that time; thus named, according to Gemelli Careri, because some earth taken from them, accidentally heated on a ship, was found to contain grains of precious metal. There is ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XIV., 1606-1609 • Various
... Pope. His opinions upon the subject were in part the outcome of his friendship with Lord Acton, a historian to whom learning and judgment had not been granted in equal proportions, and who, after years of incredible and indeed well-nigh mythical research, had come to the conclusion that the Pope could err. In this Mr. Gladstone entirely concurred, though he did not share the rest of his friend's theological opinions; for Lord Acton, while straining at the gnat of Infallibility, had swallowed the ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... realizing as he did so that it was the first time he had called her by her name, or sought after her in any way. He had always said "you" to her, or "child," or spoken of her in company as "Mrs. Spafford," a strange and far-off mythical person whose very intangibility had separated ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... three-quarters of a mile from Stourport, is Arley Kings, or Lower Arley; and about a mile lower down the river is Redstone Cliff, in which is the famous hermitage of Layamon, a monkish historian of the 13th century, who is said to have composed a "Chronicle of Britain," embracing that mythical period extending from ...
— Handbook to the Severn Valley Railway - Illustrative and Descriptive of Places along the Line from - Worcester to Shrewsbury • J. Randall
... Zip Foster! Never that!" cried Bud, calling upon a sort of mythical patron saint whose identity he jealously concealed from his cousins. "When we start herding sheep, Professor, the world ...
— The Boy Ranchers at Spur Creek - or Fighting the Sheep Herders • Willard F. Baker
... made by a man for men; sometimes, again, I think there is an abstract reason for it, and there is something more substantive about a woman than ever there can be about a man. I can conceive a great mythical woman, living alone among inaccessible mountain-tops or in some lost island in the pagan seas, and ask no more. Whereas if I hear of a Hercules, I ask after Iole or Dejanira. I cannot think him a man without women. But I can think of these three deep-breasted women, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... slightly touched with the Spanish civilisation, but with something of a tradition of the arts of old Peru and of its lost philosophy. Generation followed generation. They forgot many things; they devised many things. Their tradition of the greater world they came from became mythical in colour and uncertain. In all things save sight they were strong and able, and presently the chance of birth and heredity sent one who had an original mind and who could talk and persuade among them, and then afterwards another. ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... but, although Palacios tried, "in all possible ways," to get from the older and more intelligent natives some account of the origin and history of the ruined city, they could tell him nothing about it. To them the ruins were entirely mythical and mysterious. With the facts so accessible, and the antiquity of the ruins so manifest, it is very singular that Mr. Stephens fell into the mistake of confounding this ruined city, situated in an old forest that was almost impenetrable, with ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... A mythical island of vast extent mentioned by Plato and other ancient writers and placed by them in the ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... young men appeared during the day wearing a wooden helmet. It was a helmet obviously patterned after his own, although it had no glass or plastic, and the openings in front of the eyes were left blank. The mythical Earth-hero, Prometheus, had brought fire down from the skies. He had brought the Helmet. He was ...
— Divinity • William Morrison
... misrepresentation of the truth. It is a plastic, naive, and, at the same time, often most profound apprehension of truth, within the area of religious feeling and poetic insight. It results in narrative, legendary, mythical in nature, illustrative often of spiritual truth in a manner more perfect than any hard, prosaic statement could achieve.' Before Strauss men had appreciated that particular episodes, like the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection, ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... with respect; he not obscurely leaves him the task of filling up his omissions. Both writers, servants of the brilliant Bishop Absalon, and probably set by him upon their task, proceed, like Geoffrey of Monmouth, by gathering and editing mythical matter. This they more or less embroider, and arrive in due course insensibly at actual history. Both, again, thread their stories upon a genealogy of kings in part legendary. Both write at the spur of patriotism, both to let Denmark linger in the race for light and learning, and desirous ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... antiquity, Cyrus, had not a history more obscured with fable than the great hero of the Tartars, Tamerlane; the tale of George Castriot, surnamed Scanderbeg, for his acts of valour and feats of strength, is as mythical as the tale of Ninus: Francis Sforza, Duke of Milan, could have stood by the side of Pausanias, having as signally defeated at Mont Olmo the great general Francis Piccinino as the King of Sparta crushed at Plataea the brilliant chief, Mardonius; the Hungarian sovereigns, John Corvinus Hunniades ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... (741) of Koken; earlier; in time of Tsunayoshi; result in stock farming; worship of; mythical and terrible beasts in ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... of the city on the Greeks; empire on the Romans; the Church on the Middle Ages; commerce, plutocracy, colonial dominion, on the modern world; militarism on Germany. For these imposed forces men lived and died; they had only a mythical conception of where they came from, and they believed and some still believe them ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... Plutarch was writing at the close of the first century after Christ, and in his parallel Lives of Greeks and Romans, the most famous of his many writings, he took occasion to paint an Ideal Commonwealth as the conception of Lycurgus, the half mythical or all mythical Solon of Sparta. To Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus, as well as to Plato, Thomas More and others have been indebted for some part of the shaping ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... in the year 1666, Newton's attention appears to have been concentrated upon the subject of gravitation. Whatever may be the extent to which we accept the more or less mythical story as to how the fall of an apple first directed the attention of the philosopher to the fact that gravitation must extend through space, it seems, at all events, certain that this is an excellent illustration of ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... club, with a garden. It belonged to the professors, their families, and their friends in the town, and concerts and dances were given in it. It seems that the Heidelberg "Museum" comes nearest to the original meaning of the word as "a seat of Muses," for nearly all those mythical ladies were remarkable for their special patronage of music, ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... compliments" of either Judge Trask or Colonel Flail or Mr. Bisland. You can understand that I could not hope to play the Trask deception exclusively and successfully. I invented Colonel Flail and Mr. Bisland, and I contrived to render them quite as liberal in their patronage as the mythical Judge Trask himself. Occasionally a donation came in, by way of variety, from Smeaton and Holbrook and Caswell and other solitary creations of my mendacious imagination, when I used to blind poor dear Alice to the hideous truth. Touching myself, I gave it ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... slender fly rod of good workmanship. Dressed in soft brown, with short skirts and high laced boots, and her wavy hair tucked under a wide, felt hat; with her blue eyes shining with fun, and her warmly tinted skin glowing with healthful exercise; she appeared—to the artist—more as some mythical spirit of the mountains, than as a maiden of flesh and blood. The manner of her coming, too, heightened the impression. He had heard no sound of her approach—no step, no rustle of the underbrush. He had seen no movement among the bushes—no parting of the willows in the ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... relieved when he had said this, but the old man had no very distinct idea in his mind attached to the mythical word, so he let ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... principal legends as to the cataclysm by which primitive humanity was destroyed. The first was connected with the name of Ogyges, the most ancient of the kings of Boeotia or Attica—a quite mythical personage, lost in the night of ages, his very name seemingly derived from one signifying deluge in Aryan idioms, in Sanscrit Angha. It is said that in his time the whole land was covered by a flood, whose waters reached the sky, and from which he, together with some companions, ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... duties of the governor and governed. Their imaginations were dilated and their pride roused by the spectacle of Venice seated like a goddess in her home. Of all the secular States of Italy the Republic of S. Mark's alone produced this mythical ideal of the body politic, self-sustained and independent of the citizens, compelling their allegiance, and sustaining them through generations with the life of its organic unity.[269] The artists had no reason to paint thoughts and theories. ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... great historical names, the name of Attila, the name of Theodoric, has little to do with history. In this heroic story coming out of the heroic age, there is not much that can be traced to historical as distinct from mythical tradition. The tragedy of the death of Attila, as told in the Atlakvia and the Atlaml, may indeed owe something to the facts recorded by historians, and something more to vaguer historical tradition of the vengeance of Rosamund ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... grammatical tables (paradigms and vocabularies), lists of omens and lucky and unlucky days, and letters and reports passing between kings and governors; the latter class includes cosmogonic poems, an epic poem in twelve books, detached mythical narratives, magic formulas and incantations, and prayers to deities (belonging to the ritual service of the temples). The prose pieces, with scarcely an exception, belong to the historical period, and may ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Thebes there is a statue which is supposed to be Memnon, the mythical king of Ethiopia, and which at daybreak was said to emit ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... vengeance on the stranger who has beguiled her. It is clear that the Argonauts[483] were, as in Apollonius Rhodius, to escape up the Danube and reach another sea. In Apollonius they descended from the head waters of the Danube by some mythical river to the Adriatic; it is in the Adriatic that Absyrtus is encountered and slain; it is in Phaeacia that Jason and Medea are married. In Valerius both these incidents take place in the Isle of Peuce, at the Danube's mouth. The inference is that ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... arise out of the conflict of circumstances. These Plato proposes to leave to a younger generation of legislators. The action of courts of law in making law seems to have escaped him, probably because the Athenian law-courts were popular assemblies; and, except in a mythical form, he can hardly be said to have had before his eyes the ideal of a judge. In reading the Laws of Plato, or any other ancient writing about Laws, we should consider how gradual the process is by which not only a legal system, but ...
— Laws • Plato
... many things more beautiful, I believed, then, that nothing more beautiful had ever happened; for it was the first time a man had ever sent me roses. Nineteen years old, and my first roses! They made me so happy. Paris seemed very far away; the convent was a mythical place I had seen in a dream; nothing was real but Dad, and America, and the ...
— Cupid's Understudy • Edward Salisbury Field
... talked with fire and enthusiasm, the intellectual stimulant stirring them as he had seen drink and anger stir other men. What he heard was no longer the philosophy of the dry, printed word, written by half-mythical demigods like Kant and Spencer. It was living philosophy, with warm, red blood, incarnated in these two men till its very features worked with excitement. Now and again other men joined in, and all followed the discussion with cigarettes ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... would pursue their investigations still further they would soon satisfy themselves that the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ are largely, if not entirely, mythical. Now, for instance, when they are preparing to celebrate the ascension of Christ, they are welcoming the ascension of the Sun. The great luminary is (apparently) rising higher and higher in the heaven, shedding his warmer beams on the earth, and gladdening the ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... fire in the green leaf and has eaten no dirt in the brown, and who, accepting, for the moment, the terms Puritan and Cavalier in the sense an effete sectionalism once sought to ascribe to them—descriptive labels at once classifying and separating North and South—verbal redoubts along that mythical line called Mason and Dixon, over which there were supposed by the extremists of other days to be no bridges—I am much disposed to say, "A ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... mythical civilizers, of Peru, tile first of men, emerged, and in it, during the time of the flood, the remnants of the race escaped the fury of ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... the same skill which seven years earlier, if we may believe some rather mythical stories, had filled with wonder the old Duke of Lorraine.[2623] And she spoke certain words to Messire Nicole Lowe which confirmed him in his belief that she was indeed that same Maid Jeanne who had fared forth into France. She had the ready ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... have been made, we yet find the secret of the beginning of the soul shrouded among the fathomless mysteries of the Almighty Creator, and must ascribe our birth to the Will of God as piously as it was done in the eldest mythical epochs of the world. Notwithstanding the careless frivolity of skepticism and the garish light of science abroad in this modern time, there are still stricken and yearning depths of wonder and sorrow enough, profound and awful shadows of night ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... that the royal emblem of Persia from early times was a golden eagle with outstretched wings, resting on a spearhead like the Roman eagle, but he makes no allusion to a standard. Persian historians tell of a famous standard carried from the mythical time of Zohak to that of the last of the Pehlevi kings. Their story is that Kawah, a blacksmith, raised a successful revolt against the implacably cruel King Zohak in the earliest time of Persian sovereignty, and relieved the country from his ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon
... act? Averbuch, like most young Russian immigrants, undoubtedly believed in the mythical liberty of America. He received his first baptism by the policeman's club during the brutal dispersement of the unemployed parade. He further experienced American equality and opportunity in the vain efforts to find an economic master. In short, a three months' sojourn in the ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... though superior to any that had preceded it, was in some respects astonishing, as when he put the hippopotamus among aquatic animals with fish, and the bat among birds. Occasionally he describes a purely mythical animal like "the monkey-fox." It is difficult to see what criterion of truth would have been adequate for the scholar at that time. A monkey-fox is no more improbable than a rhinoceros, and Gesner found it necessary to assure his readers ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Hamilton, Franklin, and of the other "Founders of the Republic," not that Lincoln should become still more of the past, but, rather, that he with them should become still more of the present. However faint and mythical may grow the story of that Great Struggle, the leader, Lincoln, at least should remain a real, living American. No matter how clearly, how directly, Lincoln has shown himself in his writings, we yet ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... come to fulfil all the needs of man, and unreservedly to take the place of ancient spiritual discipline. Genuine philosophy had had its day: all metaphysics seemed deception and fantasy, a simple play of empty formulae or puerile dreams, a mythical procession of abstraction and phantom; religion itself paled before science, as poetry of the grey morning before the splendour ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... is sure to be persecuted. But he had no inkling that the Gospel story is symbolic—the life-story of genius for all time, eternally true. He never looked outside himself, and as the fruits of success were now sweet in his mouth, a pursuing Fate seemed to him the most mythical of myths. His child-like self-confidence was pathetic. The laws that govern human affairs had little interest for the man who was always a law unto himself. Yet by some extraordinary prescience, some inexplicable presentiment, the ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... with the purely mythological description of them in the Younger Edda, and with that in Norse Mythology. Upon the whole, Snorre has striven to accommodate his sketch to the Eddas, while he has had to clothe mythical beings with the characteristics of human kings. Like Saxo-Grammaticus, Snorre has striven to show that the deities, which we now recognize as personified forces and phenomena of nature, were extraordinary and enterprising persons, who formerly ruled in the North, and inaugurated the customs, ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... rich fabrics in which he trafficked: he knew only that they came to Alexandria or Damascus from Far Eastern lands. For from time immemorial the Orient had been the enemy's country, little known beyond the bounds of Syria, a half-mythical land of alien races, of curious customs and infidel faiths, a land of interminable distances, rich and populous, doubtless, certainly dangerous and inaccessible. But in the thirteenth century the veil which had long shrouded Asia in mystery was lifted, discovering to European ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... occasion did he abduct a lady, and in that case there were special circumstances with which the public have never been made acquainted. His deeds were quite black enough without further blackening with printer's ink, and it would be a pity if the real Motor Pirate were lost sight of in mythical haze such as has gathered about the name of ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... Good Men. I would take Spenser, and show you how all his fairy knights are sometimes deceived and sometimes vanquished; but the soul of Una is never darkened, and the spear of Britomart is never broken. Nay, I could go back into the mythical teaching of the most ancient times, and show you how the great people,—by one of whose princesses it was appointed that the Lawgiver of all the earth should be educated, rather than by his own kindred;—how that great Egyptian people, wisest then of nations, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... are not interesting enough to me. I suppose a good poet could have celebrated Dutch Sam {57} as having been descended from King William the Third just as well as Pindar glorifies his boxers with the mythical histories of the AEacidae, ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... thought of meeting this traditional, this almost mythical aunt whom she had so often heard about. Sometimes she had wondered if the personality of this remarkable relative had not been a figment of her father's imagination, long pondered, and reconstructed out of half-forgotten material. But this letter of hers that now lay ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... amongst them. The trappers killed six of them at one volley, and the rest ran away, leaving twenty-three beautiful longbows behind. The only clothing the dead men had on was snail-shells fastened to the ends of their long locks of hair. The trappers now began to seek more anxiously for the mythical settlements. "A great many times each day," says Pattie, "we bring our crafts to the shore and go out to see if we cannot discover the tracks of horses and cattle." On the 18th they thought some inundated ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... reading of the established Church, taking literally the figurative, allegorical, and mythical language of a collection of Oriental books of different ages, directly and inevitably led. The same result long after followed the folly of regarding the Hebrew books as if they had been written by the unimaginative, hard, practical intellect of the England of James the First ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... dreamed of one thousand acres of land, bought at one dollar and a quarter per acre, that by the magic growth of some Western town becomes worth fifty thousand dollars. They have dreamed of money invested in mythical towns, which towns are to rival in their growth Toledo, Chicago or St. Louis. The dream is to do nothing and get rich. Land sharks, speculators, usurers and politicians who aspire to a notoriety they will never win—a station they will never occupy—swarm over the West thicker than frogs in Egypt, ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... monastery, or hall has not its traditional subterranean passage? Certainly the majority are mythical; still, there are some well authenticated. Burnham Abbey, Buckinghamshire, for example, or Tenterden Hall, Hendon, had passages which have been traced for over fifty yards; and one at Vale Royal, Nottinghamshire, has been explored ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea
... exercised, or by which discretion is set to sleep—in a word, with bubble investments; and the history of many of the most promising of these speculations may be read in the following brief and not altogether mythical biography, of an interesting specimen which suddenly fell into a declining way, and is supposed to have ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... form some idea of the general position of American exploration and discovery at the time when Cartier made his momentous voyages. The maritime nations of Europe, in searching for a passage to the half-mythical empires of Asia, had stumbled on a great continent. At first they thought it Asia itself. Gradually they were realizing that this was not Asia, but an outlying land that lay between Europe and Asia and that must be passed by the navigator before Cathay and Cipango ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... and it was seen that there was nothing of the mythical in the conspiracy against Forster's life, public indignation flamed up afresh at the treatment he had received. When he next came to Leeds, after the trial of the Invincibles, a crowd followed him through the streets from the railway station to the Mercury ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... man, "how the Saviour was tempted in the wilderness by the Evil One, is not in your opinion a parable, or an allegory, or mythical legend, without any substance? but you believe that this event actually befell Jesus Christ, the Son of God, along with the various circumstances ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... disinterested of women—a woman who cannot be induced to accept anything but a bouquet—can be as dangerous an acquaintance for a young man as any opera girl of former days. As a matter of fact, the opera girl is an almost mythical being. As things are now at the theatres, dancers and actresses are about as amusing as a declaration of the rights of woman, they are puppets that go abroad in the morning in the character of respected and respectable mothers ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... from numerous and widely separated sources, is apparent, even at a cursory glance. Among these sources, the folk-lore material of Sanscrit writers seems to have left a distinctive impress upon the Bagobo mythical romance. Against a Malay background, and blended with native pagan elements, are presented chains of episodes, characteristic personalities, methods for securing a magical control of the situation, that suggest vividly parallel literary forms in the Sanscrit saga. Still more, ...
— Philippine Folk-Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss, Berton L. Maxfield, W. H. Millington,
... effectiveness, cavalry soldiers require much longer instruction than those of any other arm. They must become expert swordsmen, and acquire such skill in equitation that horse and rider shall resemble the mythical centaurs of the ancients—shall be only one individual in will. The horses should be as thoroughly trained as the riders. In European armies this is accomplished in training schools. The Governments keep constantly on hand large supplies of animals, partly purchased and partly produced in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... seem amusing, but it is not more absurd than the existing popular idea that Stonehenge is of Druidical origin. The stone circle of Salisbury Plain was many hundred years old when those half mythical Celtic priests first set foot in England, and the Druids of yesterday have about as much connection with Stonehenge as ...
— Stonehenge - Today and Yesterday • Frank Stevens
... was discredited, we were told that the mythical tendency would explain everything. It showed us how good men could tell lies without knowing it, and how the religious value of an alleged fact in an alleged historical revelation did not in the least depend on its being a fact. And that great discovery, which first converted solid ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... formerly common in South Italy. The interior of the ears and the lip of the cup have been gilt, and in the nostrils is niello. Round the neck is a band with four small figures, probably representing the nuptials of Poseidon and Saturia, daughter of Minos, from which sprang Taras, the mythical founder of Taranto. Two of the figures are seated, two standing; their draperies are gilded. The handle curves gracefully to the back of the jawbones, where it is attached to a palmette. The work may be of the fourth century B.C., the doe's head being ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... of Roses. Since that time, he says, we have taken leave of society, preferring the path of seclusion; for there is safety in solitude. Angelus Silesius,[1] a very gentle and Christian writer, confesses to the same feeling, in his own mythical language. Herod, he says, is the common enemy; and when, as with Joseph, God warns us of danger, we fly from the world to solitude, from Bethlehem to Egypt; or else suffering ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... dummies remained to bury the corpses which strewed the stage. Imaginary monsters were fashioned out of half-a-dozen Neapolitan and Milanese princes, by Ford, by Beaumont and Fletcher, by Middleton, by Marston, even by the light and graceful Philip Massinger: mythical villains, Ferdinands, Lodowicks, and Fernezes, who yet fell short of the frightful realities of men like Sigismondo Malatesta, Alexander VI., and Pier Luigi Farnese; nay, more typical monsters, with no name ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... indulged in the infancy of society when nature is a sealed book, and the uneducated mind fills creation with all sorts of beings and phantoms. There is then wide scope for the rude imagination to wander at will through the unknown universe, and to people it with every description of mythical beings and superstitious objects. Poetry is most powerful in the infancy of civilization, and enjoys a license of idea and language which would shock the taste of more advanced times. The Hindustani poetry as furnished by Sir William ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... all else was ignored. At that table there were those who had once reigned themselves, others lawfully claimed descent from kings that the world had forgotten, the kingdoms claimed by some had even changed their names. Hatzgurh, the mountain kingdom, is almost regarded as mythical. ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... A still grander mythical synthesis was the representation of the whole world under the form of the sacred ash tree Yggdrasil. This was the world tree which united heaven, earth, and hell. Its branches stretched across the world and reached up to the skies, and its roots spread in different directions—one toward ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... faithful admirer whose eyes fed upon his hero steadily. He had heard the story of this young man's deeds discussed until Dave had come to take on almost mythical proportions. ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... special lessons in the art of oratory, he also bestowed extraordinary pains upon the general cultivation of his intellectual powers. His application to Thucydides in particular is recounted in terms of obvious mythical exaggeration; showing, nevertheless, his idea of fixing upon a special book with a view to extracting from it every particle of intellectual nourishment that it could yield: in which we have an example ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... denied this. He had, he said, not called anything a myth. There was the printed book, and one might have supposed that it would be easy enough to settle this question. But it was far from being so. The words myth and mythical were used half a dozen times, and the rabbis declared that they were applied to the statements of Scripture. Bertram declared that they were applied to the appearance those statements must have as at present put before the English world. Then he said something not ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... promises and no fulfillment. The rumor of an approaching French squadron which was to make junction with de Ruyter, who had now been placed in command of the Dutch fleet, caused the English government to make the grave mistake of detaching Prince Rupert with 20 ships to look for the mythical French force. This division left Monk, who was again in command of the fleet, with only 57 ships. Hearing that de Ruyter was anchored on the Flanders coast, Monk went out to find him. De Ruyter left his anchorage to meet the English, ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... valleys, illimitably far from the land of Spain. It seemed full not so much of magic as mere sleep, either sleep in an unknown country of alien men, or sleep in a land dreamed sleeping a long while since. As the travellers heard it they thought of things far away, of mythical journeys ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... poet SIMROCK has just published a new version of the two Eddas, with the mythical narratives of the Skalda, which is spoken of as a valuable ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... of reproduction dramatically represented. In the mythical period of Chaldea the worship of the Great Mother Ishtar (the patroness of sex attraction, but a goddess whose love was a calamity to all her husbands,[1988] perhaps a mythical representation of the perils and pains of sex) was a setting loose of sex passion ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... be put to our positive moralists—these questions they have themselves suggested, and the grotesque unreality of this vague optimism will be at once apparent. Never was vagary of mediaeval faith so groundless as this. The Earthly Paradise that the mediaeval world believed in was not more mythical than the Earthly Paradise believed in by our exact thinkers now; and George Eliot might just as well start in a Cunard steamer to find the one, as send her faith into the ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... not know the mythical tragedy of Paradise? Therein dwelt our first parents in a state of perfect health and perfect innocence, and Jahwe gave them to eat of the tree of life and created all things for them; but he commanded ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... to ascertain the whereabouts of Santa Cruz. The man had almost grown mythical with me. I had heard at San Sebastian that ten thousand crowns had been offered for his scalp at Tolosa, and the fondest yearning—the one satisfying aspiration of the hyena—was to tear him into shreds, chop him into sausage-meat, gouge out his eyes, ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... disclaimed, had it been his, but which he did not happen to inherit. On the other side he may have descended from kings; but, as in the case of "The Fair Cuban," he must have added, "African, unfortunately." Did his father perform these mythical feats of strength? did he lift up a horse between his legs while clutching a rafter with his hands? did he throw his regiment before him over a wall, as Guy Heavistone threw the mare which refused the leap ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... Conquest; but they allowed angels to appear in epics dealing with the earlier time, almost as freely as gods intervene in Homer. In short, the Homeric poet undeniably treats the age of his heroes as having already, in the phrase of Thucydides, "won its way to the mythical," and therefore as ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... souls who could not draw the line of demarcation between discovery and invention—the literary bones of these explorers are dotting the trackless wastes of the subway. While it is true that after the publication of the mythical language attributed to the dwellers along the Bowery certain of its pat phrases and apt metaphors were adopted and, to a limited extent, used in this locality, it was because our people are prompt in assimilating whatever is to their commercial advantage. To the tourists who visited our newly ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... ANTAEUS, a mythical giant, a terrae filius or son of the earth, who was strong only when his foot was on the earth, lifted in air he became weak as water, a weakness which Hercules discovered to his discomfiture when wrestling ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... added to faith and virtue, according to the apostolic injunction.[158] Men fear that Christianity will be weakened when reason studies it, and that it is "dangerous" to admit that events thought to be historical have the deeper significance of the mythical or mystical meaning. It is, on the contrary, strengthened, and the student finds, with joy, that the pearl of great price shines with a purer, clearer lustre when the coating of ignorance is removed and its ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... have vanished, not only in view of the unequaled interest excited by the subject, but also of the readiness of unprincipled adventurers, and even some respectable publishers, to circulate narratives often mythical ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... the flower, which soon after appeared (1873, p. 3) in The Florist, and was perhaps the first published figure of the plant. It was named by Professor Reichenbach, who could find for it no better name than that of the mythical monster Chimaera, than which, as an old historian tells us, no stranger bogy ever came out of the earth's inside. Our engraving shows the plant about natural size, and indicates the form and local coloring pretty accurately. The ground color is yellowish, blotched with ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 384, May 12, 1883 • Various
... which I wish especially to emphasize is this: in no case does the city appear as equivalent to the dwelling-place of a tribe or of a confederation of tribes. In no case does citizenship, or burghership, appear to rest upon the basis of a real or assumed community of descent from a single real or mythical progenitor. In the primitive mark, as we have seen, the bond which kept the community together and constituted it a political unit was the bond of blood-relationship, real or assumed; but this was not the case with the city or borough. The city did ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... J. E. Harrison's deeply interesting volume, Themis,[14] she gives the translation of a fragmentary Hymn of the Kouretes, discovered among the ruins of a temple in Crete, a text which places beyond all doubt the fact that, however mythical in origin, the Kouretes, certainly, had actual human representatives, and that while in the case of the Maruts there may be a question as to whether their dance actually took place, or not, so far as the Kouretes are concerned there can be no ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... who lived in the early part of the fourteenth century—the traditional patron demi-god of fishermen. There are many stories concerning this half-mythical character, chief of which is that he hooked a whale far from shore, and, as he would not relinquish the prize, his boat was dragged for ever and ever over the surface of the sea. Mariners of the present day solemnly aver that they have seen Urashima Taro sitting in his boat skimming ...
— Edmund Dulac's Fairy-Book - Fairy Tales of the Allied Nations • Edmund Dulac
... between the great toe and the others, and if they wear any head- gear, it is only a wisp of blue cotton tied round the forehead. The one garment is only an apology for clothing, and displays lean concave chests and lean muscular limbs. The skin is very yellow, and often much tattooed with mythical beasts. The charge for sampans is fixed by tariff, so the traveller lands without having his temper ruffled ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... of "Madame Sans-Gene," A singing Napoleon, Royalties in opera, Henry the Fowler, King Mark, Verdi's Pharaoh, Herod, Boris Godounoff, Macbeth, Gustavus and some mythical kings and dukes, et seq.—Mattheson's "Boris," Peter the Great, Sardou's play and Giordano's opera, Verdi on an operatic Bonaparte, Sardou's characters, "Andrea Chenier," French Rhythms, "Fedora," "Siberia," The historic Chenier, Russian local color, "Schone Minka," "Slava," "Ay ouchnem," French ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... to be one is to permit men to fall into hurtful habits without offering protest against it. I'm losing faith in that friend Homeyer, who I strongly suspect is a mythical apology ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... his hand. The 'bus rumbled on down the street. Names that had always been remotely mythical to her now met her eye and became realities. Maillard's. And that great red stone castle was the Waldorf. Almost historic, and it looked newer than the smoke-grimed Blackstone. And straight ahead—why, that must be the Flatiron building! It loomed ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber |
