"Promethean" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a loss to place on new ground or in a fresh light the matter of discussion introduced by others. Writers of every tongue, studied by him with observant curiosity, stored his retentive memory with materials ready to be applied on every occasion, moulded by his Promethean talent into the most animated and alluring forms. As a speaker and converser he was eminently characterized by a constant flow of brilliant ideas, by a rapid succession of striking images, and by a never-failing copiousness of words, often quaint, but always correct. A similar society was formed ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... The "Contes Drolatiques" are full of it, and his conversation was also full of it. But the letters constantly show us a man with the edge of his spontaneity gone—a man groaning and sighing, as from Promethean lungs, complaining of his tasks, denouncing his enemies, and in complete ill humor generally with life. Of any expression of enjoyment of the world, of the beauties of nature, art, literature, history, ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... and again announce that the great aim of all the discoveries of the evolution theory is to show us how far mankind has fortunately progressed; when their spirit of devotion is nourished by Goethe's Promethean word: "Hast thou not thyself accomplished all, thou holy glowing heart?"—and even when Haeckel prints as the leading motto of his "Anthropogeny" Goethe's poem "Prometheus"; when the struggle of selection is also elevated to a moral principle, and the life-task of an individual is limited ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... very little; as is also true of writing verse, of playing the fiddle, and of dozens of other things, but of nothing more than of believing. For the bad or young or untaught mower without tradition, the mower Promethean, the mower original and contemptuous of the past, does all these things: He leaves great crescents of grass uncut. He digs the point of the scythe hard into the ground with a jerk. He loosens the handles and even the fastening of the blade. He twists ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... And who does not love those innumerable Russian youths and maidens, driven to acts of defiance—hopeless, futile, yet necessary—if for no other reason than to fulfill their duty to humanity and thus perhaps quiet a quivering conscience? There is something truly Promethean in the struggle of the Russian youth against their overpowering antagonist. They know that the price of one single act of protest is their lives. Yet, to the eternal credit of humanity, thousands of them have thrown ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... dollars, and how the newspapers had since found it possible to make money, to increase their circulation, by attacking him. He frankly admitted the fact of his social ostracism, attributing it partially to Aileen's deficiencies and partially to his own attitude of Promethean defiance, which ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... material survivals, at least the vestiges, of the cloister or the acropolis of the past, of its cathedral or its forum. The processes of our industries, in what is now their daily artisan routine, include, repeat, condense, what were yesterday or longer ago living inventions, each instinct with Promethean fire. The hackneyed ornament of our homes was once glowing with beauty, radiant or dark with symbolism. So it is for our everyday customs and institutions, and so for living languages; our own, perhaps, ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... without definite reason, in the arms of his beloved, that the profound, melancholy motif in the first movement of his symphony in D minor came to him. This symphony gradually grew into the great vision of his life, and, many years later, one of his women admirers gave it the modifying title of Promethean. The first time the theme sounded in his ears he roared like a wild beast, but with joy. It seemed to him that music was really born at ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... looke. For when would you my Lord, or you, or you, Haue found the ground of studies excellence, Without the beauty of a womans face; From womens eyes this doctrine I deriue, They are the Ground, the Bookes, the Achadems, From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire. Why, vniuersall plodding poysons vp The nimble spirits in the arteries, As motion and long during action tyres The sinnowy vigour of the trauailer. Now for not looking on a womans face, You haue in that forsworne the vse of eyes: And studie too, the causer of your vow. For ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... fair face the whole dark universe Speaks, as a thorn-tree speaks thro' one white flower; And all those wrenched Promethean souls that curse The gods, but cannot die before their hour, Find utterance in her beauty. That fair head Bows over all earth's graves. It was her cry Men heard in Rama when the twisted ways With children's blood ran red! Her silence ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... sea-wind's crying, Knew not the song her sister, even as she Thundering, or like her confluent spring-tides brightening, And like her darkness lightening; The song that moved about him silent, now Both soundless wings refolded and refurled On that Promethean brow, Then quivering as for flight that wakes ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... power was given Not to dissolve our clay, But draw Promethean beams from heaven To ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... rough unhewn masses of upright stones in Stonhenge, or any other Druidical temple. The sons were, indeed, heavy unadorned blocks as the eye would desire to look upon. Tall, stout, and comely, all and each of the five eldest seemed to want alike the Promethean fire of intellect, and the exterior grace and manner, which, in the polished world, sometimes supply mental deficiency. Their most valuable moral quality seemed to be the good-humour and content which ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... with its climbing spire, Brings down for mortals the Promethean fire, If careless nature have forgot to frame An altar worthy of the sacred flame. Unblest by any save the goatherd's lines, Mont Blanc rose soaring through his "sea of pines;" In vain the rivers from their ice-caves flash; No hymn ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... whatever later teachers may have done in definitely shaping opinion, in giving specific form to sentiment, and in subjecting impulse to rational discipline, here was the friendly fire-bearer who first conveyed the Promethean spark, here the prophet who first ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... visit meant, or know What thy errand here below? Shall we say that Nature blind Check'd her hand, and changed her mind, Just when she had exactly wrought A finish'd pattern without fault? Could she flag, or could she tire, Or lack'd she the Promethean fire (With her nine moons' long workings sicken'd) That should thy little limbs have quicken'd? Limbs so firm, they seem'd to assure Life of health, and days mature: Woman's self in miniature! Limbs so fair, ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... cosmos. He did not surrender the authority of moral ideals in the face of physical necessity, which is properly the essence of pantheism. He did the exact opposite; so much so that the chief characteristic of his philosophy is its Promethean spirit. He maintained that the basis of moral authority was internal, diffused among all individuals; that it was the natural love of the beautiful and the good wherever it might spring, and ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... the grave, above ground, breathing, quick, animated; animative^; lively &c (active) 682; all alive and kicking; tenacious of life; full of life, yeasty. vital, vitalic^; vivifying, vivified, &c v.; viable, zoetic^; Promethean. Adv. vivendi causa [Lat.]. Phr. atqui vivere militare est [Lat.] [Seneca]; non est vivere sed ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... learn to blush At's loyall Subject, starve at's Beggars bush: And if not drawn by example, shame, nor Grace, Turne o've to's Coxcomb, and the Wild-goose Chase. Monarch of Wit! great Magazine of wealth! From whose rich Banke, by a Promethean-stealth, Our lesser flames doe blaze! His the true fire, When they like Glo-worms, being touch'd, expire, 'Twas first beleev'd, because he alwayes was, The Ipse dixit, and Pythagoras To our Disciple-wits; His soule might run (By the same-dream't-of Transmigration) ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher in Ten Volumes - Volume I. • Beaumont and Fletcher
... master, for he only can be called proprietor of the house here who behaves with most propriety in it. The Landlord stands clear back in nature, to my imagination, with his axe and spade felling trees and raising potatoes with the vigor of a pioneer; with Promethean energy making nature yield her increase to supply the wants of so many; and he is not so exhausted, nor of so short a stride, but that he comes forward even to the highway to this wide hospitality and publicity. Surely, he has ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... of the odorous memory Thou sweetly bearest of the cherry-grove, Where blossoms bloom and lovers tell their love. Bright amber, fragrant wood, enamelled clay, Help me to burn the incense worthily! Thou fire, assist! Promethean fire, unbound, The azure clouds go wreathing round and round, Float slowly up, then gently melt away; And in their circling wreaths I dimly spy Full many a fleeting vision's fantasy. Alas! alas! How bright soe'er before my view they pass, Whether it be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... not found them sheer earth, all unworthy of Caucasian clay-pits. How much better a claim to kinship with Prometheus have you gentlemen who win fame in the courts, engaged in real contests; your works have true life and breath, ay, and the warmth of fire. That is Promethean indeed, though with the difference, it may be, that you do not work in clay; your creations are oftenest of gold; [Section: 2] we on the other hand who come before popular audiences and offer mere lectures are exhibitors of imitations only. However, I have the general resemblance to Prometheus, ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... hill-side, city and plain Are shed as drops of rain; Because all earth was black, all heaven was blind, And we cast out of mind; Because men wept, saying Freedom, knowing of thee, Child, that thou wast not free; Because wherever blood was not shame was Where thy pure foot did pass; Because on Promethean rocks distent Thee fouler eagles rent; Because a serpent stains with slime and foam This that is not thy Rome; Child of my womb, whose limbs were made in me, Have I forgotten thee? In all thy dreams through ...
— Two Nations • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... but the free, untrammeled folk-speech of that sincerer natural heart which you have learned to silence and suppress. For I dare affirm that now, as then and always, there will be some spark of the Promethean fire in every heart of man or maid, else this would indeed be a sorry world ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... to be no more real a personage than Prometheus, and if the story of the Fall is merely an instructive "type," comparable to the profound Promethean mythus, what value has ...
— The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science - Essay #6 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the performer who has to talk at any cost through five acts; and if you also do what you must always do in Shakespear's tragedies: that is, dissect out the absurd sensational incidents and physical violences of the borrowed story from the genuine Shakespearian tissue, you will get a true Promethean foe of the gods, whose instinctive attitude towards women much resembles that to which Don Juan is now driven. From this point of view Hamlet was a developed Don Juan whom Shakespear palmed off as a reputable man just as he palmed poor Macbeth off as ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... exultations, In their triumph and their yearning, In their passionate pulsations, In their words among the nations The Promethean fire is burning." ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... Muse withal Resumes her music in a sadder tone, Meanwhile the sunbeam strikes upon the wall, Conceive that lovely siren to live on, Ev'n as Hope whisper'd, the Promethean light Would kindle ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... his heaven-inspired strain; here Petrarch wooed his much-loved Laura in sonnets soft as the affection that gave them birth; here Tasso made history and Jerusalem immortal by crowning them with the garlands of his Promethean genius; and here Ariosto, Dante, Metastasio, and a galaxy of poets and philosophers shed the splendour of their gifted imaginations on the expiring greatness ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... stigmatized Mackenzie as the Wolf, the fighting and the destructive principle. Not only was the combat of these forces spiritual, but men fought, each to his totem. They were the children of Jelchs, the Raven, the Promethean fire-bringer; Mackenzie was the child of the Wolf, or in other words, the Devil. For them to bring a truce to this perpetual warfare, to marry their daughters to the arch-enemy, were treason and blasphemy of the highest ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... is the instinctive and resistant act of man when, at the winter ingress, the curfew is sounded throughout Nature. It indicates a spontaneous, Promethean rebelliousness against that fiat that this recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness, misery and death. Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy |
