"Afflatus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... strophe, urging grace to the criminal on the scaffold, general forgiveness of sinners and the abolition of hell, was rejected by Schiller, who later characterized the song as a 'bad poem'. The 'Song to Joy' sprang from noble sentiment and has the genuine lyric afflatus; but its author had not yet emerged from that nebulous youthful sentimentalism according to which joy, sympathy, love, friendship, virtue, happiness, God, were all very much the same thing. And the thought is a trifle incoherent. If the good Spirit above the stars ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... practitioner. It is possible that the stockbroker is like the poet, a creature who is born, and not made; a gifted and inspired being, not to be perfected by any specific education; a child of spontaneous instincts and untutored faculties. Certain it is that the divine afflatus from the nostrils of the god Plutus seemed to have descended upon Philip Sheldon; for he had entered the Stock Exchange an inexperienced stranger, and he held his place there amongst men whose boyhood had been spent in the offices of Capel-court, and ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... by nobody or not, it seems pretty well proved that nobody gave the plays to Shakspeare; so that, whether by inheritance, purchase, or divine afflatus, the man ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... be able to discuss that divine afflatus with you or not," returned Lester, with a touch of grim humor. "I have never experienced the sensation myself. All I know is that the lady ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... devotee to the tea-cup; he drank it strong to excite his flagging spirits, weak to quiet them down. He took Bohea with his facts, and Hyson with his fancy, and mixed them to secure the necessary afflatus to write his books of science and travel. Upon Hyson he would have attempted the Iliad, upon Bohea he would undertake to square the circle, discover perpetual motion, or reform the ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... within me the divine afflatus, I considered this accident rather fortunate than otherwise. I resolved to be guided by the paternal advice. I determined to follow my nose. I gave it a pull or two upon the spot, and wrote a pamphlet ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... his brain, and ploughing up those parallel ruts where the wagon trains of common ideas were jogging along in their regular sequences of association. No wonder the ancients made the poetical impulse wholly external. [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]. Goddess,—Muse,—divine afflatus, —something outside always. I never wrote any verses worth reading. I can't. I am too stupid. If I ever copied any that were worth reading, I was only ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... wholly gone, For 'twas not till the Punic wars were o'er That Rome found time Greek authors to explore, And try, by digging in that virgin field, What Sophocles and Aeschylus could yield. Nay, she essayed a venture of her own, And liked to think she'd caught the tragic tone; And so she has:—the afflatus comes on hot; But out, alas! she deems it shame ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... behind the scenes and yet were free to speak their thoughts, are unique. Written with the satirist's eye upon the object of his sarcasm, tinged with the license of his vagabondage, throbbing with the passionate and nonchalant afflatus of the wine-cup, they wing their flight like poisoned arrows or plumed serpents with unerring straightness ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... all religions depend for their origin and continuation directly upon inspiration, I state an historic fact. It may be known under other names, of credit or discredit, as mysticism, ecstasy, rhapsody, demoniac possession, the divine afflatus, the gnosis, or, in its latest christening, 'cosmic consciousness.' All are but expressions of a belief that knowledge arises, words are uttered or actions performed not through conscious ideation or reflective purpose, but through the promptings of ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... poems to the literature of the country, which have stamped him as being possessed of a more than ordinary share of the divine afflatus. Among them is "The Sexton's Spade," which has gained a world-wide celebrity. The writer has been connected with Mr. Burnett in the publication of two or three papers, which, somehow or other, never won their way into popular ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... natural bondsmen to whom it was only necessary, as in the old classic story, to show the whip to awe them into cringing submission. This theory found its fittest formula a little later, when Hillsborough, speaking for the Government he adorned, and {149} inspired by a more than usual afflatus of folly, declared that "we can grant nothing to the Americans except what they may ask with a halter round their necks." It is difficult to believe that a reasonable minister, endowed with a sufficient degree of human ability to push his way from office to office and from title to ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... awoke; for, on attentively inspecting the faces of the figures, I saw them working and writhing with all the contortions of the Pythoness or the Sibyl, labouring in the very throes of inspiration, struggling with the advent of the prophetical afflatus. At length their lips parted, when, in a low, solemn voice, that thrilled through the dark, deserted, and silent hall, they poured forth alternately the following vaticinal strain, each starting ...
— The Mirror, 1828.07.05, Issue No. 321 - The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction • Various
... an air of morning prime, As used by bards for their afflatus, Recovered from the spacious time Ere yet a triple coat of grime ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... half-a-dozen fair specimens of the Sunday-school prize; study them; discover the essential points of such composition; hit upon new attractions; then go to work methodically, so many pages a day. There's no question of the divine afflatus; that belongs to another sphere of life. We talk of literature as a trade, not of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. If I could only get that into poor Reardon's head. He thinks me a gross beast, often enough. What the devil—I mean ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... to come without an effort. Even when racked with pains, and groaning in agony, the intellectual machinery was still driven at a high pressure by something that resembled an irrepressible instinct. Stevenson can have had little or nothing of that inspiriting afflatus. He did his painstaking work conscientiously, thoughtfully; he erased, he revised, and he was hard to satisfy. In short, it was his weird—and he could not resist it—to set style and form ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... fox-hunting, which had completely fascinated her. Horse, habit, and country were all in perfect accord; her prosaic and hum-drum practice at home was now transmuted into the purest poetry, and under the promptings of this new afflatus she developed a grace and a daring which accomplished the final and irrevocable conquest of all her ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... the masters who had achieved but a single masterpiece—the artists and poets who but once in their lives had known the divine afflatus and touched the high level of perfection. Our host had been showing us a charming little cabinet picture by a painter whose name we had never heard, and who, after this single spasmodic bid for fame, had apparently ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... Greeks believed that hornets were the direct progeny of the snorting war-horse. The phrase "mad as a hornet" has become a proverb. Think, then, of a brush loaded and tipped with this martial spirit of Vespa, this cavorting afflatus, this testy animus! There is more than one pessimistic "goose-quill," of course, "mightier than the sword," which, it occurs to me in my now charitable mood, might have been thus surreptitiously voudooed by the war-like hornet, ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... the future will no doubt look on the Cromwell, not only as the most extraordinary, but the most satisfactory and effective of all Carlyle's work; although for the reasons stated, it can never have the largest measure of his literary charm or possess the full afflatus of his poetic and ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... with branching horns, the timid deer, and the sportive, frisking fawn. Even from the rugged precipices, that seemed intended by nature to lie waste and useless, depended the shaggy goat and the tender kid. Beside all this, Roderic had had communicated to him, by a supernatural afflatus, that wondrous art, as yet unknown in the plains of Albion, of turning up the soil with a share of iron, and scattering it with a small quantity of those grains which are most useful to man, to expect to gather, after a short interval, a ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... it—quite as clearly as his father. But how was it to be explained? Could Paul say, 'My good sir, I am a boy of genius. I have been filled with the Divine afflatus, and have been driven into solitude by my own thoughts. I have been so held by dreams of beauty that I have forgotten everything'? Could Paul offer that intolerable cheeky boast? And yet to offer to explain was to do that, and nothing ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... never hold him, you impudent dog, if you pull so hard on him"—He went on, putting his hands into his coat-tail pockets, and sticking himself in front of the fire, like the Delphic Pythoness upon the sacred tripod, in hopes, I suppose, of some oracular afflatus—"You will never hold him, I say, if you pull so hard on him. You ought to 'My lord' him for months yet, at least. You know, my good fellow, you must take every possible care to pick up what good breeding you can, if I take the trouble to put you in the way of good society, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... whole desire fervent—and if you have dared to breathe in a deep, long breath of the Holy Spirit—that according to your faith so it has been done to you; and that you may go forth enjoying the same power which rested on the Baptist, though you may not be conscious of any Divine afflatus, though there may have been no stroke of conscious power, no crown of flame, no rushing as of the ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... been working very little for these last few days. The truth is, I have not been able to work. The divine afflatus wouldn't come down upon me. There are times when a man's brain seems to be made of melted butter. Mine has been like that for the ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... for a livelihood get some queer propositions from those who have crude ideas about the operation of the literary machine. There is a prevailing idea among those who have never dabbled in literature very much, that the divine afflatus works a good deal like a ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... "Imelda di Lambertazzi," have no musical significance, except as belonging to a catalogue of forgotten titles. Donizetti was so poorly paid that need drove him to rapid composition, which could not wait for the true afflatus. ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... friends almost as real and dear to her as any in the flesh. Sleep forsook her eyes, meals stood untasted, day and night were all too short to enjoy the happiness which blessed her only at such times, and made these hours worth living, even if they bore no other fruit. The devine afflatus usually lasted a week or two, and then she emerged from her 'vortex', ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... strange, sudden, and unaccountable—seizing even the bravest —spreading through numbers with all the speed of an electric sympathy —and deciding in a moment the destiny of an army or the ruin of a tribe—is another of those passions, easily supposed the afflatus of some preternatural power, and easily, therefore, susceptible of personification. And the pride of men, more especially if habitually courageous and warlike, will gladly yield to the credulities which shelter a degrading and unwonted infirmity ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and not strictly truthful statement, even the large influence of the Virginia leaders could not gain the assent of the delegates in Congress. The afflatus of 1774 was rapidly subsiding, and changing economic conditions had already led many to look forward to a day when the slave-trade could successfully be reopened. More important than this, the nation as ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... knew whither, but perhaps into some cave, to remain in a hypnotic or mesmeric state until the moon was full. Then, returning to the tribe quite emaciated, he excited himself, as others do who pretend to the prophetic AFFLATUS, until he was in a state of ecstasy. These pretended prophets commence their operations by violent action of the voluntary muscles. Stamping, leaping, and shouting in a peculiarly violent manner, or beating the ground with a club, ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... it is only by special dispensation that one gets them. In a hotel such as this there is an outward show of reverence, but it is sheer hypocrisy; of real piety there is none, a sham attempt to observe the sacred rites without knowing how. I admit I don't know either. From me the divine afflatus has been withheld. But elsewhere I have been conscious of the presence. Once or twice I was blessed. Here, though, in default of shrines there should be chairs. Harvard, Yale, Columbia, should establish a few. When I was in college ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... ecstacy upon the morning and evening air. It does not ascend by gyrations, like the eagle or birds of prey. It mounts up like a human aspiration. It seems to spread out its wings and to be lifted straight upwards out of sight by the afflatus of its own happy heart. To pour out this in undulating rivulets of rhapsody is apparently the only motive of its ascension. This it is that has made it so loved of all generations. It is the singing angel of man's nearest heaven, whose vital breath is music. ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... a corollary of belief in an unconditioned Absolute. If union with such an Absolute is to be enjoyed, the will must be pulseless, the intellect atrophied, the whole soul inactive: otherwise the introduction of finite thoughts and desires inhibits the divine afflatus! ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... she merits," said he; "the 'Don' here, does not sing; he is not a poet even, except in soul, and all his inspirations flow through his brush; but he interprets poets with an art which I think is hardly less valuable than the poet's own divine afflatus." ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... since my fingers could clasp round anything at all they had loved to hold a brush; for years in my teens I had studied painting under the best teachers of technique in Italy. For two or three years I had done really good work, with the divine afflatus thrilling through every vein. And last year I had painted rather a commonplace picture and it had been hung on the line in the Academy, and so my friends all said I really was an artist now, and I modestly accepted the style and ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... ought to have the genius; they should have the lively appreciation, the keen sense of humour, the afflatus, and all that; and then those who cater for them would not need to trouble about those things—they would only have to cater, and leave the public to perceive, by means of their genius, the excellences of the fare provided. If a ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various |
