"Gordian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... must die to solve the problem of Deity's existence."[263] "The existence of God is a problem to which the mathematics of human intelligence seems to me to furnish no solution,"[264] "a problem without a solution, a hieroglyphic without an interpretation, a gordian knot still untied, a question unanswered, a thread still unravelled, a labyrinth untrod."[265] That there is here a strong expression of Skeptical Atheism is evident; but is there not something more? Does not Skeptical Atheism insensibly transform itself into Dogmatic, when ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... polished lucubrations—aye, not even if they burn the night-light oil and hear the chimes at midnight! I will not be hoodwinked by the superficiality of your cui bono, and shall make you the answer that I am willing for an exceedingly paltry honorarium to rush into the Gordian knot and write you the most superior essays on every conceivable and inconceivable subject under the sun, as per enclosed samples which I forward respectfully for your delightful and golden opinions, guaranteeing faithfully that all of your readers in every hemisphere and postal district ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... Gordian knot is ready to be cut, God sends the Alexander! Does not the Crown Prince William's confession of his belief in courage as the highest flower of the human spirit, in his book "Deutschland in Waffen," sound ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... over which Sir Lucien Pyne presided, and which must be kept hidden from Monte Irvin; and it was not until she thus contemplated cutting herself adrift from it all that she perceived the Gordian knot which bound her to the drug coterie. How far, yet how smoothly, by all but imperceptible stages she had glided down the stream since that night when the gold box had lain upon her dressing-table! Kazmah's drug store in Bond Street had few secrets for her; or so she believed. She knew that the ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... place side by side with him in the new spheres to which he was mounting—that, in short, she was a drag on his career. Being, by all accounts, a girl of remarkable force of character, she resolved to cut the Gordian knot by leaving London, and, fearing lest her affianced husband's conscientiousness should induce him to sacrifice himself to her; dreading also, perhaps, her own weakness, she made the parting absolute, and the place of her refuge a mystery. A theory has been ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... to like my mother-in-law, but I shall always be grateful to her for the way she cut the Gordian knot ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... of God, there is a time for all things; a time when the sword may cut the Gordian knot, and set free the principles of right and justice, bound up in the meshes of hatred, revenge, and tyranny, that the pens of mighty men like Clay, Webster, Crittenden, and Lincoln were ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... however, seek to explain, by various profound theories, the efficient causes of asserted mesmeric cures, a member of the Church of England, and popular preacher at Liverpool, the Rev. Hugh M. Neill, M.A., has cut the Gordian knot, by a sermon preached at St Jude's Church, on April 10th, 1842, and published in Nos. 599 and 600 of the Penny Pulpit, price twopence. By this sermon it appears to have occurred to the philosophic ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... idly some old Gordian knot, Unskilled to sunder, and too weak to cleave, And with ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... whole Sex is made of nothing else: Thou mayst sooner untie the Gordian Knot, expound the Problems of the monstrous Sphynx, and read what is decreed in the mysterious Book of Fate, than unfold ...
— The City Bride (1696) - Or The Merry Cuckold • Joseph Harris
... of these continuous and obstinate quarrels between the regular curas and the bishops and civil authorities, and as if to cut the Gordian knot, the government ordered, in 1753, that all the curacies be handed over to secular priests of the country. The execution of this decree presented so many difficulties, and raised so many remonstrances that it was decided in 1757 that, until it should be ordered ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... remembering Gail's gay company and the gloom of understanding the complete implications of the Colonel's clarifying lectures. Against the background of his remarks, I could find myself appreciating the Ghopal-Klueng-Natalenko reasoning: the only way to cut the Gordian knot was to have another Solar League ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... constantly arises to perplex the conscience in private life as this—which, in principle, is almost beyond solution. Sometimes, indeed, the coarse realities of law step in to cut that Gordian knot which no man can untie; for it is an actionable offence to give a character wilfully false. That little fact at once exorcises all aerial phantoms of the conscience. True: but this coarse machinery applies only to those cases in which the servant has been guilty ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... few moments of silence, and put her hands on his round, solid head. Her yellow, silken house-gown, faintly scented, touched his shoulders. "Poor Lester," she said. "You certainly have tied yourself up in a knot. But it's a Gordian knot, my dear, and it will have to be cut. Why don't you discuss this whole thing with her, just as you have with me, and see ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... which we will burn again the incense and benjamin of friendship. Blow again the sparks now so nearly extinguished of our happy boyish days; revive again the holy flames of our youthful affections; and, above all things, have the scissors ready which are to cut the Gordian knot of my complicated diseases. Soon, in shaking you by the hand, my shadow shall say ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... of the poem not being expressly stated in the original or early black-letter translation, many persons—whose love of country prompted their wishes—have endeavoured to attach a nationality to these gordian knots of erudition. An Hibernian gentleman of immense research—the celebrated "Darby Kelly"—has openly asserted the whole affair to be decidedly of Milesian origin: and, amid a vast number of corroborative ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... down to write to you, as I had intended, I mounted my pony and took a long ride to collect my thoughts. Sitting, walking, or riding is all the same. I feel as much puzzled as ever, and undetermined whether or not to cut the Gordian knot. Except my wife, there is not a friend whom I dare advise with. I have not once ventured to mention the business at all to my brother, on account of the cursed mysteries and injunctions of secrecy connected with it. I know he would blame me for ever engaging in it, for he has a very ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... to the education of Plotinus. He was twenty-eight when he went up to the University of Alexandria. For eleven years he diligently attended the lectures of Ammonius. Then he went on the Emperor Gordian's expedition to the East, hoping to learn the philosophy of the Hindus. The Upanishads would have puzzled Plotinus, had he reached India; but he never did. Gordian's army was defeated in Mesopotamia, no "blessed word" to Gordian, and Plotinus hardly ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... many changes of countenance, which Jekyl watched carefully, without pressing him for an answer. At length he replied, "There is much in your proposal, Captain Jekyl, which I might be tempted to accede to, as one manner of unloosing this Gordian knot, and a compromise by which Miss Mowbray's future tranquillity would be in some degree provided for. But I would rather trust a fanged adder than your friend, unless I saw him fettered by the strongest ties of interest. ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... case. I do not think the time has come when the central question can be approached with any safety. Rough and ready methods (such as I am afraid I must call the first part of 'Supernatural Religion') may indeed cut the Gordian knot, but they do not untie it. A number of preliminary questions will have to be determined with a greater degree of accuracy and with more general consent than has been done hitherto. The Jewish and Christian literature ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... a time. Twenty elephants contended, according, to Pliny, against a band of six hundred captives. Probus reserved six hundred gladiators for one of his festivals, and massacred, on another, two hundred lions, twenty leopards, and three hundred bears. Gordian let loose three hundred African hyenas and ten Indian tigers in the arena. Every corner of the earth was ransacked for these wild animals, which were so highly valued that, in the time of Theodosius, it was ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... is in Debussy the subtle, insinuating dissonance. Nor is the French composer wanting in audacious strokes. Once for all he stood the emancipator of the art from the stern rule of individual vocal procedure. He cut the Gordian knot of harmonic pedagogy by the mere weapon of poetic elision. He simply omitted the obvious link by a license ancient in poetry and even in prose. He devised in his harmonies the paradox, that is the essence of art, that ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... Gordian knot of law at a stroke, by saying, "Get the grace of God in your hearts, and it is really no difference what you do, or do not do." Now this is a very old idea. The elect few who get their heads into a certain mental stratum have always come ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... he was, had quitted Rome and marched through Moesia and Thrace into Asia, accompanied by a formidable army and by at least one good general. Timesitheus, whose daughter Gordian had recently married, though his life had hitherto been that of a civilian, exhibited on his elevation to the dignity of praetorian prefect considerable military ability. The army, nominally commanded by Gordian, really acted under his orders. With it Timesitheus ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... Gordian knot, however,—a church wedding, with cards for all the friends, and a reception at home. They would take the train at six from Jersey City. Mr. Underhill was rather sorry not to have an old-fashioned festivity. But Miss Cynthia said this was just ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... from under her cloak, and from her pockets.] This is The Gordian Knot,—and this Peregrine Pickle. Here are The Tears of Sensibility, and Humphrey Clinker. This is The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, written by herself, and here the second ...
— The Rivals - A Comedy • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... and at the same time cheapen it to small users—that was the Gordian knot; and the man who unquestionably did most to untie it was Edward J. Hall. Mr. Hall founded the telephone business in Buffalo in 1878, and seven years afterwards became the chief of the long-distance traffic. He was then, and is to-day, one of the statesmen of the telephone. ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... like the soft floating movement of a dream. He was more passive than active in the affair; though, if his reason had not fully approved of the step he was tending to—if he had not believed that a second marriage was the very best way of cutting the Gordian knot of domestic difficulties, he could have made an effort without any great trouble to himself, and extricated himself without pain from the mesh of circumstances. ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... the paps that feel like sieved silk, And press'd a little they will weep pure milk. Then comes the belly, seated next below, Like a fair mountain in Riphean snow, Where Nature, in a whiteness without spot, Hath in the middle tied a Gordian knot. Now love invites me to survey her thighs, Swelling in likeness like two crystal skies, Which to the knees by Nature fastened on, Derive their ever well 'greed motion. Her legs with two clear calves, like silver ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... mixture. There was so much ceremony that the dinner threatened to be very dull, and interminable as well, from the indecision of the guests as to the dishes they should accept. It was Madame Weber's clear head and decided hand that cut this Gordian knot. She turned to her child. "Eat everything," she said, "it ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... lady had owned a private pair of cherubic wings, she could not have prepared for flight with greater assurance or activity. She tightened her waist-belt, wrapped her shawl firmly round her, fastened her bonnet strings in a Gordian knot, and finally, holding out her hand to her friend, as if they had suddenly changed characters, said, "Come, are you ready?" with a tremendous show of decision. She even led the wondering Aileen along ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... cannot speak or be silent; I am full of suspicions, and therefore listen to nothing; I am in a hurry to be gone.' He wonders how this trouble is to be cured. He speaks of it as a prejudice produced from 'a gordian complication of feelings, which must take time to unravel.' And then, with a good-humored, characteristic touch, he drops the subject, saying, 'After all, I do think better of women than to suppose they care whether Mister John Keats, five feet high, likes ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... and personal involvements grew more complex. At what moment might a pressure from above close down on his pen, and with what demand? How should he act in the crisis thus forced, at Marrineal's slow pleasure? Take Edmonds's Gordian recourse; resign? But he was on the verge of debt. His investments had gone badly; he prided himself on the thought that it was partly through his own immovable uprightness. Now, this threat to his badly needed percentages! ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... demonstrated a law for the revolutions and changes of systems of worlds in infinite space. Or, are the revolutions of history, like the volcanic disturbances of our planet earth, in a sort, abnormal? They seem to come, like the deus ex machina of the Roman poet, to cut the Gordian knots that perplex statesmen and bewilder nations. The affairs of men get so tangled up sometimes, that to prevent anarchy and chaos, God sends revolutions, which sweep away the effete institutions and old, worn-out systems, to replace ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... are only stating the problem that lies before every one at the outset of his life, and you want to cut the Gordian knot with a sword. If that is the way of it, dear boy, you must be an Alexander, or to the hulks you go. For my own part, I am quite contented with the little lot I mean to make for myself somewhere in the country, when I mean to step into my father's shoes ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... who took up arms in defence of America's independence; not alone those who, in preceding wars,—Indian and French,—had gained their liberty, that swelled the ranks of the colonial militia; but slaves, inspired by the hope of freedom, went to the front, as Attucks had done when he cut the Gordian knot that held the colonies to Great Britain. "From that moment we may date the severance of the British Empire," said Daniel Webster, in his Bunker Hill oration, referring to the massacre on the ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... were turned and twisted in a more intricate and perplexed manner than they are usually found in other Hearts; insomuch that the whole Heart was wound up together in a Gordian Knot, and must have had very irregular and unequal Motions, whilst it was employed in its ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... democracy in all the Greek cities; and as he passed through Gordium, cut the Gordian-knot, which none should loose but the ruler of Asia. During a dangerous illness at Tarsus, brought on by bathing in the Cydnus, he received a letter insinuating that Philip, his physician, had been bribed by Darius ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... foredeck and hind deck of all our opposites' probations do resolve and rest finally into the authority of a law, and authority they use as a sharp knife to cut every Gordian knot which they cannot unloose, and as a dreadful peal to sound so loud in all ears that reason cannot be heard, therefore we certiorate you with Calvin, that a acquievistis imperio, pessimo laqueo vos in duistis—If ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... and their letters were scarcely read, and rarely answered. Even good Miss Grizzy's elaborate epistle, in which were curiously entwined the death of her brother and the birth and christening of her grand-nephew, in a truly Gordian manner, remained disentangled. Had her Ladyship only read to the middle of the seventh page she would have learned the indisposition of her daughter, with the various opinions thereupon; but poor Miss Grizzy's labours were vain, for her letter remains a dead letter to this ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... of all speculative men of talent?" said she. "Do they not all sit wrapt as you now are, cutting imaginary silken cords with their fine edges, while those not so highly tempered sever the everyday Gordian knots of the world's struggle and win wealth and renown? Steel too highly polished, edges too sharp, do not do for this world's work, ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... was found to be making two and a half tons of water per hour. A turn of her propeller the other way caused the now useless hawser to fall off. When recovered by the divers, this mass of steel wire was a gordian ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... closely connected with the intrigues against General Schuyler, and thus more remotely with the Conway cabal and the treason of Arnold. About the time of Burgoyne's invasion the association of Green Mountain Boys endeavoured to cut the Gordian knot by declaring Vermont an independent state, and applying to the Continental Congress for admission into the Union. The New York delegates in Congress succeeded in defeating this scheme, but the Vermont people went on and framed their constitution. ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... did not, for they had no chance. The worms crawled round and round the canvas bag, and played at making Gordian knots with each other, while several fish came and looked at the unbaited hook which Dexter offered for their inspection, but preferred to leave the ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... Maximus and Balbinus, on July 15, 238, fell victims to their own virtues at the hands of the Praetorian guard, Gordian became emperor. At the end of six years, he, too, after an innocent and virtuous reign, succumbed to the ambition of the prefect Philip, while engaged in a war with Persia, and in March 244, the Roman world recognized the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... of Alexander's boyhood is that of the "Gordian knot," which it was said could only be untied by the person who was destined to conquer Asia. After striving in vain to loosen this famous knot, it is said Alexander impatiently drew his sword and cut it—thus prefiguring what ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 25, April 29, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... we read of a spectacle by the younger Gordian of "twenty zebras, ten elks, ten giraffes, thirty African hyenas, ten Indian tigers, a rhinoceros, ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... question, the other quickly interposed some delightful circumstance about the excursion, and called upon the first to corroborate his testimony; neither, in Alexander's place, would have done anything but assure the other that the Gordian knot was very peculiarly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... cul-de-sac resolving itself at the very last moment into a promising corridor toward the outer air. At every rebuff it is my happiness to be hopelessly bewildered; and I gape with admiration when the Gordian knot is untied. If the author be old-fashioned enough to apostrophize the Gentle Reader, I know he must mean me, and docilely give ear, and presently tumble head-foremost into the treacherous pit he has digged for ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... which he wrote from London, detailing his adventures in the great metropolis, was read in my presence to a circle of admiring friends with expressions of wonder and surprise. This little circumstance made it clear to me that the easiest way out of my difficulty was to out the Gordian knot, run away from Dr. Foshay, and join ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... sufficient to rear me to the pinnacle of fortune and fame. Thus had I dreamed on for three years. One of my many objects of study engrossed the greater portion of my thoughts—the mysterious tie that united soul and body. Could I untie this Gordian knot—and I was vain enough to hope I might—then would I rank amongst earth's brightest ornaments, and fill a niche with Newton and Bacon. This extraordinary subject had even when at school, engaged the greater part of ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... Cecil laid himself out to be agreeable, and Miss Arminster, who was naturally aware of the awkwardness of his position, did her best to promote conversation, while Spotts almost immediately cut the Gordian knot by excusing himself on the plea of ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... "Ay—the Gordian knot. Had she lived and had my father smoked the affair—Gad! he would ha' broke me; he would so!" he repeated, and emptied ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... conquered by Frederick the king, and must submit to him. So soon as Frederick the Great recognizes the fact that the man in him is subjected by the enchanting Barbarina, like Alexander the Great, he will cut the gordian knot, and release himself from even the soft ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... was cutting the Gordian knot, and answering the conclusion of an argument not by refuting it but by opposing thereto a contrary argument. Which procedure does not conform to the laws for philosophical disputes. Notwithstanding, most of the Cartesians contented themselves with ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... proves the good father superior even to Archimedes, for he can turn the world without anything to rest his lever upon. It is only surpassed by the dexterity with which the sturdy old Jesuit in another place cuts the gordian knot—"Nothing," says he, "is more easy. The inhabitants of both hemispheres are certainly the descendants of the same father. The common father of mankind received an express order from Heaven to people the world, and accordingly it has been peopled. To bring ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... through the wide world. The sun shall sooner lose his splendour, the pale moon drop from her orb, the sea forget to ebb and flow, and all things change their course, than Sabra prove inconstant to Saint George of England. Let, then, the priest of Hymen knit that gordian knot, the knot of wedlock, which death alone has ...
— The Seven Champions of Christendom • W. H. G. Kingston
... merely expresses an attitude—he becomes a reference point. He can be marked, measured and entered on a graph. His actions can be grouped with others and the action of the group measured. Man—and his society—then becomes a systems problem that can be fed into a computer. We've cut the Gordian knot of the three-L's and are on ...
— The K-Factor • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... face of it, there was no question of possession. The man being weaker than the woman would have been only too glad to elope, and thus cut the Gordian knot of the unhappy situation. But the woman, having acted from a high sense of duty, which Chaldea could not rise to, evidently was determined to continue to be a martyr. The question was, could she keep up that pose in the face of the undeniable ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... had entered the tangle, everything was changed. That clear-eyed fellow might see through to the very bottom of Mark's tidewater plans. He might step in and cut the Gordian knot by simply paying off Jerry's debts. Telling the boy to laugh at the danger of exposure, Doone could snatch him away to the West. So Mark came to forestall Ronicky, by sending Jerry out of town and out of reach, for the time being. ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... "'Now Gordian knots were tied to be By magistrates divided; We cut them—and the severed ends Do much ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... perplexity, &c. (see uncertainty); intricacy; entanglement; cross fire; awkwardness, delicacy, ticklish card to play, knot, Gordian knot, dignus vindice nodus, net, meshes, maze; coil, ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... legend of the Mysteries, or Spurious Freemasonry, without violating the religious principles of the Primitive Freemasonry of the Jews; but the necessity for such invention never existed, and before the completion of the temple a melancholy event is said to have occurred, which served to cut the Gordian knot, and the death of its chief architect has supplied Freemasonry with its appropriate legend—a legend which, like the legends of all the Mysteries, is used to testify our faith in the resurrection of the body and the immortality ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... thought, were a kind of star map made by shepherds when Istria was wooded, to direct them in driving their flocks. Here are two inscriptions mentioning an entirely unknown god and goddess, and the inscription of Gordian in which the name of Nesactium occurs, the discovery of which fixed the site of the most important of the Istrian cities, the scene of the massacre of the women and children by the hands of their husbands and fathers, to prevent them from ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... her memory: the dull red carpet, the antique chairs, the stairway hung with old engravings, climbing upward to the room which she was never again to enter as before. The temptation assailed her to cut once and for all the Gordian knot, and obeying its impulse, she began to walk down the flagging ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... unknown, Whilst Herod did usurp his royal throne, Banish'd his native country, every day, Like Moses, at the brink of death he lay. But that storm's over, and blest be that hand That gave him conduct to his peaceful land; Where this great King the Gordian knot unties, Of Heaven's, the kingdom's, and his enemies; Not with the sword, but with his grace and love, Giving to those their lives that for his strove: Never did person so much mercy breath Since our blest Saviour's and his father's death. In fine, his actions may our pattern be, ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... Macedonia, and subdued the people of Thrace, Illyria, and Greece? Had he not led his troops over the Hellespont, defeated the Persians, and conquered the countries of Asia Minor, Lycia, Cappadocia, and Phrygia, where with a blow of his sword he had severed the Gordian knot, a token of supremacy over Asia? At Issus, on the rectangular bay facing Cyprus, he had inflicted a crushing defeat on the great King of Persia, Darius Codomannus, who with the united forces of his kingdom had come to meet him. ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... occasion, said all that was to be said about that matter. Ware sincerely mourned Daisy, for in a way he had been fond of her. Still, he could not but confess that a marriage between them would have been a mistake, and that drastic as was the cutting of the Gordian knot, it relieved him from an impossible position. His love for Anne would always have stood between himself and the unfortunate girl, and her jealousy would have ruined both their lives. Certainly he saw no chance of making Anne ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... New Marriage Act passed in 1753 a Fleet marriage was indissoluble. It was an illegal act, and the parties were punishable; but the Gordian knot was quite as secure as if it had been tied in the most orthodox manner. The great difficulty to my mind was the onus probandi. The marriage might have taken place; the marriage be to all intents and purposes a good marriage; but how produce ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... been comfortably certain whether we ought not to march into the restaurant arm in arm, but the penniless goddess (who had perhaps been brought to Europe as a subtle combination of etiquette-mistress and ladies'-maid) cut the Gordian knot with a quick glance, to our intense relief; and we filed in anyhow, places being indicated to Terry and me on ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... sealed, and which he apparently hesitated to surrender. Something further he wished to say; but the President was eager and did not perceive it, and took and hastily opened the letter. 'This,' said he, looking toward me with a triumphant air, 'cuts the Gordian Knot. I can now dispose of this subject without difficulty, I see my way clear.' Chase sat by Stanton, fronting the fire; the President beside the fire, his face toward them, Stanton nearest him. I was on the sofa, near the east window. 'Mr. President,' said Stanton, with solemnity, ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... the construction of the place. The Gordian knot was all very well in its way: so was the maze of Hampton Court: so is the maze at the Beulah Spa: so were the ties of stiff white neckcloths, when the difficulty of getting one on, was only to be equalled by the apparent impossibility of ever getting it off again. But what involutions ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... a vengeance. It is so easy to say "I'll cut that Gordian knot!" and then pack one's tooth-brush and start off unknotting, but it is quite another matter when one comes face to face with the problem and is met by the "buts" of those who have previously been ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... one or two important particulars in which he had a manifest and striking advantage over the generality of young men. Where, for instance, Herbert, Reynolds, and Van Tromp had, through indolence or hurry, passed over the Gordian knots which had occurred in the course of their studies, Sidney seems to have stopped, and sitten deliberately and patiently down, resolved not to cut but to untie them before he rose, so as not only to make himself master of the knowledge ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... a gold coin of the Emperor Gordian—the same who built the amphitheatre of El-Djem—which was found here, as well as some lamps and sculptured fragments of stone. Bruce speaks of cipollino columns; they are still to be seen, if ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... the same thing over again; a woman against two children. This shows how strong she is; you can't realize what she has done—even when you see it. An heir was wanted to those estates. Love cried out for one. Hate cried out for one. Nature denied one. She has cut the Gordian knot; cut it as boldly as the lowest woman in Huntercombe would have cut it under ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... their heart-strings became entangled, people would not find the marriage tie so binding; it is a man's purse-strings and a woman's apron-strings that really form the Gordian knot. ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland
... survival of large fragments of the records of the Brotherhood, dating from shortly after the battle of Actium, show that it continued to work and to flourish down to the reign of Gordian (A.D. 241), and from other sources we know that it was still in existence in the fourth century.[919] These records have been found on the site of the sacred grove, at the fifth milestone on the via Campana between Rome and Ostia, which from the time of this revival onwards was the centre of ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... should he test that problem? He wished to seethe world that might be carnal. True; but, he wished to convert the world.... was not that spiritual? Was he not going on a noble errand?.... thirsting for toil, for saintship, for martyrdom itself, if it would but come and cut the Gordian knot of all temptations, and save him-for he dimly felt that it would save him—a whole sea of trouble in getting safe and triumphant out of that world into which he had not yet entered .... and his heart ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... it cannot be! I think better of Clem than to believe he, too, has made a mistake, like Quimby, and fallen in love with the wrong woman!" then starting up, she exclaimed, tragically, "Who? ah! who shall cut the Gordian knot and bring about a crisis that shall cause this 'wired love' to terminate in ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... maintained the pomp suitable to their standing, while they gnawed secretly and unseen at the hard crust of want. Thus from father to son the debts were constantly increasing, and the revenues becoming smaller and smaller. If I do not make an end of this, and sever the Gordian knot like Alexander, instead of attempting the wearisome task of untying it, I shall soon present to the court and nobility the sad spectacle of a Count Rhedern who is compelled to give up his hotel, his equipage, his furniture, and his servants, ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... Khalid, have yet a little to do with you. Such arguments about the Divine Law and the Canon Law, about alms and spiritual beggars, might cut the Gordian knot with your uncle, but—and whether it be good or bad English, we say it—they cut no ice with the Church. Yes, Mother Church, under whose wings you and your cousin were born and bred, and under whose wings you and your cousin would be married, ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... hath every advantage over him in the wrong," answered her lover, rather evasively; "but would that I could persuade thee to cut the Gordian knot and put an end to this torturing suspense, by flying with me, and giving me a lawful right to be thy protector according to the wishes ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... especially on questions upon which the party might be divided. On the other hand, the right to refuse to vote was a long-standing one and had been used over and over again by Republicans as well as Democrats. Reed, however, had made up his mind to cut the Gordian knot. Looking over the House he called the names of about forty Democrats, directed the clerk to make note of them and then declared a quorum present. The meaning of the act was not lost on the opposition. Pandemonium broke loose. Members rushed up the aisle as if to attack the Speaker, ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... friends fit in with some tenable theory of the nature of his ailment, were about all we could do. Possibly it was because he realized to an uncommon degree the tremendous impediment of this narrow limitation that Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of Homoeopathy, cut the Gordian knot in sheer rebelliousness, and proclaimed, as he virtually did, that a diagnosis was not necessary to the successful treatment of disease, but that one only needed to know empirically how to ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... burst into an immoderate fit of laughter; on recovering from which, he said to Mr Asterias, 'You have caught an odd fish, indeed.' Mr Toobad was highly exasperated at this unseasonable pleasantry; but Mr Hilary softened his anger, by producing a knife, and cutting the Gordian knot of his reticular envelopment. 'You see,' said Mr Toobad, 'you see, gentlemen, in my unfortunate person proof upon proof of the present dominion of the devil in the affairs of this world; and I have no doubt but that the apparition of this night was Apollyon himself in disguise, ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... involve the assumption of sudden and violent catastrophes and revolutions of the whole earth, and its inhabitants—theories which are restrained by no reference to existing analogies, and in which a desire is manifested to cut, rather than patiently to untie, the Gordian knot. ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... triumphed, were to die eventually, puzzled. A mayor whose greatest hour was in thwarting one who contemned him, lived to say: "It is a great mystery. He was a strange man." A great city struggled for a score of years to untangle that which was all but beyond the power of solution—a true Gordian knot. ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... a dream; but it is not all a dream. No, I verily believe you have there the Gordian knot of slavery untied; you have there the solution of the problem; you have there the curtain up, and the last scene in the last act of ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
... My lord!—my lord hath plaid a prodigals part, 225 To break his stock for nothing, and an insolent, To cut a Gordian when he could not loose it. What violence is this, to put true fire To a false train; to blow up long crown'd peace With sudden outrage; and beleeve a man, 230 Sworne to the shame of women, 'gainst a woman Borne to their honours? But I ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... Caesar! I was mixing my philosophy with surgery and medicine while Pertinax was sucking at his mother's breast in a Ligurian hut. Rome, my son, is sick of too much mixed philosophy. She needs a man of iron—a riser to occasion—a cutter of Gordian knots, precisely as a sick man needs a surgeon. The senate will vote, as you say, at the praetorian guard's dictation. You have been clever, my Sextus, with your stirring of faction against faction. They are mean men, all so full of mutual suspicion as ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... them at best theology with its cosmology and its logic is only a shadow of shadows, for God reveals himself to the pure in heart, and it matters not what science may say of the material and fleeting world. This spirit manifests itself in wide circles in our day. The Gordian knot is cut, for philosophy and religion no longer touch each other ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... pleased. In this instance, the game consisted principally of beasts of chase; and, on one occasion, one thousand stags, as many of the ibex, wild sheep (mouflions from Sardinia?), and other grazing animals, besides one thousand wild boars, and as many ostriches, were turned loose by the emperor Gordian.] ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... the weakness in the empire caused by these civil wars, had latterly been harassing the eastern frontier; and it soon became the duty of the young Gordian to march against them in person. Hitherto the Roman armies had usually been successful; but unfortunately the Persians, or, rather, their Syrian and Arab allies, had latterly risen as much as the Romans ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... Gordian, of gut on a windy day! O bitter east wind that bloweth down stream! O the young ducks that, swimming between us and the trout, contend with him for the blue duns in their season! O the hay grass behind us that entangles the hook! O the rocky wall that breaks ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... Lousteau, who affected to be unable to look at her; she herself felt such pity as might cut every social Gordian knot. ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... traced during the process of untying it. This is the reason why the culmination is usually set well along toward the conclusion of the story. Sometimes even, when the major knot has been tied with a Gordian intricacy, the author sets it at the very end of his narrative, and suddenly cuts it instead of carefully untying it. But there is no absolutely necessary reason why it should stand at the end, or, ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... all Patty's French, and it was not very much at best, seemed to fly out of her head and she could not even think how to say, "I wish to take them away with me." So seeing nothing else to do, she cut the Gordian knot of her dilemma by reaching up and taking the candles from the sockets. She blew them out, and holding them in a bundle, said pleasantly, "Papier?" having thought of a French word at last that expressed ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells
... projecting bit of rock and defy you for perhaps five or ten minutes; and then when you do succeed in tearing him away and pull him out with the hook buried deep in his loose, pendulous, wrinkled and corduroyed throat, he instantly resolves himself into a quivering Gordian knot, winding the line in and about his coils and knotting it into such knots that can never ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... the whole country has been waiting in breathless suspense for six months, each one of which has seemed an eternity to the loyal people of the North, for the 'grand forward movement' of the army, which is to cut the Gordian knot of the rebellion, and perform unspeakable prodigies, not lawful for man to utter, a backward movement has been executed on the banks of the Potomac, by the valiant commanders there stationed, for which none of us were prepared. No person, even though his imagination possessed ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... so easy as that. You can't cut every difficulty with a sword, as they did the Gordian knot. One may go far in defence of a woman's honor, but there are boundaries which even a gallant man cannot pass; and, before I speak, I must ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... rekte tratrancxis la tutan ligajxon. "Nenio estas pli facila ol tio," li diris, "kaj nun mi ne dubas cxu mi certe regos super cxiuj regxoj de Azio." Pro tio, kion faris Aleksandro Granda, oni ankoraux nuntempe diras, kiam iu ajn superas malfacilajxon per kia ajn subita metodo, "Li trancxis la gordian ligajxon." ...
— A Complete Grammar of Esperanto • Ivy Kellerman
... But though to poets we allow, No matter when acquired or how, From truth unbounded deviation, Which custom calls Imagination, Yet can't they be supposed to lie One half so fast as Fame can fly; Therefore (to solve this Gordian knot, A point we almost had forgot) 510 To courteous readers be it known, That, fond of verse and falsehood grown, Whilst we in sweet digression sung, Fame check'd her flight, and held her tongue, And now pursues, with double force And double speed, her destined course, Nor ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... GORDIAN KNOT, a knot by which the yoke was fastened to the beam of the chariot of Gordius (q. v.), and which no one could untie except the man who was destined to be the conqueror of Asia; Alexander the Great being ambitious to achieve ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... friend is worthy, no doubt, but dull, and the boy was too hopelessly in love to be amusing. And as for you—well—you would do very nicely, no doubt, my dear Arnold, but you are too stuffed up with principles for a girl of Isobel's antecedents. So she has cut the Gordian knot ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... dressing-table. Well—well—I—I wish I had seen Sir Antony again. Just now he sent me a present. It is a knife for my chatelaine, the hilt studded with diamonds, and there is a note which says that there is still time to cut the Gordian knot. ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... which no knife can sever. Uncles and aunts may, under certain circumstances, be regarded as sacred, and meet for occasional burnt-offerings; but beyond them I hold that the knot of blood-relationship may be regarded as Gordian, and ruthlessly cut. Cousins have no claims. Indeed, the scale of the legacy duties, like few legalities, follows the natural law. The further removed, the greater tax should our blood-relations pay for our ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... in fact; things which are tangled or entangled mutually hold and draw upon each other. The conception of a material object is usually complex, involving form, color, size, and other elements; a clock is a complicated mechanism; the Gordian knot was intricate; the twining serpents of the Laocoon are involved. We speak of an abstruse statement, a complex conception, a confused heap, a heterogeneous mass, a tangled skein, an ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... coloring that fascinates children in the woods. It is the poetry of evil. Men like you ought to dwell in caves and never come out of them. You have made me live that vast life, and I have had all my share of existence; so I may very well take my head out of the Gordian knot of your policy and slip it into the running knot of ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... afternoon Jim had a wretched time. To be beaten after such a race by a foot, and to be beaten by a foot when victory would have cut the Gordian knot of his difficulties once and for all, was enough to embitter anybody's existence. He found it hard to accept the well-meant condolences of casual acquaintances, and still harder to do the right thing and congratulate Drake on his victory, a refinement of self-torture which ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... other, we had the most unideal conditions possible to contend with, and we were handicapped by having to use mitted instead of ungloved fingers to untangle the snarls of knots. Unlike Alexander the Great, we dared not cut the "Gordian Knots," but we ...
— A Negro Explorer at the North Pole • Matthew A. Henson
... men have wrought, and fought, and won, Cutting with crimson sword Fame's Gordian knot, And, dying, nations wonder'd—and forgot,— But this Man's name shall circle with the sun; And when our children's children feel the glow, That ripens them unconsciously to men, Asking, with upturn'd ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... why man cannot fly may be answered in a very simple and yet satisfactory manner: He has not been organically constructed for that purpose. That may seem like cutting the Gordian knot, but, after all, it is the only explanation that can be given. You might as well ask why man cannot clutch a perch with his foot after the manner of a bird or a monkey, for the response would be the same—his foot was made ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... to die." Generally speaking, the mountaineers use angry imprecations and personal abuse of all kinds sparingly. Instead of standing and cursing one another like enraged Billingsgate fish-women, they promptly cut the Gordian knot of their misunderstanding with their long, double-edged daggers, and presently one of them is carried away on a ladder. When, as a Caucasian proverb asserts, "It is only a step from the bad word to the kinjal," ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... you,)" said the Superior, pleased at the Gordian knot being loosed, and then relapsed into his atrophy, without moving a ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... moralist (viz., a teacher of the duties of justice), or that politics are inverted ethics, if we exclude the thought that ethics also teaches the duty of benevolence, magnanimity, love, and so on. The State is the Gordian knot that is cut instead of being untied; it is Columbus' egg which is made to stand by being broken instead of balanced, as though the business in question were to make it stand rather than to balance it. In this respect the State is like the man who thinks that he can produce fine weather ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... depended events of far-reaching consequence. The Constitution of the United States is the enduring monument to the courage, the forecast, the wisdom of the members of the Convention of 1787. It was theirs to cut the Gordian knot, to break with the past, and, regardless of the jealousies and antagonisms of individual States, to establish the more perfect union, which has been declared by an eminent British statesman "the greatest ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... sleep in his friend's house. Before sunrise on the morrow, Basil sent forth his invitations to all of the Anician blood in Rome. The first to respond was Gordianus, whose dwelling on the Clivus Scauri stood but a few minutes' walk away. Though but a little older than Basil, Gordian had been for several years a husband and a father; he was in much esteem for his worldly qualities, and more highly regarded for the fervour of his religious faith. A tall, handsome, dignified man, he looked straight before him with frank eyes, and his lips told of spirit tempered by kindliness. ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... tenderness to one which would grieve the other. This perception on Robert's part was a just one; it explains a situation which, in times of faith, when the sovereign pontiff had power to intervene and cut the Gordian knot of such phenomena (allied to the deepest and most impenetrable mysteries), would have found its solution. The Revolution had deepened the Catholic faith in these young hearts, and religion now rendered this crisis in their lives the ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... for that ease we should pay with our life. For that swift answer, achieved by leaving out prime factors in the problem, we should be betraying the self for whose sake alone any answer is valuable. It does not pay to cut such Gordian knots! Our task, then, is to preach transcendence again, not in terms of the old absolutist philosophy, but in terms of the perceptions, the needs, the experience of the human heart and mind and will which produced ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... continue the war. And besides I doubt whether we could maintain the place with Brent besieging us in front, and the whole naval force of Virginia, under the command of such expert seamen as Gardiner and Larimore, attacking us from the river. No, no, the only way to untie the Gordian knot is to cut it, and the only way to extricate ourselves from this difficulty is to ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... forth to seek the needful instruments, while I proceeded to cut another Gordian knot.... An acquaintance of mine, hearing that I was coming to India, suggested that I should take charge of a parcel for a friend of hers, who wanted to send it to her fiance in Bombay. As all the heavy baggage was sent from London to join us at Port Said, I had not seen the "parcel," and, finding ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... The younger Gordian, in his triumphal games, astonished the Romans by the strangeness of the animals displayed, in search of which the whole known world was ransacked. The curious mob now beheld the graceful forms of twenty zebras, and the remarkable stature of ten giraffes, brought from remote African ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... the formation of all things is from God alone and out of his Esse, yet they have not dared to go beyond their first thought on the subject, lest their understanding should become entangled in a so-called Gordian knot, beyond the possibility of release. Such release would be impossible, because their thought of God, and of the creation of the universe by God, has been in accordance with time and space, which are properties of nature; and from nature no one can have any perception of God and of the creation ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... Bacchus's Reward to Midas. River Pactolus. Pan Challenges Apollo. Midas's Ears. Gordian Knot. Baucis and Philemon. Aetna. Perpetual Spring. Pluto carries off Prosperine. Cere's Search. Prosperine's Release. Eleusinian Mysteries. Glaucis changed to a ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... complexity; complexness &c. adj.; complexus[obs3]; complication, implication; intricacy, intrication[obs3]; perplexity; network, labyrinth; wilderness, jungle; involution, raveling, entanglement; coil &c. (convolution) 248; sleave[obs3], tangled skein, knot, Gordian knot, wheels within wheels; kink, gnarl, knarl[obs3]; webwork[obs3]. [complexity if a task or action] difficulty &c. 704. V. complexify[obs3], complicate. Adj. gnarled, knarled[obs3]. complex, complexed; intricate, complicated, perplexed, involved, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... be cutting the gordian knot, indeed," said Hazel. "What, die to shirk a few difficulties? No. I propose an amendment to that. After the words 'kneel down,' insert the words, 'and get up again, trusting in that merciful Providence which has ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... will appear to the future historian in a very different light from that in which it has been presented by either the radical or democratic journals of the day. He will speak of the one as a military chieftain under the influence of worthy motives, cutting a Gordian knot which the higher and controlling diplomatic and executive superior wished should be cautiously untied. The one has acted with a view to promptly settling a great trouble within his own sphere—the other wisely comprehending that the action ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... that Gordian knot had better be cut at once?" advised Dora. "I won't change my mind, and you know I've always been an obstinate thing. There are important things for both of us to achieve, somewhere. I must grope about to find my share of them, for I feel ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... roots of strength, comes upon the moral aspects at once.—War ennobles the age.—Battle, with the sword, has cut many a Gordian knot in twain which all the wit of East and West, of Northern and Border statesmen could ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... is his modified fatalism. He would not accept the boisterous mode of cutting the Gordian-knot proposed by the noble British Philisterwe know were free and theres an end on it! He prefers Lamarcks, The will is, in truth, never free. He believes man to be a co-ordinate term of Natures great progression; a result of the interaction of ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... gratitude by dedicating his wagon to the deity of the oracle and tying it up in its place with the wiliest knot that his simple wisdom knew, pulled as tight as his brawny arms and strong rough hands could pull. Nor could anyone untie the famous Gordian knot, and therefore become, as the oracle promised, lord of all Asia, until centuries had passed, and Alexander the Great came to Phrygia and sliced through the knot ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... thus formed and the claws of it do not show. Sometimes it is hard to decide between them, and he cuts the Gordian knot by marrying someone else, but the friendship is never the same afterward. The girls are no longer boon companions and when the man crosses their paths, they manage to convey the ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... would come without fortune, despoiled of everything, and then, alas! she would merely be one more embarrassment to him. A mind of a second order, and a proud mind like that of Nathan, would be likely to see, under these circumstances, and did see, in suicide the sword to cut the Gordian knots. The idea of failure in the face of the world and that society he had so lately entered and meant to rule, of leaving the chariot of the countess and becoming once more a muddied pedestrian, was more than he could bear. Madness ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... is inevitable, why should we not cut the Gordian knot, and conduct our ministry wholly in the English language? This would greatly simplify our tasks, besides removing from us ...
— The Lutherans of New York - Their Story and Their Problems • George Wenner
... king, dedicated his wagon to the deity of the oracle, and tied it up in its place with a fast knot. This was the celebrated Gordian knot, which, in after times it was said, whoever should untie should become lord of all Asia. Many tried to untie it, but none succeeded, till Alexander the Great, in his career of conquest, came to Phrygia. He tried his skill with as ill success as others, till growing impatient he drew his ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... horizon of our thoughts and can be seen as two. No contradiction, no consciousness; no cross, no crown; contradictions are the very small deadlocks without which there is no going; going is our sense of a succession of small impediments or deadlocks; it is a succession of cutting Gordian knots, which on a small scale please or pain as the case may be; on a larger, give an ecstasy of pleasure, or shock to the extreme of endurance; and on a still larger, kill whether they be on the right side or the wrong. Nature, as I said in "Life and Habit," hates that any principle ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... wars of Greece, the Commoners of England, or the Revolutions of France, Senator Clay predicted that it would be "not of two or three years' duration, but a war of interminable duration, during which some Philip or Alexander, some Caesar or Napoleon, would arise and cut the Gordian knot and solve the problem of the capacity of man for self-government, and crush the liberties of both the several portions of this ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... a minute she held the idea in her mind till she grew familiar with it, then it was driven out by another thought that followed swiftly on its track. Frank Muller must die, and die before the morning light. By no other possible means could the Gordian knot be cut, and both Bessie and her old uncle be saved. If he were dead he could not marry Bessie, and if he died with the warrant unsigned their uncle could not be executed. That was the terrible ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... passage which Aristotle, of course, would have put in plainer language, if he had known what he meant himself—but modern philosophers are kind enough to help him out occasionally—when the entrance of the gentleman in dust cut the Gordian knot, and saved the Stagyrite from the disgrace of having a pretty bit of esoteric abstruseness translated into ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... eyes, The external symptoms of remorse within, Express our grief, or when in sullen dumps, With head incumbent on expanded palm, Moping we sit, in silent sorrow drown'd; Whether inveigling Hymen has trepann'd The unwary youth, and tied the gordian knot Of jangling wedlock not to be dissolv'd; Worried all day by loud Xantippe's din, Who fails not to exalt him to the stars, And fix him there among the branched crew (Taurus, and Aries, and Capricorn, The greatest ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... cut off a hand or mortify an appetite. But the task before us, which is to co-endure with our existence, is rather one of microscopic fineness, and the heroism required is that of patience. There is no cutting of the Gordian knots of life; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... there I was caught,—like other women who want to be caught, and who trust to chance to cut the Gordian knot of their indecision. So to Les Touches ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... of the name of Gregory. [64] His grandfather Felix had himself been pope, and as the bishops were already bound by the laws of celibacy, his consecration must have been preceded by the death of his wife. The parents of Gregory, Sylvia, and Gordian, were the noblest of the senate, and the most pious of the church of Rome; his female relations were numbered among the saints and virgins; and his own figure, with those of his father and mother, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... judicial slaves of slaveholders' slave-drivers? I was neither born nor bred for that. I drew my first breath in a little town not far off, a poor little town where the farmers and mechanics first unsheathed that Revolutionary sword which, after eight years of hewing, clove asunder the Gordian knot that bound America to the British yoke. One raw morning in spring—it will be eighty years the 19th of this month—Hancock and Adams, the Moses and Aaron of that Great Deliverance, were both at ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... where, among a few scattering vineyards and jujube-trees, nestles Ayash, a place which disputes with the neighboring village of Istanos the honor of being the theatre of Alexander the Great's celebrated exploit of cutting the Gordian knot that disentangled the harness of the Phrygian king. Ayash is to be congratulated upon having its historical reminiscence to recommend it to the notice of the outer world, since it has little to attract attention nowadays; it is merely the shapeless jumble of ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... her influence; and feeling the difficulties of reconciling his honour and his worldly prospects to further prosecution of the love, rashly expressed but not deeply felt, he had determined frankly to cut the Gordian knot he could not solve, and inform Sibyll that marriage between them was impossible. With that view he had appointed this meeting, and his conference with the king but confirmed his intention. It was in this state of mind that he was ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... kept off by them, as by us, each in our place, by honest self-examination, diligent prayer, and the grace of God which comes thereby. Once or twice in the world's history a great ruler, like Charles the Fifth, cuts the Gordian knot, and escapes into a convent: but how few can or ought to do that? There are those who must go on ruling, or see their country ruined; for all depends on them. So had Queen Elizabeth to do; so had Dietrich of Bern likewise. After them would come ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... brooding over the two sombre mysteries—Death and Life (and which is the darker?); the sense of fate driving life on—the fate of a temperament that restlessly longs for new impressions and intense emotions, without the vigor of action that cuts the Gordian knot of fancy and speculation with the swift sword-stroke of ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... Sisyphean labor, tough job, teaser, rasper[obs3], dead lift. dilemma, embarrassment; deadlock; perplexity &c. (uncertainty) 475; intricacy; entanglement, complexity &c. 59; cross fire; awkwardness, delicacy, ticklish card to play, knot, Gordian knot, dignus vindice nodus[Lat], net, meshes, maze; coil &c. (convolution) 248; crooked path; involvement. nice point, delicate point, subtle point, knotty point; vexed question, vexata quaestio[Lat], poser; puzzle ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... them, and extract the spiritual treasure. The Emperor Maximin was less friendly to the Church; and yet his enmity was confined chiefly to those Christian ministers who had been favourites with his predecessor; so that he cannot be said to have promoted any general persecution. Under Gordian the disciples were free from molestation; and his successor, Philip the Arabian, was so well affected to their cause that he has been sometimes, though erroneously, represented as the first Christian Emperor. [300:1] The death of this monarch in A.D. 249 was, however, soon followed ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... Haviland Hicks, Jr., cheerfully. "Has Ballard learned our signals, or some Bannister student sold them to a rival team, as per the usual football story? Though the notice doth not herald it, I am to be present, for my room is to be used, and the Coach gave me a special invitation to cut the Gordian knot with ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... body must have been great, when these champions were immediately overthrown and killed. They did not, however, despair: substituting the two governors of Rome, Pupienus and Balbinus, and associating to them the younger Gordian, they resolved to make a stand; for the severities of Maximin had by this time manifested that it was a contest of extermination. Meantime, Maximin had broken up from Sirmium, the capital of Pannonia, and had advanced to Aquileia,—that famous ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... only claim to the popular admiration. If Titus exhibited five thousand wild beasts at the dedication of the amphitheatre, Trajan bestowed ten thousand on the people at the conclusion of the Dacian war. If the younger Gordian collected together bears, elks, zebras, ostriches, boars, and wild horses, he was an imitator only of the spectacles of Carus, in which the rarity of the animals was as much ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... not to be worried by the difficulty of finding time in our elementary and secondary schools for the introduction of the newer subjects making for increased vocational efficiency. They would cut the Gordian knot with one single operation by eliminating enough of the older subjects to make room for the new. I confess that this solution does not appeal to me. Fundamentally the core of the elementary curriculum must, I believe, always be ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley |
