"Olympian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... into a room in which every arrangement is conducive to physical discomfort, and even such a paragon will fail of attaining that ideal of happy order which she aims to realize in her children's reading room. The temper even of an Olympian is not proof against ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... elephants which stood upon the back of a gigantic tortoise, which, in its turn, floated on the surface of an elemental ocean. The early Western civilisations conceived the fable of the Titan Atlas, who, as a punishment for revolt against the Olympian gods, was condemned to hold up the expanse of ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... written about time after time, as though it were a gathering of the very flower of humanity. Perched up there by the freak or wisdom of Leblanc, it had a certain Olympian quality, and the natural tendency of the human mind to elaborate such a resemblance would have us give its members the likenesses of gods. It would be equally reasonable to compare it to one of those enforced meetings upon the mountain-tops that must have occurred in the opening ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... well be built, like a festal bower or arch, to entertain him a single day. Happier, if he know the solemnity of that relation and honor its law! He who offers himself a candidate for that covenant comes up, like an Olympian, to the great games where the first-born of the world are the competitors. He proposes himself for contests where Time, Want, Danger, are in the lists, and he alone is victor who has truth enough in his constitution to preserve ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... edifying neglect of public business; and that his Highness now keeps a cigar store in Rupert Street, much frequented by other foreign refugees. I go there from time to time to smoke and have a chat, and find him as great a creature as in the days of his prosperity; he has an Olympian air behind the counter; and although a sedentary life is beginning to tell upon his waistcoat, he is probably, take him for all in all, the handsomest tobacconist ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... receive them, indeed, Rome had performed on them a cruel operation: they were enervated, bleached. Those great centralized deities became in their official life the mournful functionaries of the Roman Empire. But the decline of that Olympian aristocracy had in no wise drawn down the host of home-born gods, the mob of deities still keeping hold of the boundless country-sides, of the woods, the hills, the fountains; still intimately blended ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... among its founders. Then came the Germantown Club, of native American boys, organized in 1855, whose highest ambition, for many years, was to play the Philadelphia Club, "barring Tom Senior," then the only fast round-arm bowler in the country. Next came the Olympian, the Delphian, the Keystone Cricket Clubs, and a host of lesser lights, whose head-quarters were at West Philadelphia; and soon after the now famous Young America Cricket Club was formed by the lamented Walter S. Newhall, partly as a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... mod'rate or inferior strength, Though all are not with equal pow'rs endued, Yet here is work for all! bear this in mind, Nor tow'rd the ships let any turn his face, By threats dismay'd; but forward press, and each Encourage each, if so the lightning's Lord, Olympian Jove, may grant us to repel, And backward to his city ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... insult the fanes of the bestial gods. The impunity with which these sacrileges had been perpetrated had made a profound impression, and did no little to undermine Hellenic faith. But now the worshiper of the vile Olympian divinities, whose obscene lives must have been shocking to every pious man, was brought in contact with a grand, a solemn, a consistent religious system having its foundation on a philosophical basis. Persia, as is the case with ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... been in communion with a high and commanding intellect and a great nature. We are vexed by pedantries that recall the precieuses of the Hotel Rambouillet, but we know that she had the soul of the most heroic women in history. We crave more of the Olympian serenity that makes action natural and repose refreshing, but we cannot miss the edification of a life marked by indefatigable labour after generous purposes, by an unsparing struggle for duty, and by steadfast and devout fellowship with ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... with an English translation). Christianity is an incomparable heavenly wisdom, the teacher of which is the Logos himself. "It produces neither poets, nor philosophers, nor rhetoricians; but it makes mortals immortal and men gods, and leads them away upwards from the earth into super-Olympian regions." Through Christian knowledge the soul returns to its Creator: [Greek: ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... moves, for a mean and a measure Of motion, — not faster than dateless Olympian leisure Might pace with unblown ample garments from pleasure to pleasure, — The wave-serrate sea-rim sinks unjarring, unreeling, Forever revealing, revealing, revealing, Edgewise, bladewise, halfwise, wholewise, — 'tis done! Good-morrow, lord Sun! With several voice, with ascription ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... Columbus restored to favour, Columbus presenting natives, Columbus announcing his discovery, the recall of Columbus, Isabella pledging her jewels, Columbus in chains, and Columbus describing his third voyage. Greece has given us a set of stamps illustrating the Olympian Games. But collectors look with considerable suspicion upon stamps of this showy class, for too many of them have been produced with the sole object of making a profit out of their sale to collectors, and not to meet any ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell
... effectually as his sketch of the English Academy, disturbed by a "flight of Corinthian leading articles, and an irruption of Mr. G.A. Sala;" his comparison of Miss Cobbe's new religion to the British College of Health; his parallel between Phidias' statue of the Olympian Zeus and Coles' truss-manufactory; Sir William Harcourt's attempt to "develop a system of unsectarian religion from the Life of Mr. Pickwick;" the "portly jeweller from Cheapside," with his "passionate, absorbing, almost blood-thirsty clinging to life;" the grandiose ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... a little package, and, with preter-careful hands, dropped a long white mantle over the shoulders of the ministerial coxcomb. Is light folds closed around him, and, with an Olympian nod, he turned toward the door, while the valet flew to open it. As soon as the count appeared, the other valets, who, with the hair-dresser, stood on either side of the room, raised each one a long brush dipped in hair-powder, ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... desire for survival, Faint in the most strenuous moods, Became an Olympian apathein In ...
— Hugh Selwyn Mauberley • Ezra Pound
... old gaieties recommenced, but more Olympian in tone, as befitted the ruler of rulers, terrible now being the lifting of Hogarth's brows at the least lapse in ritual; and only the chastest- nurtured of the earth ever now stalked through gavotte or pavane in those halls of ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... to offer you a shake hands," he inquired smilingly; "or shall I continue to invoke the Olympian gods with classically ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... brains. A Bruno is angrily seized by the throttle And hunted about by thy ghost, Aristotle, Till a More or Lavater step into his place: Then the world turns and makes an admiring grimace. Once the men were so great and so few, they appear, Through a distant Olympian atmosphere, Like vast Caryatids upholding the age. Now the men are so many and small, disengage One man from the million to mark him, next moment The crowd sweeps him hurriedly out of your comment; And since we seek vainly ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... only strong men, choleric and powerful, thunder-bolts of war, diplomats with olympian heads, or men of genius, who can show this utter confidence, this generous devotion to weakness, this constant protection, this love without jealousy, this easy good humor with a woman. Good heavens! ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... Olympian more heroic than he, and certainly none with so compelling a vitality. "Such a warm, kind light in them!" she thought of the eyes others had found hard ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... it is highly remarkable that the only comic scenes in the first and greatest of epics are those in which the gods are the chief actors—as when the lame Hephaestus takes upon him the office of cupbearer at the Olympian banquet, or when Artemis gets her ears boxed by the angry Hera. It would almost seem as if there were a vein of deliberate satire running through these descriptions, so daring is the ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... over the birth of a son; the child is to inherit his grandfather's name, and the father is celebrating the occasion with his friends. He would not be so pleased, if he knew that the boy was to die before he was eight years old! It is natural enough: he sees before him some happy father of an Olympian victor, and has no eyes for his neighbour there, who is burying a child; that thin-spun thread escapes his notice. Behold, too, the money-grubbers, whom the aforesaid Death's-officers will never permit to be money-spenders; and the noble ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... thou so distraught of wit That thou shouldst face me, and to fight defy Me, who in might, in blood, in stature far Surpass thee? From supremest Zeus I trace My glorious birth; and from the strong Sea-god Nereus, begetter of the Maids of the Sea, The Nereids, honoured of the Olympian Gods. And chiefest of them all is Thetis, wise With wisdom world-renowned; for in her bowers She sheltered Dionysus, chased by might Of murderous Lycurgus from the earth. Yea, and the cunning God-smith welcomed she Within her mansion, when from heaven he fell. Ay, and the Lightning-lord ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... realms above: Their father is the Olympian Jove. Ne'er shall oblivion veil their front sublime, Th' indwelling god is great, nor fears ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... he whispered boldly, stooping to her level—but in the same moment a heavy hand was laid upon his neck and a burly, gray-bearded Jupiter stood before him with a great train of Olympian attendants. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... transmission and inheritance have attacked the independence of the individual. Science finds no ego, self or will that can maintain itself against the past. Heredity rules our lives like that supreme primeval necessity that stood above the Olympian gods. "It is the last of the fates," says Wilde, "and the most terrible. It is the only one of the gods whose real name we know." It is the "divinity that shapes our ends" and hurls down the deities of freedom and choice. Science dissolves the personality into ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... Nassau, and flesh-brushed until he glowed (it may be) as healthily as did the cheeks of those who spied on him. On this question the Muse declines to take sides. For certain his naked body, after these ministrations, glowed delicious within the bath-gown as he mounted again to his Olympian chamber. There he allowed Manasseh to wash out his locks in fresh water (the Collector had a fine head of hair, of a waved brown, and detested a wig), to anoint them, and tie them behind with a fresh black ribbon. This done, he took his clothes one by one as Manasseh handed them, ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... know they are at their ripest. Then, with baskets, we sally out; I taking the middle rank, and the children the outer spray of boughs. Even now we gather those only which drop at the touch; these, in a brimming saucer, with golden Alderney cream and a soupcon of powdered sugar, are Olympian nectar; they melt before the tongue can measure their full soundness, and seem to be mere ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... afraid to stay there, fearing that his motions might be watched, and that Antony would think that he had objects of State in his journey. He had already been told that some attributed his going to a desire to be present at the Olympian games; but the first notion seems to have been that he had given the Republic up as lost, and was seeking safety elsewhere. From this we are made to perceive how closely his motions were watched, and how much men thought of them. From Syracuse ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... and our skill, and our prowess both by land and sea, and our amazing importance to ourselves and to others,—which importance has reached such a height at the present day as to make of us a veritable spectacle for Olympian laughter,— and we draw out our little sums of life from the Eternal exchequer, and add them up and try to obtain the highest interest for them, always forgetting to calculate that in making up the sum total, that mysterious "Unknown Quantity" will have to come in, and (un less ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... le requiem. The truth is, that some idealists were disappointed to find Puvis to be a sane, healthy, solidly built man, a bon vivant in the best sense of the phrase, without a suggestion of the morbid, vapouring pontiff or haughty Olympian. Personally he was not in the least like his art, a crime that sentimental persons seldom forgive. A Burgundian—born at Lyons, December 14, 1824—he possessed all the characteristics of his race. Asceticism was the last quality to seek in him. A good ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... in the following century in Marino's epic of Adone. We find it infusing the scene of Mirtillo's first meeting with Amarilli, which may be said to set the tone of the rest of the poem. Happening to see the nymph at the Olympian games, Mirtillo at once fell in love and contrived to introduce himself in female attire into the company of maidens to which she belonged. Here, the proposal being made to hold a kissing match among themselves, Amarilli was unanimously chosen judge, and, the contest over, ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... joyous pagan souls under imperfect Christian draperies. Small blame it is therefore to Tegner that Schiller's poems furnished him with frequent suggestions and sometimes also with metres. Schiller had, in "The Gods of Greece," sung a glorious elegy on the Olympian age which stimulated his Swedish rival to write "The Asa Age," in which he regretted, though in a rather half-hearted way, the disappearance of Odin, Thor, and Freya. The poem, it must be admitted, falls much below Tegner at his best. Schiller's ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the Gods was, then, a series of eight small hangings, four typifying the seasons and four the elements, with an appropriate Olympian forming the central point of interest and the excuse for an entourage of thrilling and graceful versatility. This set has been copied so many times that even the most expert must fail in trying to identify the date of reproduction. Two hundred and thirty times this set is known to have been ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... de Charge past them like lightning. The Irish mare gave a rush and got alongside of him; the King would have done the same, but Cecil checked him and kept him in that cool, swinging canter which covered the grassland so lightly; Bay Regent's vast thundering stride was Olympian, but Jimmy Delmar saw his worst foe in the "Guards' Crack," and waited on him ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... milk of the Contrat Social. Nay, for the whole Body, is not this patriotic opposition also a fighting for oneself? Awake, Parlement of Paris, renew thy long warfare! Was not the Parlement Maupeou abolished with ignominy? Not now hast thou to dread a Louis XIV., with the crack of his whip, and his Olympian looks; not now a Richelieu and Bastilles: no, the whole Nation is behind thee. Thou too (O heavens!) mayest become a Political Power; and with the shakings of thy horse-hair wig shake principalities and dynasties, like a very ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... bliss, beatific itself by beatitude's breath. Surely no spirit or sense of a soul that was soft to the spirit and soul of our senses Sweetens the stress of surprising suspicion that sobs in the semblance and sound of a sigh; Only this oracle opens Olympian, in mystical moods and triangular tenses,— "Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is dark till the dawn of the day when we die." Mild is the mirk and monotonous music of memory, melodiously mute as it may be, While the hope in ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... felt for him by every young man in that college and throughout the town,—indeed, throughout the whole North, for he was the pride and glory of the land. It was then that they called him godlike, looking like an Olympian statue, or one of the creations of Michael Angelo when he wished to represent majesty and dignity and power in repose,—the most commanding human presence ever seen in the Capitol ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... Maison's, near Alfort. You come home by the left bank of the Seine, in the midst of a cloud of very black Olympian dust. The horse drags your family wearily along. But alas! your pride has fled, and you look without emotion upon his sunken flanks, and upon two bones which stick out on each side of his belly. His coat is roughened by the sweat which ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... and all hail, mighty people, be greeted, On the sons of Athena shines sunshine the clearest. Blest people, near Jove the Olympian seated. And dear to the maiden his daughter the dearest. Timely wise 'neath the wings of the daughter ye gather, And mildly looks down ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... an unheard-of satisfaction of an inconceivable pride. If he had hated her he could not have flung that enormous fortune more brutally at her head. And his unrepentant death seemed to lift for a moment the curtain on something lofty and sinister like an Olympian's caprice. ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... category. He has still some of the slimness of youth; but youthfulness is not the effect he aims at: his frock coat would befit a prime minister; and a certain high chested carriage of the shoulders, a lofty pose of the head, and the Olympian majesty with which a mane, or rather a huge wisp, of hazel colored hair is thrown back from an imposing brow, suggest Jupiter rather than Apollo. He is prodigiously fluent of speech, restless, excitable ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... the serenely grave Olympian who uttered the words, "Let man be noble, resourceful, and good"; who gave a new content to the religious sentiment, since he conceived all existence as a perpetual change to higher conditions, and pointed ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... sleep 225 From one whose dreams are Paradise Fly, when the fond wretch wakes to weep, And Day peers forth with her blank eyes; So fleet, so faint, so fair, The Powers of earth and air 230 Fled from the folding-star of Bethlehem: Apollo, Pan, and Love, And even Olympian Jove Grew weak, for killing Truth had glared on them; Our hills and seas and streams, 235 Dispeopled of their dreams, Their waters turned to blood, their dew to tears, Wailed for ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... must it have been so before the invention of printing, at a time when it was more usual to listen to books read aloud than to read them oneself? Plutarch journeyed to Rome just as Herodotus went to Athens, or as he is said to have gone to the Olympian festival, in search of an intelligent audience of educated men. Whether his object was merely praise, or whether he was influenced by ideas of gain, we cannot say. No doubt his lectures were not delivered gratis, and that they were well attended ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... their youth and anthropomorphistic and animistic thought worshipped light, and its source, the sun, as the supreme deity, the giver of joy and abundance. All the benevolent deities of the Arians were celestial beings, all the malevolent divinities spirits of darkness: Olympian gods and the demons of the netherworld—Aesir and Giants. To the naive mind of the Indo-Germanic races it appeared a matter of course that the sun, the conqueror of night and winter, the fertilizing, life-giving deity, should be worshipped as the ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... B.C. was marked by the destruction by fire of the old Capitoline Temple, which had withstood the ravages of the Gauls. Sulla aspired to rebuild it, and caused to be transported to Rome for that purpose the column of the Olympian Zeus at Athens. It was completed by Caesar, and its roof was gilded at an expense of $15,000,000. The pediment was adorned with statuary, and near it was a colossal statue ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... They told Jupiter that as he was the father it would be better if he left in other hands the making of thunderbolts. Vulcan undertook the task. Soon his furnaces glowed with bolts of two kinds; one that hits its mark with a deadly unerring—and that is the sort which any of the Olympian gods will hurl; whilst the other sort was that which becomes scattered on its course and does damage only to the mountain tops, or perchance is even lost on the way. It is this kind of thunderbolt that Jupiter sends. His fatherly heart permits him ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... all routine thinking, he puts the standard, once for all, inside every man instead of outside him; when he is told, such a thing must be so, there is immense authority and custom in favor of its being so, it has been held to be so for a thousand years, he answers with Olympian politeness, "But is it so? is it so to me?" Nothing could be more really subversive of the foundations on which the old European order rested; and it may be remarked that no persons are so radically ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... dictator undertook the reconstruction of the Capitolium, for which purpose he caused some columns of the temple of the Olympian Jupiter to be removed from Athens to Rome. Sulla's work was continued by Lutatius Catulus, and finished by Julius Caesar in 46 B. C. A second restoration took place in the year 9 B. C. under Augustus, ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... with white hairs; and like Virgil's Silenus, who, his face smeared with the juice of berries, discoursed of Olympian Gods to the innocent shepherds of Sicily, he talked to Stevie of domestic matters and the affairs of men whose sufferings are great and immortality ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... with all her appearance and manner. Lothair thought he had never seen any one or any thing so serene; the serenity, however, not of humbleness, nor of merely conscious innocence; it was not devoid of a degree of majesty; what one pictures of Olympian repose. And the countenance was Olympian: a Phidian face, with large gray eyes and dark lashes; wonderful hair, abounding without art, and ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... David is a great big boy, fleshy, broad-backed, with monstrous biceps, a market porter waiting to put a sack upon his back. The working of the marble is remarkable and, after all, is a fine piece of study which would do honor to any other sculptor except Michael Angelo; but there is lacking that Olympian mastership which characterizes the works ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... incarnation of Mrs. Radcliffe. Soame Jenyns was dead, indeed, in the flesh, but his influence stalked at nights under the lamps and where disputants were gathered together in country rectories. Dr. Parr affected the Olympian nod, and crowned or checkmated reputations. "A flattering message from Dr. P——" sends our Diarist into ecstasies so excessive that a reaction sets in, and the "predominant and final effect upon my mind has been depression rather than ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... her lord's Olympian smile His lotus-loving Memphian lies,— The musky daughter of the Nile, With plaited hair and ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... his Persian, Indian and Tartar studies; let Quatremere de Quincy, explaining the structure of the great chryselephantine statues, reproduce conjecturally the surface of ivory and the internal framework of the Olympian Jupiter; let D'Ansse de Villoison discover in Venice the commentary of the Alexandrian critics on Homer; let Larcher, Boissonade, Clavier, alongside of Coray publish their editions of the old Greek authors—all this causes no trouble, and all is ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... adversaries, among which was a force in the valley of Big Sandy, supposed to be advancing on Paris, Kentucky. General Nelson at Maysville was instructed to collect all the men he could, and Colonel Gill's regiment of Ohio Volunteers. Colonel Harris was already in position at Olympian Springs, and a regiment lay at Lexington, which I ordered to his support. This leaves the line of Thomas's operations exposed, but I cannot help it. I explained so fully to yourself and the Secretary of War the condition of things, that I can add nothing new until further ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... which in most ancient times had had a much wider diffusion along the Mediterranean world, for traces of it can be found even in Greek mythology. For were not Jupiter and Juno, who constituted the august Olympian couple, at the same time also brother and sister? Gradually restricted through the spreading of Greek civilization, this custom was finally eradicated at the shores of the Mediterranean by Rome after the destruction of ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... overmastering desire to play to the applause of Europe. She had conceived herself as the heroine of a grandiose drama. It was her ambition to be the "Grand Monarque" of the North, and to show the Paris of Louis Quinze that the age of Olympian sovereignty was not yet past. Hence her sensitiveness to Western opinion, her assiduous court to the men of intellect, her anxiety to be admired and feared in Europe. Nowhere is this pose, this consciousness ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... to have clung to Shelley's mind to the end, and made him rebellious against everything bearing the paternal name. He assailed the Father of the Hebrew theocracy with amazing bitterness, and joined Prometheus in cursing and dethroning Zeus, the Olympian usurper. With him, tyrant and father were synonymous, and he has drawn the old Cenci, in the play of that name, with the same fierce, unfilial pencil, dipped in blood and wormwood. Shelley was by nature, self-instruction, and inexperience of life, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... exclaimed Cedric—"food for the Olympian gods, ambrosia and nectar too. Come along, David, or there will be none left for you. Sit down, man, no one wants you to be waiting on us." "Yes, do sit down, please," observed Elizabeth softly; and Mr. Carlyon slipped at once into the empty ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... his large features and conversational basso profundo, seemed to me. His very name had something elephantine about it, and it seemed to me that the house shook from cellar to garret at his footfall. Some have pretended that he had Olympian aspirations, and wanted to sit in the seat of Jove and bear the academic thunderbolt and the aegis inscribed Christo et Ecclesiae. It is a common weakness enough to wish to find one's self in an empty ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... will recognize in this a parallel to the Greek myth in which the Olympian divinities refer their debate in the matter of the apple of discord to the judgment of Paris. May there not in both fables lie a dim forefeeling of the time when Justice shall transfer her seat from the skies, so that whatever her ministers bind ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... the craze for ground stunts and carried it well beyond the lines. One machine chased a train for miles a few hundred feet above, derailed it, and spat bullets at the lame coaches until driven off by enemy craft. Another made what was evidently an inspection of troops by some Boche Olympian look like the riotous disorder of a Futurist painting. A pilot with some bombs to spare spiralled down over a train, dropped the first bomb on the engine, and the second, third, fourth, and fifth on the soldiers who scurried from the carriages. When a detachment of cavalry really did ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... Several days are spent at Brussels in revelry. The English heroes astonish their allies by exhibiting splendid games, similar to those which draw the flower of the British aristocracy to Newmarket and Moulsey Hurst, and which will be considered by our descendants with as much veneration as the Olympian and Isthmian contests by classical students of the present time. In the combat of the cestus, Shaw, the lifeguardsman, vanquishes the Prince of Orange, and obtains a bull as a prize. In the horse-race, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... that the provocation amounted almost to justification. And as for the crime of disobedience, it will not be gainsaid that a large part of the responsibility fell on the shoulders of the lawgivers in Paris, whose decrees, coming oracularly from Olympian heights without reference to local or other concrete circumstances, inflicted heavy losses in blood and substance on the ill-starred people of Rumania. And to make matters worse, Rumania's official representatives at the Conference had been not ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... a contrivance to be always with her: he would be her "comic." It was a new system which had come into fashion: the most plastic performances spoiled by the juxtaposition of their caricatures; acrobats, Olympian gods, parodied by a merry-andrew in a ridiculous coat: just as though Nunkie Fuchs, for instance, had taken it into his head to appear with his Three Graces and mimic their tricks, kicking about at the end of a wire with his ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... end of the school-room. I rose and threaded my way through two lines of boys, who put out their legs to trip me up in my passage through their ranks; and surmounting all difficulties, found myself within three feet of the master's high desk, or pulpit, from which he looked down upon me like the Olympian Jupiter upon mortals, ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... There was something Olympian about the way she did it. The excuse was made, and the regret expressed in the interest of courtesy, but neither was insisted on as a fact, nor was seriously intended, it appeared, even to disguise the fact, ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... convinced of its divine origin, that awes the beholder as he gazes. In comparison with the supreme dignity of this ugly, pallid Hapsburger, upon whom disease and death have already laid a shadowy finger, how artificial appear the divine assumptions of an Alexander, how theatrical the Olympian airs of an Augustus, how merely vulgar and ill-worn the imperial poses of ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... dignitary (who was really a great man) and his wife, there was an old military general—a count or baron with a German name, a man reputed to possess great knowledge and administrative ability. He was one of those Olympian administrators who know everything except Russia, pronounce a word of extraordinary wisdom, admired by all, about once in five years, and, after being an eternity in the service, generally die full of honour ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... at first, in the thought of working from under cover, in the sense of operating always in the dark, unknown and unseen. It gave a touch of something Olympian and godlike to his movements. But as time went by the small cloud of discontent on his horizon grew darker, and widened as it blackened. He was avid of something more than power. He thirsted not ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... in terms of familiar comprehension. He first declares atheism an open choice, and then he brands it with the most odious epithet in the accepted vocabulary of the hour. Danton followed practically the same line, though saying much less about it. 'If Greece,' he said in the Convention, 'had its Olympian games, France too shall solemnise her sans-culottid days. The people will have high festivals; they will offer incense to the Supreme Being, to the master of nature; for we never intended to annihilate the reign ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... midsummer noonday: so that those things might be felt as warm, and fresh, and blue, by the young and the old, the weak and the strong, who came to sun themselves in the god's presence, as procession and hymn rolled on, in the fragrant and tranquil courts of the great Olympian temple; while all the time those people consciously apprehended in the carved image of Zeus none but the personal, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... journey just described Shelton had stood one afternoon on the barge of his old college at the end of the summer races. He had been "down" from Oxford for some years, but these Olympian contests ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... used to anything. Our lot is mitigated, too, by the knowledge that we are all in the same boat. The most olympian N.C.O. stands like a ramrod when addressing an officer, while lieutenants make obeisance to a company commander as humbly as any private. Even the Colonel was seen one day to salute an old gentleman who rode on to the parade-ground during morning drill, ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... Nectaris, though offering in its appearance no explanation of its toothsome name—perhaps it was regarded as the drinking cup of the Olympian gods—is one of the most singular of the dark lunar plains in its outlines. At the south it ends in a vast semicircular bay, sixty miles across, which is evidently a half-submerged mountain ring. ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... indeed we may here join, in some of those instances, the American tribes visited in the course of the present voyage) have carried their favourite amusements, the plaintive songs of their women, their dramatic entertainments, their dances, their olympian games, as we may call them, the orations of their chiefs, the chants of their priests, the solemnity of their religious processions, their arts and manufactures, their ingenious contrivances to supply the want of proper ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... Feast and revel o'er our head, And we titmen are only able To catch the fragments from their table. Theirs is the fragrance of the fruits, While we consume the pulp and roots. What are the moments that we stand Astonished on the Olympian land! ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... both armies shudder. Then he too is miraculously conveyed to Olympus, where, after exhibiting his wound, he denounces Minerva who caused it. But, although Jupiter sternly rebukes his son, he takes such prompt measures to relieve his suffering, that Mars is soon seated at the Olympian board, where before long he is joined by Juno ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... Otis' and Sam Adams' influence," as Governor Hutchinson wrote to Lord Dartmouth, "was the town meeting, that Olympian race-course of ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... There was a cloud on his broad, Jovian, hilarious, Olympian brow, with its clustering ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... yes, in the moil and toil of propaganda, "movements," "causes" and agitations the statesman-inventor and the political psychologist find the raw material for their work. It is not the business of the politician to preserve an Olympian indifference to what stupid people call "popular whim." Being lofty about the "passing fad" and the ephemeral outcry is all very well in the biographies of dead men, but rank nonsense in the rulers of real ones. ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... their interest and millennial habit to secure control of every important religious movement and to incorporate rather than suppress. And this incorporation is more than mere recognition: the parvenu god borrows something from the manners and attributes of the olympian society to which he is introduced. The greater he grows, the more considerable is the process of fusion and borrowing. Hindu philosophy ever seeks for the one amongst the many and popular thought, in ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... that element, and furnishing by its aid a full account of the Homeric men and the Homeric religion. It starts, after the introductory chapter, with a discussion of the several races then existing in Hellas, including the influence of the Phoenicians and Egyptians. It contains chapters on the Olympian system, with its several deities; on the Ethics and the Polity of the Heroic age; on the geography of Homer; on the characters of the Poems; presenting, in fine, a view of primitive life and primitive society as found in the ...
— MacMillan & Co.'s General Catalogue of Works in the Departments of History, Biography, Travels, and Belles Lettres, December, 1869 • Unknown
... knight-errantry." He compares, e.g., the Laestrygonians, Cyclopes, Circes, and Calypsos of Homer, with the giants, paynims, sorceresses encountered by the champions of romance; the Greek aoixoi with the minstrels; the Olympian games with tournaments; and the exploits of Hercules and Theseus, in quelling dragons and other monsters, with the similar enterprises of Lancelot and Amadis de Gaul. The critic is daring enough to give the Gothic manners the preference over the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... fell, out of the ruin it made were shaped marvels of form; Olympian castles and giant statues, images of such savage creatures as roamed devastating the earth in days when man ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... pouring from its top and illuminating not only the surrounding treetops but the broad face of this uplifted disc, roused in the awed spectator a thrill such as in mythological times might have greeted the sudden sight of Vulcan's smithy blazing on Olympian hills. But the clang of iron on iron would have attended the flash and gleam of those unexpected fires, and here all was still save for that steady throb never heard in Olympus or the halls of Valhalla, the pant of the motor eager for flight in ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... their national popularity and their direct influence on the education of the people, a description of the Olympian games is not out of place in a history of education. At first they were religious in character. They were celebrated in honor of Zeus, at Olympia, in Elis, which became the Holy Land of Greece. They took place once in four ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... World" are seven most remarkable objects of the ancient world. They are: The Pyramids of Egypt, Pharos of Alexandria, Walls and Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Temple of Diana at Ephesus, the Statue of the Olympian Jupiter, Mausoleum of Artemisia, ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... dramatists learned that cheerful and serious love of life, that solemn and manly facing of death, that sense of the finiteness of man, the inexhaustibleness of nature, which shines out in such grand, paganism, with such Olympian serenity, as of the bent brows and smiling lips of an antique Zeus, in Shakespeare, in Marlowe, in Beaumont and Fletcher, even in the sad and savage Webster. But with the abstract, with the imbibed modes of thought and feeling, with the ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... England's stateliest type of man, In port and speech Olympian; Whom no one met, at first, but took A ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... bang the book down on the table and continue pouring forth inextricable anacolutha. Everyone was listening; they had never heard anything like this before. It was a revelation. Christy chewed his finger-nails. Burgess assumed an air of Olympian content. The flood of ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... circle is involved in the idea of a circle, and a non-existent all-perfect Being is as inconceivable as a quadrilateral triangle. It is sometimes answered that in this way we may prove the existence of anything, —Titans, Chimaeras, or the Olympian Gods; we have but to define them as existing, and the proof is complete. But in this objection there is really nothing of weight; none of these beings are by hypothesis absolutely perfect, and, therefore, of their existence we ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... and consecrate By love and reverence of the Olympian sire Whom I too loved and worshipped, seeing so great, And found so gracious toward my long desire To bid that love in song before his gate Sound, and my lute be loyal to his lyre, To none save one it now may dedicate Song's ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... strenuous effort of the imagination, Wordsworth was enabled to depict his own love in excelsis, to imagine what aspect it might have worn, if it had been its destiny to deny itself at some heroic call, and to confront with nobleness an extreme emergency, and to be victor (as Plato has it) in an Olympian contest of the soul. For, indeed, the "fervent, not ungovernable, love," which is the ideal that Protesilaus is sent to teach, is on a great scale the same affection which we have been considering in domesticity and ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... old and tired and sad; it was plain that he expected attack and equally plain that he would meet it with fanatic serenity. And yet, the magnificent blunderer presented so fine an aspect of the tortured Olympian, he confronted us with so vast a dignity—the driven snow of his hair tousled upon his head and shoulders, like a storm in the higher altitudes—that he regained, in my eyes, something of his mountain ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... grand Olympian palace, however, Maia preferred to remain in her own home—a beautiful grotto on the hill Kyllene, and it was here that the ...
— Harper's Young People, May 25, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... hath its peculiar walks, cloisters, terraces, groves, theatres, pageants, games, and several recreations; every country, some professed gymnics to exhilarate their minds, and exercise their bodies. The [3272]Greeks had their Olympian, Pythian, Isthmian, Nemean games, in honour of Neptune, Jupiter, Apollo; Athens hers: some for honour, garlands, crowns; for [3273]beauty, dancing, running, leaping, like our silver games. The [3274]Romans had their feasts, as the Athenians, and Lacedaemonians held ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... aside thy mantle! Clothe thee with nakedness, O Soul, that art its priestess! For lo, thy body is thy temple. Pass unto me a magnet's stream, O amber of the flesh, And let me drink of nectar drawn From Nakedness Olympian! ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... tales how, when the sons of the gods were born, the mothers always died in agony? Maybe it's only Semele I'm thinking of. At any rate, I've sometimes wondered whether the young men of our time had to die to bring a new idea into the world... something Olympian. I'd like to know. I think I shall know. Since I've been over here this time, I've come to believe in immortality. ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... landscape was a hideous Walhalla, a fit abode for the savage giant gods of the old Scandinavians. Thor and Woden would have been at home in it. The Cyclops and Titans would have been too little for it. The Olympian deities could not be conceived of as able or willing to exist in such a hideous chaos. No creature of the Greek imagination would have been a suitable inhabitant for it except Prometheus alone. Here his eternal agony and boundless despair might not ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... an almost Gothic quaintness, more properly belonging to a rich native ballad than to the poetry of Hellas. There was a certain impropriety in his knowing so much Greek—an unfitness in the idea of marble fauns, and satyrs, and even Olympian gods, lugged in under the oaken roof and the painted light of an odd, old Norman hall. But Methley, abounding in Homer, really loved him (as I believe) in all truth, without whim or fancy; moreover, he had a good ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... thoughts he forced upon me. He was not made to bask in the sunshine of life. He is a stormy petrel. It was for his ugliness I chose him. Those dark stern features, that imperious mouth, and a brow like the Olympian Jove. He scared me into loving him. I sheltered myself upon his breast from the thunder of his brow, the lightning ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... message to deliver urbi et orbi, "Here I reign more tranquilly than at Lahore"? Perhaps but for this immortal analytical study, archaeologists might begin to puzzle their heads about him five hundred years hence, and set about writing quartos with plates (like M. Quatremere's work on Olympian Jove) to prove that Napoleon was something of a Sofi in the East before he became "Emperor of the French." Well, the wealthy shop laid siege to the poor little entresol; and after a bombardment with banknotes, entered ...
— Gaudissart II • Honore de Balzac
... Olympian mould, The admirable * * * * behold; Whom naught could dazzle or mislead, unless 'Twere the wild light of fatal cautiousness; Who never takes a step from his own door But he looks backward ere he looks before. When once he starts, it were too much to say He visibly gets farther on his way: But all ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson |
