"Sisyphus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Aides to restore to him his beloved wife. Armed only with his golden lyre, the gift of Apollo, he descended into the gloomy depths of Hades, where his heavenly music arrested for a while the torments of the unhappy sufferers. The stone of Sisyphus remained motionless; Tantalus forgot his perpetual thirst; the wheel of Ixion ceased to revolve; and even the Furies shed tears, and withheld for a time their persecutions. Undismayed at the scenes of horror ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... the hero of the "Odyssey," who in one way or other accounted for all the wooers that "sorned" upon his house, and had a receipt for their bodies from the grave-digger of Ithaca! But even this wily descendant of Sisyphus would have found it no such easy matter to deal with the English suitors, who were not the feeble voluptuaries of the Ionian Islands, that suffered themselves to be butchered as unresistingly as sheep in the shambles—actually standing at one end of a banqueting-room ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Is Sisyphus rolling His stone up the mountain! Immersed in the fountain, Tantalus tastes not The water that wastes not! Through ages increasing The pangs that afflict him, With motion unceasing The wheel of Ixion Shall torture ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... on a pivot where it lies, gradually sinking in the course of centuries deeper and deeper into the rock, and in new freshets receiving the aid of fresh stones, which are drawn into this trap and doomed to revolve there for an indefinite period, doing Sisyphus-like penance for stony sins, until they either wear out, or wear through the bottom of their prison, or else are released by some revolution of nature. There lie the stones of various sizes, from a pebble to a foot or two in diameter, some of which have rested ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... urg'd that, And clear'd to him, that Sisyphus was damn'd To roll the ceaseless stone, only because He would have ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... forms the measure of, and constitutes, our riches. Progression is the increase of the proportion of the effect to the result. Its ideal extreme may be represented by the eternal and fruitless efforts of Sisyphus.[A] ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... ineptitude, inaptitude; unsubservience[obs3]; inadequacy &c. (insufficiency) 640; inefficiency.&c. (incompetence) 158; unskillfulness &c. 699; disservice; unfruitfulness &c.(unproductiveness). 169; labor in vain, labor lost, labor of Sisyphus; lost trouble, lost labor; work of Penelope; sleeveless errand, wild goose chase, mere farce. tautology &c. (repetition) 104; supererogation &c. (redundancy) 641. vanitas vanitatum[Lat], vanity, inanity, worthlessness, nugacity[obs3]; triviality &c. (unimportance) 643. caput mortuum[Lat][obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... What we have a right to insist on is that our general policy in the Philippines shall not be shaped now merely by the just discontent with the bad start. The reports of continual victories, that roll back on us every week, like the stone of Sisyphus, and need to be won over again next week, the mistakes of a censorship that was absolutely right as a military measure, but may have been unintelligently, not to say childishly, conducted—all these are beside the real question. They must not obscure the ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... the Duchess, and in the cascades leaping like a flock of sheep, an idea of his passion shared with la Tinti. In the midst of his torrent of love a rock stood up against which the torrent broke. The Prince, like Sisyphus, was constantly ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... no heat. A mere charge of treason he was almost prepared now to endure. If Mistress Fortune helped him, he might refute it, but to be branded before Hellas as the destroyer of his bosom friend, and that by guile the like whereof Tantalus, Sisyphus, and Ixion conjoined had never wrought—what wonder his knees smote together? Why had he not foreseen that Agis would fall into Lycon's hands? Why had he trusted that lying tale from Artemisium? And worst of all, worse than the ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... or no relation to time or maturity. Life seems a race which they have yet to run entirely. They have made no progress toward the goal. They are born—nothing further. But it seems hard, when a man has toiled high up the steep hill of knowledge, that he should be cast like Sisyphus, downward in a moment; that he who has worn the day and wasted the night in gathering the gold of science should be, with all his wealth of learning, all his accumulations, made bankrupt at once. What becomes of all the riches of the soul, the piles and pyramids of precious thoughts which men ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... hardly to be reduced to demonstration. Again, the wisdom of antiquity (the shadows whereof are in the poets) in the description of torments and pains, next unto the crime of rebellion, which was the giants' offence, doth detest the offence of futility, as in Sisyphus and Tantalus. But this was meant of particulars: nevertheless even unto the general rules and discourses of policy and government there is due a ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... a frosty day, sent out of his hall by Boreas for the express purpose of looking black at one another. When they ask you, "how you do," you would think they were measuring the length of your coffin. They are ever, it is true, labouring to be agreeable; but they are like Sisyphus, the stone they roll up the hill with so much toil, runs down again, and hits you a thump on the legs. They are sometimes polite, but invariably uncivil; their warmth is always artificial—their cold never, they are stiff ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... phantoms in the clouds. Let us content ourselves with injuring no man, and doing good only in our own little sphere. Let us leave States and senates to fill the sieve of the Danaides, and roll up the stone of Sisyphus." ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... want is to die and to be born again, transformed myself, and in a different world. And I can neither stifle these aspirations nor deceive myself as to the possibility of satisfying them. I seem condemned to roll forever the rock of Sisyphus, and to feel that slow wearing away of the mind which befalls the man whose vocation and destiny are in perpetual conflict. "A Christian heart and a pagan head," like Jacobi; tenderness and pride; width of mind and feebleness of will; the two men of ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... give all that lies beneath the sun's golden round and top of sovereignty to migrate into some untried region and state of being, or even to renounce existence altogether and lie down forever in the attractive slumber of the grave! Without death, mankind would undergo the fate of Sisyphus, no future, and in the present the oppression of an intolerable task with an aching vacuum of motive. The certainty and the mystery of death create the stimulus and the romance of life. Give the human race an earthly ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... schoolmen labored most intellectually and scientifically—practical result, nil, so these labor harder than other men—result, nil. This is literally 'beating the air.' The ancients imagined tortures particularly trying to nature, that of Sisyphus to wit; everlasting labor embittered by everlasting nihilification. We have made Sisyphism vulgar. Here are fifteen Sisyphi. Only the wise or ancients called this thing infernal torture; our old women call it ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... that, as our civilization has been now four centuries in the "age of reason," it must next (and probably soon) pass into the fifth stage, that of decrepitude, and thence into infantile credulity and imbecility once more,—as a demonstration that history is such a Sisyphus, his induction is weak even ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... them, that is to say, by their inner void, by the interval between what they are and what they ought to be. They are for ever on the point of recovering themselves, for ever occupied in losing themselves. An inflexible law condemns them, like the rock of Sisyphus, to fall back when they are almost touching the summit, and this law, which has projected them into space and time, is nothing other than the very constancy of their original insufficiency. The alternations of generation and decay, the evolutions ever beginning over and ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... holiness, and cause of madness, crucifying and disquieting all that it takes hold of." [1813]Seneca calls it, rem solicitam, timidam, vanam, ventosam, a windy thing, a vain, solicitous, and fearful thing. For commonly they that, like Sisyphus, roll this restless stone of ambition, are in a perpetual agony, still [1814] perplexed, semper taciti, tritesque recedunt (Lucretius), doubtful, timorous, suspicious, loath to offend in word or deed, still cogging and colloguing, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... library into an extempore theatre. Ladies and ladies'-maids were busily occupied in manufacturing dresses. Lawless spent whole hours in pacing up and down the billiard-room, reciting his part, which had been remodelled to suit him, and the acquisition of which appeared a labour analogous to that of Sisyphus, as, by the time he reached the end of his task, he had invariably forgotten the beginning. Every one was in a state of the greatest eagerness and excitement about something—nobody exactly knew what; and the interest Ellis took in the ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... how Sisyphus felt when the stone kept rolling back upon him. Did he ever look up to the top of the mountain and calculate the distance he must needs traverse before his task should ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... pupil of Gorgias and Melesigenes afraid of Tartarus! In what region of the infernal world do you expect your domicile to be fixed? Shall you roll a stone like Sisyphus? ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... whirling round upon the wheel, teaches {us} what a rolling thing is fortune. Sisyphus, with immense labour, pushing the stone up the lofty hill, which ever, his labour lost, rolls back from the top, shows that men's miseries are endless. When Tantalus is athirst, standing in the midst ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... had no doubt of his affection, but that there was no remedy for his ill, since it sprang from a stone, where he had sown desires without hope of fruit—a stone from which he did not expect a mushroom of content—a stone of Sisyphus, which he bore to the mountain of designs, and when it reached the top rolled over and over to the bottom. At length, however, after a thousand entreaties, Milluccio told his brother all about his love; whereupon Jennariello comforted him as much as he could, and bade him be of good cheer, and ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... heard of Sisyphus, who was condemned eternally to roll a stone up a hill? Well, Monsieur, that would be a simple task compared with an attempt to convert me to Catholicism. I believe in three things: life, pleasure, and death, because I know them ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... difficult to determine the original; but when this primary class of ideas is expressed by sounds entirely and totally different, the task becomes utterly hopeless, and the labor as vain as that of Sisyphus. Indeed, it would be very difficult to show how languages, derived from one stock, could possibly differ so far in their expression of the simplest ideas and wants as not to be mutually traceable: and truly, until this is done (which I conceive impossible), I am content ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... chorus, "Hy-ah! Hullah! Hee-ah! Hey!" measures their tread and shifts the strain from man to man, step by step, with the precision of clock work. On the rivers in China, too, one sees boats run by human treadmill power: a harder task than that of Sisyphus is that of the men who sweat all day long at the wheel, ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... unto my plaints give eare; Give ear, I say, ye ghosts, if ghosts can heare, And listen to my plaints that doe excell The dol'rous tune of ravish'd Philomel. Now let Ixions wheele stand still a while, Let Danaus daughters now surcease their toyle, Let Sisyphus rest on his restlesse stone, Let not the Apples flye from Plotas sonne, And let the full gorg'd Vultur cease to teare The growing liver of the ravisher; Let these behold my sorrows and confesse Their paines doe farre come short of my distresse. ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... the vulgar, and would have regarded all these disquisitions with indolence and indifference. At present they seem to be in a very lamentable condition, and such as the poets have given us but a faint notion of in their descriptions of the punishment of Sisyphus and Tantalus. For what can be imagined more tormenting, than to seek with eagerness, what for ever flies us; and seek for it in a place, where it is impossible ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... black Cocytus, wandering to the world below, That languid river to behold we of this earth must go; To see the grim Danaides, that miserable race, And Sisyphus of AEolus, condemned to ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... letters to Flaubert she laughed over the human documents of Zola, the elaborate note taking of Daudet, for she was blessed with an excellent memory and a huge capacity for scribbling. Not so Zola. Each book was a painful parturition, not the pain of a stylist like Flaubert, but the Sisyphus-like labor of getting his notes, his facts, his characters marshalled and moving to a conclusion. Like Anthony Trollope, when the last page of a book was finished he began another. He was a workman, not a dilettante ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... allot the islands of the blessed to their brave men, whom they call heroes and demi-gods; and to the souls of the wicked, the region of the ungodly, in Hades, where their fables relate that certain persons, such as Sisyphus, and Tantalus, and Ixion, and Tityus, are punished; which is built on this first supposition, that souls are immortal; and thence are those exhortations to virtue and dehortations from wickedness collected; whereby good men are bettered in the conduct of their life by ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... lectures before dinner, delivered one on all the affairs of the world—foreign and domestic, moral, political, and literary. In the course of it he touched on Reform. 'The stone which Lord Michin Malicho—who was the Gracchus of the last Reform, and is the Sisyphus of the present—has been so laboriously pushing up hill, is for the present deposited at the bottom in the Limbo of Vanity. If it should ever surmount the summit and run down on the other side, it will infallibly roll over and annihilate the franchise ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... drooped, heavy with delicious fruit, over his head; but when he put forth his hand to pluck the fruit, a furious gust of wind swept it away far beyond his reach. And yet another famous criminal he saw, Sisyphus, the most cunning and most covetous of the sons of men. He was toiling painfully up a steep mountain's side, heaving a weighty stone before him, and straining with hands and feet to push it to the summit. But every time he approached the top, the stone slipped through his hands, ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... I beseech you, are you afraid of the three-headed Cerberus in the shades below, and the roaring waves of Cocytus, and the passage over Acheron, and Tantalus expiring with thirst, while the water touches his chin; and Sisyphus, ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... betrothed. Lo Sparta is wide, and wide is Elis, a land of chariots and horses, and Arcadia rich in sheep, and there are the citadels of the Achaeans, and Messenia, and Argos, and all the sea-coast of Sisyphus. There be maidens by their parents nurtured, maidens countless, that lack not aught in wisdom or in comeliness. Of these ye may easily win such as ye will, for many are willing to be the fathers-in-law of ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... arrogance and contempt that had marked them in life! The poor were allowed half-time in their tortures, respite and punishment alternating. Those with whom legend is so busy I saw with my eyes—Ixion, Sisyphus, the Phrygian Tantalus in all his misery, and the giant Tityus—how vast, his bulk ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... son of Hermes and father of Anticleia, mother of Odysseus. He lived at the foot of Mount Parnassus, and was famous as a thief and swindler. On one occasion he met his match. Sisyphus, who had lost some cattle, suspected Autolycus of being the thief, but was unable to bring it home to him, since he possessed the power of changing everything that was touched by his hands. Sisyphus accordingly burnt his ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... that he had to throw overboard a number more of useless articles, especially when there was a mountain-top to pass. Things went on thus for more than one hundred and twenty miles; they were worn out with ascending and falling again; the balloon, like another rock of Sisyphus, kept continually sinking back toward the ground. The rotundity of the covering, which was now but little inflated, was collapsing already. It assumed an elongated shape, and the wind hollowed large ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... dear fellow, do you want to be the Sisyphus of this era?—You will find the stone of Evil heavy to roll upward,— moreover, it will exhibit the usually painful tendency to slip back ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... possible? could it be that Barkilphedro should miss his aim? To be a lever powerful enough to heave great masses of rock, and when sprung to the utmost power to succeed only in giving an affected woman a bump in the forehead—to be a catapult dealing ruin on a pole-kitten! To accomplish the task of Sisyphus, to crush an ant; to sweat all over with hate, and for nothing at all. Would not this be humiliating, when he felt himself a mechanism of hostility capable of reducing the world to powder! To put into movement all the ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... my labour never ceaseth, In grievous passions my woes still bemoaning; My eyes with tears against the fire striving, Whose scorching gleed my heart to cinders turneth; But with those drops the flame again reviving, Still more and more it to my torment burneth, With Sisyphus thus do I roll the stone, And turn the ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Idea, by Michael Drayton; Fidessa, by Bartholomew Griffin; Chloris, by William Smith • Michael Drayton, Bartholomew Griffin, and William Smith
... avoid a few of the rocks in his necessarily rugged pathway to success. I emphasized this in two preceding chapters and shall reiterate it again and again; for I am trying to say a helpful word to you; and all your talents will be folly and all your toil the labor of Sisyphus if ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... universal lot ordains We seek the black Cocytus' stream, That languid strays thro' dreary plains, Where cheerless fires perpetual gleam; Where the fell Brides their fruitless toil bemoan, And Sisyphus ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... or thought so; but that love Cost her an effort, which is a sad toil, The stone of Sisyphus, if once we move Our feelings 'gainst the nature of the soil. She had nothing to complain of, or reprove, No bickerings, no connubial turmoil: Their union was a model to behold, ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... fished? Did you ever, late for that mysterious dinner-party in some enchanted castle, wander disconsolately, in unaccountable rags and dirt, in search of that phantom carpet-bag which never gets found? Did you ever "realise" to yourself the sieve of the Danaides, the stone of Sisyphus, the wheel of Ixion; the pleasure of shearing that domestic animal who (according to the experience of a very ancient observer of nature) produces more cry than wool; the perambulation of that Irishman's model bog, where you slip two steps ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... in some sort exemplified; and yet it may be suspected that even in such resemblances the mind often governs the ear, and the sounds are estimated by their meaning. One of the most successful attempts has been to describe the labour of Sisyphus: ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... ennuied, as if she must have lived in centuries past, and there was no new thing. Yet the face in the mirror does not tell that story. How curiously she has come into the lives of these Grandons a second time, and gone out with as little result. Is the stone of Sisyphus the veiled myth ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... the other in the National Museum, Naples; Venus Listening to Music, two versions, the stately nude evidently a memory of the Venus reposing in the Uffizi: Adam and Eve (also a copy of this by Rubens); Prometheus, Sisyphus—long supposed to be copies by Coello; Christ Bearing the Cross, St. Margaret, a portrait of the Duke of Este, Salom, Ecce Homo, La Dolorosa, the once admired Allocution; Flight Into Egypt, St. Catalina, a self-portrait, St. Jerome, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... accommodations, she was obliged to writhe in and out of the door like a beautiful serpent. Withers, the wan page, slept out of the house immediately under the tiles at a neighbouring milk-shop; and the wheeled chair, which was the stone of that young Sisyphus, passed the night in a shed belonging to the same dairy, where new-laid eggs were produced by the poultry connected with the establishment, who roosted on a broken donkey-cart, persuaded, to all appearance, that it grew there, and ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... a sleepless sisyphus, and one day, in a flash of intuition, I located and showed the flaw in an obscure ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... the body of Melicertes was thrown on the Isthmus of Corinth where Sisyphus, his uncle, who reigned in that city, instituted the Isthmian games in his honor. For this fable we are indebted to the fertile invention of the Greeks, Melicertes being no other than the Melcarthus or the Hercules of Tyre, who, from having been drowned ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... to be found in the 'LETTRES DE MAUPERTUIS' (Dresden, 1752, then a brand-new Book), but are now clipt out from the Maupertuis Treatises—we can fancy to be almost sublimities.—Almost, unfortunately not altogether. And then there is such a Sisyphus-effort visible in dragging them aloft so far: and the nimble wicked Voltaire so seizes his moment, trips poor Sisyphus; and sends him down, heels-over-head, in a torrent of roaring debris! 'From gradual transpiration of our vital force comes Death; which perhaps, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... et pullum, male parvus Si cui filius est; ut abortivus fuit olim Sisyphus: hunc varum, distortis cruribus; illum Balbutit scaurum, pravis fullum ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... very hard, to have their cups scored next morning upon their back; and, indeed, to keep all a frigate's crew from intoxication on a Christmas-day would be something like undertaking the labour of Sisyphus, for, as fast as one man could be frightened or flogged into ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... Sis'yphos, in Latin Sisyphus, a king of Corinth, noted for his avarice and fraud. He was punished in the infernal regions by having to roll uphill a huge stone, which always rolled down again as soon as it reached the top. Sisyphos ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... proud of Ernest's exclusive devotion, and the notice it attracted. I knew I was, by the mortification I experienced, when that devotion was withdrawn. It is true, I knew he was inflicting on himself torments to which the fabled agonies of Tantalus, Sisyphus, and Ixion combined could not be compared; but others did not; they saw the averted eye, the coldness, the distance, the estrangement, but they did not, could not see, the bleeding heart, the agonized spirit hidden beneath ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... provincials, whenever they have the chance, are a studious and thoughtful race. The isolation and monotony of life in many parts are bound to drive men to study and reflection if the means for these are at hand. Sisyphus himself had hardly less variety of occupation than some of our shepherds whose work on the hills involves long absences from social intercourse. To such men (whose life is suggestive of a repeating decimal) the access to an ell or two of good books often means mental ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... sins: the death of General Hendricks, the sacrifice of Molly Culpepper, the temptation and fall of her father, the death of his boyhood's friend, and then the headlines. These things were laid at his door, and over and over again, like Sisyphus rolling the stones uphill, he swept them away from his threshold, only to find that they rolled right back again. And with them came at times the suspicion that his daughter's unhappiness was upon him also. And besides these things, a hundred business transactions wherein he had ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... to give the reader a translation of the genuine works of Plato only, I have not translated the Axiochus, Demodoeus, Sisyphus, &c. as these are evidently ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... might be a shadowy world—the poets said so—Odysseus visited its depths and brought back its report—but it was a gloomy place at best. Horace alludes to it always in the tone of the Hebrew Psalmists, or of Hezekiah sick to death, utilizing Minos and Cerberus and Tantalus and Sisyphus for poetic effect, yet ever with an undertone of sadness and alarm. Not Orpheus' self, he says (I, xxiv, 13), in his exquisite lament for dead Quinctilius, can bring back life-blood to the phantom pale who has joined the spectral band that voyage to Styx: the gods are ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... you know, is made for sweeping, and it seems as though it could not be fatigued. Let us rid ourselves of this criminal blindness which prevents us from seeing the exhaustion of those who are always in the breach. Relieve the sentinels perishing at their posts, give Sisyphus an hour to breathe; take for a moment the place of the mother, a slave to the cares of her house and her children; sacrifice an hour of our sleep for someone worn by long vigils with the sick. Young girl, tired sometimes perhaps ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... "for such has been the rule of our watch ever since the days of the excellent centurion Sisyphus, in whose time it first was determined, that all contraband commodities or suspicious weapons, or the like, which were brought into the city during the nightwatch, should be uniformly forfeited to the use of the soldiery of the ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... by their relative distances from each other measured by the eye. But this requires long practice. At first he must remember if he can, and when he cannot he must count up to his unknown note from some remembered one. It is, at best, a labor of Sisyphus. With many people—bright and intelligent people, too—it requires years of practice to read new music at sight even tolerably readily; for it is not simply a question of learning the notes, difficult as that may be: there is a further ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... "The beautiful distich upon Ajax puts me in mind of a description in Homer's 'Odyssey,' which none of the critics have taken notice of. It is where Sisyphus is represented lifting his stone up the hill which is no sooner carried to the top of it, but it immediately tumbles to the bottom. This double motion of the stone is admirably described in the numbers of these verses; ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... superstitions, and slain like a dog by a tile from the hand of an old woman! Verily, the stars flatter when they give me a type in this fool of war—when they promise to the ardour of my wisdom the same results as to the madness of his ambition—perpetual exercise—no certain goal!—the Sisyphus task, the mountain and the stone!—the stone, a gloomy image!—it reminds me that I am threatened with somewhat of the same death as the Epirote. Let me look again. "Beware," say the shining prophets, "how thou passest under ancient roofs, or besieged walls, ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... gift of Apollo, and so seducing are his strains that in vain our guards advance to arrest his course; they immediately begin dancing, and he easily eludes their efforts. The general confusion is indescribable. All business is at a standstill: Ixion rests upon his wheel; old Sisyphus sits down on his mountain, and his stone has fallen with a terrible plash into Acheron. In short, unless we are energetic, we are on the eve ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... keep on the alert for hours under a fiery sun. Often the chance goes by, or the trail followed proves false; but the season is over, and one must wait for the return of another spring. The trade of observer in many cases resembles the exhausting labours of the Sisyphus beetle, painfully pushing his pellet up a rough and stony path; so that the team halts and staggers at every moment, the load spills over and rolls away, and all has to ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... do not carry the stone of Sisyphus on thy shoulder to pave the way to disappointment. If thou writest but indifferent poetry none will envy thee, and some will praise thee; but nature, in her malignity, hath denied unto thee a capacity for the enjoyment of such praise. In this she ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... with impatience, and was then equally impatient to have it clasped again. But no description can convey an adequate impression of the weary restlessness with which from morning to night he pursued these labors of Sisyphus—doing and undoing—fretting that he could not do it, fretting ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... of my measureless despair. I sang thy beauty, O Eurydice! I sigh'd my love forth, O Eurydice! With tears and weary sighs, Eurydice! And at thy name the pains of Hell grew light; Ixion's wheel stopp'd in its weary rounds, The rock of Sisyphus forgot to roll, And draughts of comfort flow'd o'er Tantalus:— Then from old Dis's hands the keys slipp'd down, And words of hope and pity spake he forth. He promised thee again if I would go, Never back-looking, from those realms of gloom, ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... believe. I cannot recall just when I first began to believe in Mt. Vesuvius, but I am quite certain that it was not in my school-days. It may have been in my teaching-days, but I'm not quite certain. I have often wondered whether we teachers really believe all we try to teach. I feel a pity for poor Sisyphus, poor fellow, rolling that stone to the top of the hill, and then having to do the work all over when the stone rolled to the bottom. But that is not much worse than trying to teach Caribbean Sea and Mt. Vesuvius, if we can't really believe in them. ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... with the explanation that a fable like that would disqualify the magazine for every denominational reader, though Howells hastened to express his own joy in it, having been particularly touched by the author's reference to Sisyphus and Atlas as ancestors of the tumble-bug. The "True Story," he said, with its "realest king of black talk," won him, and a few days later he wrote again: "This little story delights me more and more. I wish you had about forty ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... recognizing every member of the Conference as a brother of a common family, that now, after the labor of three weeks, and upon the very verge of adjustment, you should not destroy all we have done by interposing questions of this kind. Do not let us be seen engaged in the idle labor of Sisyphus. Do not let us now, just as we are about placing on the top of the mountain the block of constitutional adjustment, suffer that block to rebound. Dismiss the amendment with, I pray you earnestly, all questions of this sort, and let us proceed ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... in the ancient tongues. On the other hand we shall shorten the originally long stressed antepenultimate vowel in Brasidas, Euripides, Icarus, Lavinia, Lucilius, Lydia, Nicias, Onesimus, Pegasus, Pyramus, Regulus, Romulus, Scipio, Sisyphus, Socrates, Thucydides, and ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... his unusually heavy confessional, was jubilant. Nothing exhilarates him like work. Given a scanty confessional, and he is as gloomy as Sisyphus; given a hard, laborious day, and he is as bright as Ariel. He was ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... Tantalus And Sisyphus were kings long time ago, But now they lie in the Lake Dolorous, The hills of hell are noisy with their woe; Ay, swift the tides of Empire ebb and flow, And that is quickly lost was hardly won, As Ilios herself o'erwell did ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... Apollo's temple at Delphi, for which he was sentenced to have a great stone hung over his head, ready every moment to fall and crush him to pieces. Ixion, for an assault on Juno, was struck down to hell, and tied to a wheel, which kept continually turning. Sisyphus is a notorious robber, condemned to roll a stone up to the top of a hill, which is made to roll down again immediately; and as he has to begin and roll it up again as soon as it comes down, his labour is perpetual. The Danaides are fifty virgins (sisters), who all but one, by the command ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... condemned to economic stagnation, the "valuable statistical material" collected at such an expenditure of time and money is in great part antiquated and useless. The statistical department will be compelled, therefore, like another unfortunate Sisyphus, to begin the work anew, and it is difficult to see how the Zemstvo, unless it becomes a little more practical, is ever to get out of ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... pleasant one withal. Your camp of to-day differs only in non-essentials from that of yesterday, and your camp of to-morrow will probably be almost exactly like to-day's. Only when you reach your objective point do you come to a full realization that you have not been the Sisyphus of the ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... which I read in this book; I can only reply that I see it all so clearly that conviction is a necessity. There is no trouble in believing. To attempt disbelief, would be to illustrate the fable of Sisyphus." ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... our advocates challenge the first place, nor is there any sort of people that please themselves like them: for while they daily roll Sisyphus his stone, and quote you a thousand cases, as it were, in a breath no matter how little to the purpose, and heap glosses upon glosses, and opinions on the neck of opinions, they bring it at last to ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... gloom they see, And instant rise. Here dwell the suffering damn'd. Here Tityus, stretcht o'er nine wide acres, yields His entrails to be torn. Thou, Tantalus, Art seen, the stream forbid to taste;—the fruit Thy lips o'erhanging, flies! Thou, Sisyphus, Thy stone pursuing downwards; or its weight Straining aloft, with oft exerted power! Ixion whirling, too; with swift pursuit, Thou follow'st, and art follow'd! Belides! Your husband-cousins who in death dar'd steep, And ceaseless draw the unavailing streams! All Juno ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... As Sisyphus against the infernal steep Rolls the huge rock whose motions ne'er may sleep, So up thy hill, ambrosial Richmond! heaves Dull MAURICE [56] all his granite weight of leaves: Smooth, solid monuments of mental pain! The petrifactions ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... those who are benefited by their punishment; the incurable are such as Archelaus, who benefit others by becoming a warning to them. The latter class are generally kings and potentates; meaner persons, happily for themselves, have not the same power of doing injustice. Sisyphus and Tityus, not Thersites, are supposed by Homer to be undergoing everlasting punishment. Not that there is anything to prevent a great man from being a good one, as is shown by the famous example of Aristeides, the son of Lysimachus. ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... this is the man who can make haste, even uphill, the only haste worth making; and it must be up the right hill, too: not that Corinthian Acropolis, of which, I suppose, the white specter stood eighteen hundred feet high, in Hades, for Sisyphus to roll his fantastic stone up—image, himself, forever of the greater part of ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... the morning again I behold the place where all that is heavenly rests! I endeavour after apathy. I labour to be senseless, stupid, an idiot! I strain to be dead to supreme excellence! But it is the stone of Sisyphus, and ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... "Like Sisyphus! I had begun to give up hope, when the Gipsy I was seeking was seen by one of my agents. He alone knows the secret. And I am waiting, ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... and Mick acknowledged the good advice by unhooking a leg of mutton and belabouring him soundly, to the detriment of himself and his mutton, till the police interfered. On another occasion he addressed his energies to the Sisyphus-like task of endeavouring to roll a very large water-barrel through his mother's very small door, all one winter night, while his mother alternately coaxed and threatened. Mick's pranks were endless, but lest ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... in its position. This ascending and descending stopper is hollow, carpeted, with cushioned seats, and is watched over by two condemned souls, called conductors, one of whom is said to be named Igion, and the other Sisyphus. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the chain rattling on to the deck. In vain I tried to stop it. I then made a desperate effort to replace it, but as it had taken probably two men some time to put it up I had not the slightest chance of succeeding. My task was something like that of Sisyphus, a man of ancient days, who had to roll a huge stone to the top of a mountain, but which always came down again as soon as he got ...
— The Two Whalers - Adventures in the Pacific • W.H.G. Kingston
... by his devoted followers as the knell of their hopes. For years they had been engaged labourously in rolling uphill the stone of Sisyphus, making active friendships and seeking a fair trial. That opportunity had come at last. It had been an affair of life or death; the contest was protracted, intense, dramatic; the issue for a time had hung in poignant doubt; but the dismal result let the stone roll down again ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... Sisyphus some ever roll The same old round of things Which dwarf the mind and starve the soul, Until they long for wings To fly from dull monotony, Which carries in its train That wreck of thought—Despondency— Which preys on heart ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... heavenly power forfend it But if Odysseus and the tyrant lords Suggest a forged tale, O rise to end it, Nor fan the fierce flame of their withering words! Forth from thy tent, and let thine eye confound The brood of Sisyphus[2] that would thee wound! ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... Resentment gorged his throat. It was unfair—so damned unfair. He had no business coming here. He should have stayed on Beta or at least on a human world where he would never have met Copper. He loved her, but he couldn't have her. It was Tantalus and Sisyphus rolled into one unsightly package and fastened to his soul. With a muttered curse he rose to his feet, and as he did he stopped—frozen—staring at Copper as though he had never seen ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... still"? Who is that must not, if question'd, say...... "What I would have remain'd or become, I am not"? We are ever behind, or beyond, or beside Our intrinsic existence. Forever at hide And seek with our souls. Not in Hades alone Doth Sisyphus roll, ever frustrate, the stone, Do the Danaids ply, ever vainly, the sieve. Tasks as futile does earth to its denizens give. Yet there's none so unhappy, but what he hath been Just about to be ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... exerted the utmost of his skill to unite the ministers, and to cement the apertures of the state: but he found his pains fruitless, his arguments unavailing, and his endeavours, like the stone of Sisyphus, rolling back upon himself. He retired to a friend's house in Berkshire, where he remained 'till the Queen died. So fatal an event terminated all his views in England, and made him return as fast as possible ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... Ixion turned on a wheele,[*] For daring tempt the Queene of heaven to sin; And Sisyphus an huge round stone did reele Against an hill, ne might from labour lin; 310 There thirsty Tantalus hong by the chin; And Tityus fed a vulture on his maw; Typhoeus joynts were stretched on a gin, Theseus condemnd to endlesse slouth by law, And fifty sisters ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... reached Ephesus, and was on the point of marching into Caria, when Dercylidas arrived to take command of his army. The new general was a man whose genius for invention had won him the nickname of Sisyphus. Thus it was that Thibron returned home, where on his arrival he was fined and banished, the allies accusing him of allowing his troops to plunder ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... youth and beauty; but his success would live on, ever freshening in his sight, rising through long years to a great height, and remaining fixed and exalted. With a great belief she believed in him and what he could do. He was a Sisyphus who could and would roll the-huge stone to the top of the hill—and ever with ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Argos' utmost bound, (Argos the fair, for warlike steeds renown'd,) Aeolian Sisyphus, with wisdom bless'd, In ancient time the happy wall possess'd, Then call'd Ephyre: Glaucus was his son; Great Glaucus, father of Bellerophon, Who o'er the sons of men in beauty shined, Loved for that valour which ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... thousand feet high, being the centre of the crossing currents of the winds, and of the commerce of Greece. Therefore, Athena, and the fountain-cloud Pegasus, are more closely connected with Corinth than even with Athens in their material, though not in their moral, power; and Sisyphus founds the Isthmian games in connection with a melancholy story about the sea gods; but he himself is 'kerdotos andron', the most "gaining" and subtle of men; who having the key of the Isthmus, becomes ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... says—anticipating, as all these ancients so provokingly do, some of our most modern popular philosophers—"sweetness, both in language and in manner, is a very powerful attraction in the formation of friendships". He is by no means of the same opinion as Sisyphus in Lord ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... people! Amid these heavy-hearted and dull-eyed loiterers, what a relief it would have been to have met the soiled jacket, the brawny arm, and the manly brow, of one of our own artizans! I felt there were worse things in the world than hard work. Better it were to roll the stone of Sisyphus all life-long, than spend it in such idleness as weighs upon the cities of Italy. Better the clang of the forge than the rattle of the sabre. The Milanese seemed looking into the future; and a dismal future it is, if one may judge from their looks,—a future full of revolutions, ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... inability to gain support, the binding of his hands from free action by the machinery of State regulations only applicable to home ecclesiastics, the continual making beginnings that never were allowed to progress—or, as he himself called it, the continual rolling of the stone of Sisyphus—could not but exhaust his powers, above all in such a climate; and that same sickly summer of 1822 which proved fatal to Felix Carey was his last. In July, one of his clergy, on whom he had been obliged to ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... alone, but think of Hades, with Tantalus, Sisyphus, Tityus, and all the rest of them. How futile were the attempts of the old Greeks and Romans to lay before us any plausible conception of eternal torture. What were the Danaids doing but that which each one of us has to do during his or her whole life? What are ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... Imagine the Sisyphus' little pear with its hatching-chamber swollen into a globule a trifle smaller than the sphere at the other end; suppose the two protuberances to be divided by a sort of wide open groove like that of a pulley; ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... disgust, he turned to stare behind him at the crowd on its way to Daphne, making such a business of pleasure as reduced the pleasure to a toil of Sisyphus (who had to roll a heavy stone perpetually up a steep hill in the underworld. Before he reached the top the ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... of the thousands beneath struggling and striving, none with all desires satisfied, some in an agony of want and penury, all straining for the elusive Enough; like Sisyphus ever rolling the rock of labour up a hill ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... in difficulty, down to the present day. But that it should be other than a problem for the whites had not been thought of. How strange this seems to us, whose whole attention is concentrated upon it from morning till night, from childhood to the grave! We stand before it like Sisyphus before the great rock which he rolled so laboriously and so vainly up ...
— A Comparative Study of the Negro Problem - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 4 • Charles C. Cook
... Tantalus, in spite of his thirst, stopped for a moment his efforts for water, Ixion's wheel stood still, the vulture ceased to tear the giant's liver, the daughters of Danaus rested from their task of drawing water in a sieve, and Sisyphus sat on his rock to listen. Then for the first time, it is said, the cheeks of the Furies were wet with tears. Proserpine could not resist, and Pluto himself gave way. Eurydice was called. She came from among the new-arrived ghosts, limping with her ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... to his aid in cases where no such device had been adopted by Homer, as when, in describing the labours of Sisyphus,[47] he wrote: ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... You are there, are you? Sir," said he, turning to me, "I am the most unhappy man in the world. Talk of Sisyphus rolling the ever-recoiling stone—of Prometheus gnawed by the vulture since the birth of time. The fables yet live. There is my rock, forever crushing me back! there is my eternal vulture, feeding upon my heart! There! there! there!" And, with an awful gesture of malediction ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... ye phantoms of the dark abyss: Bring, Tantalus, thy unextinguished thirst, And Sisyphus, thy still returning stone; Come, Tityus, with the vulture at thy heart; And thou, Ixion, bring thy giddy wheel; Nor let the toiling sisters stay behind. Pour your united griefs into this breast, And in low murmurs sing sad obsequies (If ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... joy alone possessed me, but soon the great bitter burden came rolling back upon my soul, like the stone of Sisyphus, which my sleeping soul had ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield |
