"Praxiteles" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the world before breakfast in quest of adventure or a point of view, all in white, not so very tall perhaps, but uncommonly upright—Sandra Williams got Jacob's head exactly on a level with the head of the Hermes of Praxiteles. The comparison was all in his favour. But before she could say a single word he had gone out of the Museum and ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... little; all those Italian fellows in the Renaissance used to brag. There was a sensation once common, I am sure, in the human breast—a kind of religious awe in the presence of a marble image newly created and expressing the human type in superhuman purity. When Phidias and Praxiteles had their statues of goddesses unveiled in the temples of the AEgean, don't you suppose there was a passionate beating of hearts, a thrill of mysterious terror? I mean to bring it back; I mean to thrill the world again! I mean to produce a Juno that will make you tremble, ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... ladies, who have it protest, Needs but behold the pourtraict of her part, If pourtray'd it might be by any living art; But living art may not least part expresse, Nor life-resembling pencil it can paint, All it were Zeuxis or Praxiteles— His daedale hand would faile and greatly faynt, And her perfections with his error taynt; Ne poet's wit that passeth painter farre— In picturing the parts of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various
... Michelangelo beheld God, heard that voice of thunder, and bears the terrible impress of what he saw and heard on Mount Sinai: his profound eye is scrutinizing the mysteries he vaguely sees in his prophetic dreams. Is it the Moses of the Bible? I cannot say. Is it in this way Praxiteles and Phidias would have represented Lycurgus and Solon? We may deny it boldly. The legislators in their hands would have been the embodiment of law; they would have represented an abstraction in a form whose harmonious beauty nothing ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... reputation of being well-read with the least trouble" (Life, p. 48). Burton is discoursing on injury and long-suffering. "'Tis a Hydra's head contention; the more they strive, the more they may; and as Praxiteles did by his glass [see Cardan, De Consolatione, lib. iii.], when he saw a scurvy face in it, break it in pieces; but for the one he saw, he saw many more as bad in a moment; for one injury done, they provoke another cum fanore, and twenty enemies for one."—Anatomy of Melancholy, 1893, ii. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... sculptor: Praxiteles in wood. A fine choice they have made for their gunpowder, a workman that ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... the highest perfection; and poetry exhibited all the grace and vigor of the Athenian imagination. And though time has effaced all traces of the pencil of Parrhasius, Zeuxis, and Apelles, posterity has assigned them a place in the temple of fame beside Phidias and Praxiteles, whose works are, even at the present day, unrivalled for classical purity of design and perfection of execution. And after the city had passed her noon in art, and in political greatness, she became ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... valuations has become fixed. What young man nursed on Shelley's poetry has not become a lover of freedom and an active force against all oppression? But even in maturer years art may work in this way. One cannot live constantly with the "Hermes" of Praxiteles without something of its serenity entering into one's soul to purge passion of violence, or with Goethe's poetry without its wisdom making one wise to live. The effect is not to cause any particular act, but so to mold the mind that every act performed is different ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... him. Even under these circumstances, however, the guest of the evening occupied an inconspicuous place at the reporters' table, while he was represented on the chairman's right by the bust of Poseidon, hastily modelled for the occasion by Praxiteles, and dedicated to Themistocles, who was a plain man, but whose portrait, even if he had been handsome, it was thought would not have looked well in such a position at a time when portrait-statuary was unknown. The only direct allusion to him was in the ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... Well, sir, that was not the taste of the Athenians. They preferred the society of women who would not have made any scruple about sitting as models to Praxiteles; as you know, sir, very modest women in Italy did to Canova; one of whom, an Italian countess, being asked by an English lady, "how she could bear it?" answered, "Very well; there was a good fire ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... uncultivated savage of the north, and when they are found in the darling of an enlightened people, who has added the height of gymnastic skill to the most distinguished natural qualities, such as we can now only see in the works of Phidias and Praxiteles—or in our living model of ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... their great originals, perplexed and stultified literary criticism, much as the criticism of classical art was confused by an age which drew no distinction between late Graeco-Roman sculpture and the finest work of Praxiteles or Pheidias. ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... a wondrous sculptor once, a genius in his way, Named Phidias Praxiteles Canova Merryday. He sat within his studio and said, "I really must Begin a ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... that he excelled especially in modelling horses and other animals. His two race-horses in memory of the victory of Hiero of Syracuse at Olympia in 468 were considered unsurpassable. However, it is related that Praxiteles removed the charioteer from one of the groups of Calamis and replaced it by one of his own statues "that the men of Calamis might not be inferior to his horses." Thus it would appear that Calamis was less successful in dealing with the human body, though a statue of Aphrodite ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... strict house of Pomponia, where modesty was observed, even when women were by themselves, the maiden, wonderful as a wonderful dream, harmonious as a work of Praxiteles or as a song, stood alarmed, blushing from modesty, with knees pressed together, with her hands on her bosom, and downcast eyes. At last, raising her arms with sudden movement, she removed the pins which held her hair, and in one moment, with one ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... the legends of the Jews, and confining ourselves entirely to the generally received Scriptures, there will be found sufficient food for an imagination warm as that of Homer, Apelles, Phidias, or Praxiteles. It is astonishing that such rich materials for poetry should for so many centuries have been so little regarded, appropriated, or ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... tells a story of a youth who fell in love with Praxiteles' statue of Aphrodite: see Imagines, Sec. 4. He tells the story more elaborately in ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... in a melodious voice, quoted some scraps of guide-book. Rosamund did not find what she wanted among them. She knew already about the ruins, about the Nike of Paeonius and the Hermes of Praxiteles. So she left the young Greek to his waking dream, and possessed her soul in a patience that was not difficult. She liked to dwell in anticipation. And she felt that any secret this land was about to reveal to her would be, must be, beautiful. She ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... [4017]the dragon got under the elephant's belly, and sucked his blood so long, till he fell down dead upon the dragon, and killed him with the fall, so both were ruined. 'Tis a hydra's head, contention; the more they strive, the more they may: and as Praxiteles did by his glass, when he saw a scurvy face in it, brake it in pieces: but for that one he saw many more as bad in a moment: for one injury done they provoke another cum foenore, and twenty enemies for one. Noli irritare crabrones, oppose not thyself to a ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... and Lord Bacon; among orators, Pericles, Demosthenes, Cicero, Mirabeau, Burke, Webster and Clay; among poets, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare; among painters and sculptors, Phidias, Parrhasius, Zenxis, Praxiteles, Scopas, Michael Angelo, Raphael and Rubens; among philanthropists, John Howard; among inventors, Archimedes, Watt, Fulton, Arkwright, Whitney and Morse; among astronomers, Copernicus, Galileo, Tycho Brahe, Newton, La Place and the elder Herschel. Here are sixty names of distinguished men, and ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... that position. The archaisms of old Greece are not better than such works; and as we can trace the onward course of those ancient masters of art from the rude outlines on the vases of Etruria, to the glorious works of Phidias and Praxiteles—even so, if we wish to know the true course of the revival of modern art, must we trace it in the sculpture, wall-painting, and missal-drawing, of the middle ages, until we find it assume a more definite and better-regulated style in the ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... from art not merely spirituality, depth of thought and feeling, soul-turmoil or soul- peace, but that she can form herself on the very lines and colours of art, and can reproduce the dignity of Pheidias as well as the grace of Praxiteles. Hence came their objection to realism. They disliked it on purely social grounds. They felt that it inevitably makes people ugly, and they were perfectly right. We try to improve the conditions of the race ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... the electric switch, and turned, with leaping heart, to look into the face of my visitor. It was a face of the purest Greek beauty, a face that might have served as a model for Praxiteles; the skin had a golden pallor, which, with the crisp black hair and magnetic yet velvety eyes, suggested to my fancy that this was the young Antinoues risen from the Nile, whose wraith now appeared to me out of the night. I stifled a cry of surprise, not unmingled ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... hair, rippling over the delicate ear and gathered into a knot behind, her large violet eyes and blooming white skin, her Grecian profile and stately yet flowing form, might have become an Aphrodite of Xeuxis or Praxiteles; but her serene and gracious countenance beamed with a pure seraphic light which is wanting to the classical goddess, and must be sought in the Madonnas of Raphael. Moreover, she had an indescribable ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro |
