"Apocalyptist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... communications of his penned in hours of exaltation, when visions of Constantine's city, the mosque of Aya Sofia towering aloft, warmed his fancy and the sheen of Byzantine brocades and the quaint paraphernalia of bygone days inspired his apocalyptic words. His language in those telegrams and letters was highfaluting and bombastic. And I read other communications of his—mostly abject appeals for help—devoid of dignity and manliness, when the gloom of dissipated illusions was made unbearable ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... next place, look for the preconceptions that have a definite historical origin; those, for instance, flowing from the pre-Christian, apocalyptic literature of the Jews, taking the Maccabean legend of Daniel as the centre of inquiry—those flowing from Alexandrian Judaism and the school of Philo—those flowing from the Palestinian schools of exegesis. Examine your synoptic gospels, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... I feel that every change upon this earth Is bought with sacrifice. My yearnings fail To reach that high apocalyptic mount Which shows in bird's-eye view a perfect world, Or enter warmly into other joys Than those of faulty, struggling human kind, That strain upon my soul's too perfect wing Ends in ignoble floundering: ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... by terror and terrific beauty over my dreams, lay in the awful political mission which at that time it fulfilled. The mail-coaches it was that distributed over the face of the land, like the opening of apocalyptic vials, the heart-shaking news of Trafalgar, of Salamanca, of Vittoria, of Waterloo. These were the harvests that, in the grandeur of their reaping, redeemed the tears and blood in which they had been sown. Neither was the meanest peasant so much below ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... the brave and blessed, And, for his soul's sustaining, The apocalyptic eyes of Christ— ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... Testament which declares (and, as we have seen in the last paragraph, experience seems largely to corroborate the view) that the Kingdom of God does not come in this world but in the next. I refer (only I dislike using a word which few soldiers at the front will understand) to New Testament "apocalyptic," which seems to present a vision of this world as immediately to pass away in catastrophe and of the arrival of another ...
— Thoughts on religion at the front • Neville Stuart Talbot
... democracy of his desire and faith was one not devoted to material interests; to spiritualise the democracy became henceforth his aim. In the Paroles d'un Croyant he announced in rhythmical prose his apocalyptic visions. "It is," said a contemporary, "a bonnet rouge planted on a cross." In his elder years Lamennais believed in a spiritual power, a common thought, a common will directing society, as the soul directs the body, but, like the soul, invisible. His metaphysics, in which ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... upon too minute and specific interpretation. But, at the same time, we must not forget that, from the very beginning of the Jewish Revelation, from the time when the seven-branched candlestick was appointed for the Tabernacle, right down to the day when the Apocalyptic Seer saw in Patmos the Son of Man walking in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks, the metaphor has had one meaning. The aggregate of God's people are intended to be, as Jesus told us immediately after He ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... down a branch of this tree of life and wave it. Let him throw it down and kindle it. Let all the way from Mount Zalmon to Shechem be filled with the tossing joy. Good news! This bonfire of the Gospel shall consume the last temple of sin, and will illumine the sky with apocalyptic joy that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners. Any new plan that makes a man quit his sin, and that prostrates a wrong, I am as much in favor of as though all the doctors, and the bishops, and the archbishops, and the synods, and the academical gownsmen of Christianity sanctioned ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... whose prerogative was Victory, what vision did arise? An apocalyptic vision: blackness of darkness forever, and side by side with chaos, fair fields of living green, through which a young girl walked towards a womanhood as fair as hers who sat beside him. Unconscious of wrong that child, and yet how deeply, how variously wronged! If he had meditated ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... be hurried, by his sense of humour and justice, into that remark about the case of Providence and the Baker, I should be sorry for any of his children who should have stumbled into the same attitude of criticism. In the apocalyptic style of the housekeeper of Invermay, woe be to that person! But there was no fear; husband and sons all entertained for the pious, tender soul the same chivalrous and moved affection. I have spoken with one who remembered her, and who had been the intimate and equal of her sons, and I found ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with the most docile air possible while he explained to me all the ins and outs in his system of the universe, past, present, and future,—heard him dilate calmly on the Millennium, and expound prophetic symbols, marching out before me his whole apocalyptic menagerie of beasts and dragons with heads and horns innumerable, to all which I gave edifying attention, taking occasion now and then to turn a compliment in favor of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... David had a suggestion to make. He thought that Lucien's poem, Saint John in Patmos, was possibly too biblical to be read before an audience but little familiar with apocalyptic poetry. Lucien, making his first appearance before the most exacting public in the Charente, seemed to be nervous. David advised him to take Andre de Chenier and substitute certain pleasure for a dubious delight. Lucien was a perfect reader, the listeners would enjoy listening to him, and ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... clownish young men," were raised up the great champions of the Truth,—though sorely troubled by the wiles of Duessa, by the craft of the arch-sorcerer, by the force and pride of the great powers of the Apocalyptic Beast and Dragon, finally overcomes them, and wins the deliverance of ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... the book of Revelations, his favorite portion of the blessed Book, the others listening spellbound. Even Otto Relstaub, who saw and heard little of genuine Christian teachings in his cheerless home, was touched as never before by the indescribably solemn story of the apocalyptic vision. ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... loved a fugue. Ah, the fugues they had! And then a voice crossed Mr Sharnall's memory, saying, "When I am here myself, I beg that there may be no more fugue." "No more fugue"—there was a finality in the phrase uncompromising as the "no more sea" of the Apocalyptic vision. It made Mr Sharnall smile bitterly; he woke from his daydream, and ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... woods—her Old Guard, sylvan-plumed— The far-off Huron, like a silver thread, The clue to some enchanted labyrinth, Dimly perceived beyond the stretch of woods, Th' approaches tinted by a purple haze, And softened into beauty like the dream Of some rapt seer's Apocalyptic mood; And when at Rockridge we sat looking out Upon the softened shadows of the night, And the wild glory of the throbbing stars; Where'er we bent our Eden-tinted way: My brain was a weird wilderness of Thought: My heart, love's sea of passion tossed and ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... should begin to labour in that vineyard of the Lord; and Baltic could start them on a new career for the glory of God and the sowing of the good seed. With thoughts like these, Gabriel walked along, wrapped in almost apocalyptic visions, and saw with inspired gaze the past sorrows of himself and Bell fade and vanish in the glory of a God-guided, God-provided future. It was not the career he had shadowed forth for himself; but he resigned his ambitions for Bell's sake, and aided by love ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... to false teachers and surrendering to the guidance of evil counsellors, the Lord is constantly admonishing her to heed the voice of her true Teacher and Guide, the Holy Ghost. How forcibly this admonition is introduced into the great Apocalyptic drama! As in the opening of the successive seals, representing the judgments of God upon apostate Christendom, the cry is repeated, "Come"! "Come"! "Come"! "Come"! (Rev. 6)—as though the church under chastisement would repeatedly relearn ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... not arise sometimes great demonic forces, incarnated in formidable personalities, who are really and truly "humani generis hostes," enemies of the human race? The weird mediaeval dream of the anti-Christ, drawn from Apocalyptic literature, symbolises ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... and the treasury of France. The thunders of battle were daily heard, and the paths of these hostile bands were ever marked by smoldering ruins and blood. Vials of woe were emptied, unsurpassed in apocalyptic vision. In the siege of Brisac, the wretched inhabitants were reduced to such a condition of starvation, that a guard was stationed at the burying ground to prevent them from devouring the putrid carcasses ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... there were any historical event which floated before the prophet's mind is wholly uncertain. If there were a smaller judgment upon some city of the enemy, it passes in his view into a world-wide judgment; and my text is purely ideal, imaginative, and apocalyptic. Its nearest ally is the similar vision of the Book of the Revelation, where, when Babylon sank with a splash like a millstone in the stream, the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... every variety of form, consists of these two things,—an exact and laborious observance of external religious duties, and a heart satisfied with itself while it is devoted to the world. The species is described for all times and places in the Apocalyptic Epistle to the Church in Sardis: "Thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead" (Rev. iii. 1). There is a profession of godliness wanting its power; Christ's name comes readily to the lip, but the god of this world possesses the heart and ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... heated pulpiteer, Not preaching simple Christ to simple men, Announced the coming doom, and fulminated Against the scarlet woman and her creed: For sideways up he swung his arms, and shriek'd 'Thus, thus with violence,' ev'n as if he held The Apocalyptic millstone, and himself Were that great Angel; 'Thus with violence Shall Babylon be cast into the sea; Then comes the close.' The gentle-hearted wife Sat shuddering at the ruin of a world; He at his own: but ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... letter, and each was exactly like the others in every word and every line. His bill for midnight oil must have been extraordinary, for he was a business man and had to earn his living by day. Kept within the limits of sanity by a religion without apocalyptic visions, he was saved from predicting the end of the world by mystic calculations, but he used them to prove everything else and fervently believed that endless meanings were deducible from the numerical ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... predicting the birth of a Saviour, probably contained a prophetic allusion to the phenomenon in question; "There shall come a star out of Jacob, and a sceptre shall rise out of Israel;" and with similar reference, we read in the apocalyptic vision, "I am ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... rosebuds; howsoe'er remote, In opposition or consent, Each thing, or person, or event, Or seeming neutral howsoe'er, All, in the live, electric air, Awoke, took aspect, and confess'd In her a centre of unrest, Yea, stocks and stones within me bred Anxieties of joy and dread. O, bright apocalyptic sky O'erarching childhood! Far and nigh Mystery and obscuration none, Yet nowhere any moon or sun! What reason for these sighs? What hope, Daunting with its audacious scope The disconcerted heart, affects These ceremonies and respects? Why stratagems in everything? Why, why not kiss her in the ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore |
