"Promethean" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Spain was empress in the realm of mind. The Elizabethan age in England was shaped by the sword. America's intellectual preeminence followed the long agony of the Revolution, and blazed like a banner of glory in the wake of the Civil War. The Reign of Terror gave forth flashes of true Promethean fire—the crash of steel in the Napoleonic war studded the heavens with stars. It required an eruption of warlike barbarians to awaken Italy from her lethargy, while Celt and Saxon struck sacred fire from the shields of the intrepid Caesars. ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... women take warning. God has given you Jesus Christ. It was worth while for Christ to live; it was worth while for Christ to die, in order that into the souls of all sinful, God-forgetting, devil-following men there might pass this Promethean spark of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... 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, human character, these pages are singularly destitute. And yet we know that such ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... fabled to have made a human image from the dust of the ground, and then, by fire stolen from heaven, to have animated it with a living soul. So man, as to his body, is made of earthly clay; but the Promethean spark that forms his soul is the fresh breath of God. There is no objection to the real ground and essence of this theory, only to its form and accompaniments. It is purely anthropomorphitic; it conceives ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... out the light, and then put out the light. If I quench thee, thou flaming minister, I can again thy former light restore, Should I repent me; but once put out thy light, Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature, I know not where is that Promethean heat, That can thy light relume. When I have pluck'd the rose I cannot give it vital growth again, It ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... because of its vigourous masculinity. To him there was in it the "scintillant iron," "the strong arm, ruddy at times with the tongues of promethean fire." It is a big canvas, avowedly romantic. "It is," he wrote, after the play had been running in New York some months, "a work of great propulsive power, of genuine creative ingenuity, of massive dramatic ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Paul Kauvar; or, Anarchy • Steele Mackaye
... lots were made, and marked, and mixed, and handed, In silent horror,[126] and their distribution Lulled even the savage hunger which demanded, Like the Promethean vulture, this pollution; None in particular had sought or planned it, 'T was Nature gnawed them to this resolution, By which none were permitted to be neuter— And the lot fell on Juan's ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... lichen, might have looked, if contrasted with the 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 was expressed ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Promethean Poet was there. He had touched the Heavenly flame; he had lasted the Waters of Inspiration: he had drained the Crystal Cup of Fancy, finding therein neither Lees nor Dregs, which bite the tongue, stifle the song, of lesser Men; he had reverently kissed the coy hand of Fame, ...
— A Spray of Kentucky Pine • George Douglass Sherley
... France of the brave! France of lost hopes! France of Promethean zeal! Napoleon's France, that bruised the despot's heel Of Europe, while the feudal world did rave. Thou France that didst burst through the rock-bound grave Which Germany and England joined to seal, And undismayed didst seek the human weal, Through which thou couldst thyself and others save— ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... last is from Petersburgh. "Like gods," forsooth; why, you travel like—; that, however, was a very pretty allusion. I have repeated it a dozen times and more. Your other letters also contain now and then a spark of Promethean fire: a spark, mind ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... modest. But when the prophets of ethical naturalism again 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 ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... globe has cooled and settled down to a possibly habitable condition, its four attendant moons will suffer the fate that overtook the earth's satellite, and in their turn become barren and death-stricken, while the great orb that once nurtured them with its light and heat receives the Promethean fire and begins ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... 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
... symphonic poem is in very essence opposed to the symphony. The genius of the symphony lies in the overwhelming breadth and intensity of its expression without the aid of words. Vainly decried by a later age of shallower perception, it achieved this Promethean stroke by the very magic of the design. At one bound thus arose in the youngest art a form higher than any other of human device,—higher than the epic, ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... occasion of the smallest spark, to blaze-up? Neither, in this our Life-element, are sparks anywhere wanting. Without doubt, some Angel, whereof so many hovered round, would one day, leaving 'the outskirts of AEsthetic Tea,' flit nigher; and, by electric Promethean glance, kindle no despicable firework. Happy, if it indeed proved a Firework, and flamed-off rocketwise, in successive beautiful bursts of splendour, each growing naturally from the other, through the several ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... atmosphere of party passion and religious hate, generating the lurid fires which glare in the battailous canticles of his prose pamphlets. The three great poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, are the utterance of his final period of solitary and Promethean grandeur, when, blind, destitute, friendless, he testified of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come, alone ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... empty than so emptily filled. He's a man's skin full of profaneness, a paradise full of weeds, a heaven full of devils, a Satan's bedchamber hung with arras of God's own making. He can be thought no better than a Promethean man; at best but a lump of animated dust kneaded into human shape, and if he has only such a thing as a soul it seems to be patched up with more vices than are patches in a poor Spaniard's coat. His general employment is to scorn ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... He was a stately youth, of noble bearing, of high purpose, of fastidious taste; and, if his broad forehead, his clear, large blue eyes, his commanding features, his lips, firm, yet plastic to every change of thought and feeling, were not an empty mask, might not improbably claim that Promethean quality of which the girl's letter had spoken,—the strange, divine, ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... nature's holy countenance, Until that grove appear'd, as if perchance, And then his tongue with sober seemlihed Gave utterance as he entered: "Ha!" I said, 960 "King of the butterflies; but by this gloom, And by old Rhadamanthus' tongue of doom, This dusk religion, pomp of solitude, And the Promethean clay by thief endued, By old Saturnus' forelock, by his head Shook with eternal palsy, I did wed Myself to things of light from infancy; And thus to be cast out, thus lorn to die, Is sure enough to ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... unseeingly,—his thoughts were very far away from all his surroundings. Before his imagination rose a Gehenna-like picture of the world in which he had to live,—the world of fashion and form and usage,—the world he was to try and rouse to a sense of better things. A Promethean task indeed! to fill human life with new symbols of hope,—to set up a white standard of faith amid the swift rushing on and reckless tramping down of desperate battle,—to pour out on all, rich or poor, worthy or unworthy, the divine-born balm of Sympathy, which, when given ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... pray for strength Promethean, Pray for power to endure; Then I say, O soul, be steadfast! Make the lofty purpose sure; And that love may be all-worthy, God of heaven, ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... Club, "A waiter still I might have long remained, "And long the club-room's jokes and glasses drained; "But ah! in luckless hour, this last December, "I wrote a book,[4] and Colburn dubbed me 'Member'— "'Member of Brooks's!'—oh Promethean puff, "To what wilt thou exalt even kitchen-stuff! "With crumbs of gossip, caught from dining wits, "And half-heard jokes, bequeathed, like half-chewed bits, "To be, each night, the waiter's perquisites;— "With such ingredients served up oft before, "But with fresh fudge and fiction ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... clock, with a figure of Prometheus chained to a rock on the top, and the vulture digging into his ribs. And Buller, as he noticed this, remembered, with the clearness afforded by funk spoken of above, that an uncle of his, who was an ardent homeopathist, had an explanation of his own of the old Promethean myth. He maintained that Prometheus typified the universal allopathic patient, and that the vulture for ever gnawing his liver was Calomel. The clock was flanked on each side by a grotesque figure, also in bronze. Two medieval bullies had drawn their swords, and ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... soul and sense in wine, In lotus-lulling languors, fond desires That heat the heart with fierce, unhallowed fires— Till Pleasure, Circe-like, transform us into swine. But if some subtler spirit thrill our clay, Some God-like flame illume this fleeting dust— Promethean fire snatched from the Olympian height— Then must we choose the nobler, higher Way, Seeking the Beautiful, the Pure, the Just— The ultimate ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... wants and plain everyday life. The educated public became weary of the Romantic writers, who were always "sighing like a furnace," delighting in solitude, cold eternity, and moonshine, deluging the world with their heart-gushings, and calling on the heavens and the earth to stand aghast at their Promethean agonising or their Wertherean despair. Healthy human nature revolted against the poetical enthusiasts who had lost the faculty of seeing things in their natural light, and who constantly indulged in that morbid self-analysis ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... who, in season and out of season, forgetting private gain for public weal, has laboured with Promethean and sacrificial ardour to instil the love of reasonable letters into countless thousands; to whom, and to whose colleagues, amid the perishable caducity of human affairs, is largely due the pullulation ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... Giants, Ventriloquists, the Invisible Girl, 710 The Bust that speaks and moves its goggling eyes, The Wax-work, Clock-work, all the marvellous craft Of modern Merlins, Wild Beasts, Puppet-shows, All out-o'-the-way, far-fetched, perverted things, All freaks of nature, all Promethean thoughts 715 Of man, his dullness, madness, and their feats All jumbled up together, to compose A Parliament of Monsters. Tents and Booths Meanwhile, as if the whole were one vast mill, Are vomiting, receiving on all sides, 720 Men, Women, three-years' Children, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth |
