"Avatar" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of less than a hundred men, was hardly Gibraltar; yet it would put the grandiloquent hidalgoes of Spain on their mettle to make more clatter over the downfall of the cross of St. George from that historic rock. McClellan was the young Napoleon, the very god of war in his latest avatar. While this was absurd, and in the end injurious to McClellan, it was of service to his Government; for it strengthened his loins to the task before him—a task demanding the highest order of ability and the influence of a demigod. ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... men cared for? What was to become of the race, if the few women who loved art, and through art learned really to love their kind, were forever to be denied? And here was Vina Nettleton with the spiritual power to concentrate her dream into an avatar (if into the midst of her solitary labors, a great man's love should suddenly come)!... Did the Destiny Master fall asleep for a century at a time, that such a genius for motherhood should be denied, while the earth was being replenished ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... tone I like to hear," said she, smiling. "I felt sure I could count on you not to indulge in too much nonsense. Well, I'm going to try the next avatar just to remind fate of my existence. I think fate's forgotten me, and I can stand anything but that. I've lost Carly, and I've lost Queen.... Oh, G.J.! Isn't it awful to think that when I offered you Queen she'd already ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... having formerly appraised that Omar in a way that, I dare say, advanced him to another Edition: he (S.W.) now writes me that he feels moved to write in favour of another Persian who now accompanies Omar in his last Avatar! I have told him plainly that he had better not employ time and talent on what I do not think he will ever persuade the Public to care about—but he thinks he will. {236} He may very likely cool upon it: but, in the ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... needs have had a dazzling effect. From the moment men allowed themselves to believe that humanity after all had not been meant for a dwarf, that its squat stature was not the measure of its possible growth, but that it stood upon the verge of an avatar of limitless development, the reaction must needs have been overwhelming. It is evident that nothing was able to stand against the enthusiasm ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... the monstrous shape of a creature half man, half lion (his fourth Avatar or incarnation), delivered the three worlds, that is to say, Earth, Heaven, and the lower regions, from the tyranny of an ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... the tradition of Chin Hung, the God of T'ai Shan of the fifth generation from P'an Ku, this being, then called Yuean-shih T'ien-wang, was an avatar of P'an Ku. It came about in this wise. In remote ages there lived on the mountains an old man, Yuean-shih T'ien-wang, who used to sit on a rock and preach to the multitude. He spoke of the highest antiquity as if from personal experience. When Chin Hung asked him where he ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... the avatar of the God of Etiquette, personified in Mr. Richard Nash, descended somewhere about the year 1705, for the purpose of regenerating the barbarians. He alighted just at the moment that one of the doctors we have alluded to, in a ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... his strange fancy of speaking against himself may have contributed toward it. But how do you explain the anger expressed by his pen? Do you forget his misanthropical invectives, his personal attacks, his 'Avatar,' his epigrams?" ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... is always a miracle, but at thirty-three years old, such a bird of paradise rising in the sage-brush was an avatar. One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim. King, like Adams, and all their generation, was at that moment passing the critical point of his career. The one, coming ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... serve Thee? Every votary offers his worship to the God of his own creation: each day he receives service— None seek Him, the Perfect: Brahma, the Indivisible Lord. They believe in ten Avatars; but no Avatar can be the Infinite Spirit, for he suffers the results of his deeds: The Supreme One must be other than this. The Yogi, the Sanyasi, the Ascetics, are disputing one with another: Kabr says, "O brother! he who has seen that radiance ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... Christian Era such a peculiar conjunction and combination of the planets occurred in the Constellation symbolizing the destinies of Judea, which was interpreted as indicating the appearance of an Incarnation or Avatar of a Great Divine Soul—a Master of Masters—a Mystic of Mystics. It must be remembered that these Orders are composed of non-Christians—people that the average Christian would call "heathens," and that therefore this testimony must be regarded as free from bias ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... of the soul Improvisatore, account of one at Milan 'Ina,' Mrs. Wilmot's tragedy of Inchbald, Mrs., her 'Simple Story' Her 'Nature and Art' Incledon, Charles, singer 'INEZ,' Stanzas to Interlachen Invention Iris, the 'IRISH AVATAR' Irving, Washington, esq. Italian manners Italians, bad translators, except from the classics Italy, the only modern nation in Europe that has a ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... Wilde wept whenever he thought of the death of Lucien de Rubempre. Lucien should have been allowed at least one more "avatar." That is one of the things that pleases me so much in that old ten-penny paper edition published by the great Paris house. We have a list of the characters in the index, with all their other appearances on the stage; just exactly as if it were ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... complexion was real, and how much was patent rouge and Bloom of Ninon. He doubted whether Simpson, Sir Charles's valet, was not Colonel Clay in plain clothes; and he had half an idea that Cesarine herself was our saucy White Heather in an alternative avatar. We pointed out to him in vain that Simpson had often been present in the very same room with David Granton, and that Cesarine had dressed Mrs. Brabazon's hair at Lucerne: this partially satisfied ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... period of the high development of the sacred play. Only a few years earlier the civic procession, or pageant, had shown in brilliant tableaux vivants the stories of the Minotaur and Iphigenie. The study of classic art and literature had blossomed in the very streets of Italy in a new avatar of the dramatic dance. From every account we glean testimony that the costuming of these spectacles was admirable. It must follow that so simple a task as the dressing of the characters in Poliziano's "Orfeo" was easily accomplished at that time when the Arcadian spirit of the story was precious ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... which was both grotesque and pitiable. The guest of honour was "Pete" Doyle, the former car-conductor and "young rebel friend of Walt's," then a middle-aged person. John Swinton, who presided, described Whitman as a troglodyte, but a cave-dweller he never was; rather the avatar of the hobo. As John Jay Chapman wittily wrote: "He patiently lived on cold pie, and tramped the earth in triumph." Instead of essaying the varied, expressive, harmonious music of blank verse, he chose the easier, more clamorous, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... of so brief a serial will not mount sufficiently to carry strongly over from month to month; when the tale is completed it will not make a book which the Trade (inexorable force!) cares to handle. It is therefore still awaiting its authoritative avatar, which it will be some one's prosperity and glory to imagine; for in the novelette are possibilities for fiction as ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... fraternity, has yet retained enough of his original organic conditions to render him, even in the isolation of (here she mentioned the region I had come from) susceptible to the higher influence of the occult sisterhood. Receive him in your midst as the chela of a new avatar which will be unfolded to him under your tender guidance. Take him in your arms, O my sisters, and comfort him with the doctrines of Ila, ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... himself confesses), and altogether wants any controlling purpose. But to whatever extent Christianity had insinuated itself into and colored European literature, it was mainly as mythology. The Christian idea had never yet incorporated itself. It was to make its avatar in Dante. To understand fully what he accomplished we must form some conception of what is meant by the Christian idea. To bring it into fuller relief, let us contrast it with the Greek idea as it appears in poetry; for we are not dealing with a question ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... him she was sorry he was going away. What he had found was a very statuesque little lady, clad in fluffy summer white, with the other Ardea's slate-blue eyes and soft voice, to be sure, but with no other reminder of the lost avatar. ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... There was some heart, too, in the manner in which they gesticulated and declaimed; and I have little doubt but that they were in earnest—especially if any of these happened to have friends or relations down that way, who had been roused out of house and home by the Gallic Avatar. When they were tired with singing, or perhaps presumed that they had therewith tired us, they took to playing the fool. Not merely in a general sense, in which they may be said to have been so engaged all along; but with heavy effort, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... into the system, for the sake of propitiating the Indian mind, so that its influence is hostile to Christianity and to missions. Idols are to be worshiped because they are "centers of magnetism." In England Mrs. Besant predicts a second advent of Christ. But in India this becomes a new avatar of Krishna. In spite of her stout denunciation of child-marriages and her inculcation of modern science, her propaganda has not been so much a reform of Indian religion, as it has been a hindrance to reform. Hindu devotees indeed have eulogized ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... petticoats,—to His Majesty, King Cotton,—not a very merry king, it must be owned, as young King Charles was, or old King Cole, but still a worthy sovereign; for, after all, he is but a new and most bulky avatar of Almighty Dollar. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... original impressions of Junonian abundance, she did not so much dwindle as seem to vanish from the proportions his visions had assigned her that first night when he saw her standing before the mirror. In this outdoor avatar, this companionship with the sun and breeze, she was new to him again, and he found himself searching his consciousness for his lost acquaintance with her, and feeling as if he knew her less and less. Perhaps, indeed, she had no very distinctive individuality; perhaps at her ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... wish of Mother Barringer's heart to see her daughter married and settled with "a stiddy young man that you knowed all about, and his folks before him." She had observed with great disquietude the brilliant avatar of Mr. Bertie Leon and the evident pride of her daughter in the bright-plumaged captive she had brought to Chaney Creek, the spoil of her maiden snare. "I don't more'n half like that little feller." (It is a Western habit to ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... the conservative, or the worldly-minded, or of the plain people who could not understand the enigmatic utterances of the reformers, the dangerous or ludicrous sides of transcendentalism were naturally uppermost. Nevertheless the movement was but a new avatar of the old Puritan spirit; its moral earnestness, its spirituality, its tenderness for the individual conscience. Puritanism, too, in its day had run into grotesque extremes. Emerson bore about the same relation to the absurder outcroppings ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... esotericism. The verses of the Koran that refer to the "Companions of the Cave"[218] indicate that he knew more than he taught in public, and that there may be some ground for certain Asiatic nations holding the exaggerated belief that he was an Avatar,[219] the tenth incarnation of the Aum—the Amed, the Nations' Desire.[220] He was ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... he had completed the sixtieth year of his age, so extravagant became his passion for the unknown fair one, that he became (were it possible for a Frenchman of that day to be so) melancholy and miserable. His pain was, however, somewhat appeased by the avatar of the little foot itself, appertaining to a pretty and youthful girl in the very humblest class of life. All distinctions were levelled at once by love: the actor sought the parents of the female, procured their ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 287, December 15, 1827 • Various
... his favourite manuscript, the Myth of Psyche, translated from Apuleius, which he declared Raphael must one day paint for him. But of all the gods of antiquity the one which roused our young enthusiast to deepest admiration was Apollo, whose avatar was the sun, but whose spiritual significance was infinitely more, the light of the soul, the god of music, art, and poetry and all that elevates the ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... on this quotation. I might point out how St. Bridget is called the mother of the Lord, and by others, the Mary of the Irish, the 'Automata coeli regina,' and seems to have been considered at times as an avatar or incarnation of the blessed Virgin. I might more than hint how that appellation, as well as the calling of Christ 'the best of the sons of the Lord,' in an orthodox Catholic hymn, seems to point to the remnants of an older creed, possibly Buddhist, the transition whence towards Catholic Christianity ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... was the first occasion in the history of the world when the idea of the Avatar found its place in religion. Western scholars are never tired of insisting that Buddhism is of the nature of a moral code, coldly leading to the path of extinction. They forget that it was held to be a religion that roused in its devotees an inextinguishable fire of ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... Spirits, and none are mightier than they. One, fearful in mysterious beauty, the Queen of all that is occult and inscrutable, rises in cloudy state from the antique Orient—from the Egypt of the Only Isis, and from the Avatar land of Brahma—solemnly breathing the love of the All in One. Infinitely lovely is the dark-browed Queen, and she bears in her hand the lotus. Against her, in laughing sunlight, amid green leaves and birdsong, waving merry warning, stands a brighter form—the incarnation ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... modulation, inflexion, mood, qualification, innovation, metastasis, deviation, turn, evolution, revolution; diversion; break. transformation, transfiguration; metamorphosis; transmutation; deoxidization [Chem]; transubstantiation; [Genetics], mutagenesis transanimation^, transmigration, metempsychosis^; avatar; alterative. conversion &c (gradual change) 144; revolution &c (sudden or radical change) 146, inversion &c (reversal) 218; displacement &c 185; transference &c 270. changeableness &c 149; tergiversation &c (change ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... "making a revolver of my mind," Van Bummel would have translated it. I knew that our soil produced more soldiers even than France, the fertile mother of red-legged heroes; but I did not expect, in the Nineteenth Century and in the State of New York, to have beheld an avatar of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... been obliged to adopt his writings, the adoption was merely a sham one, as it never paid the slightest attention to them? No, no, the church was never led by Moses, nor by one mightier than he, whose doctrine it has equally nullified—I allude to Krishna in his second avatar; the church, it is true, governs in his name, but not unfrequently gives him the lie, if he happens to have said anything which it dislikes. Did you never hear the reply which Padre Paolo Segani made ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... and arts against her abominable tormentors, and rout them utterly. The god was gracious; whence his nine avatars, or incarnations,—as fish, as tortoise, as boar, as man-lion, as dwarf Brahmin, as Pursuram,—the Brahmin-warrior who overthrew the Kshatriya, or soldier-caste; the eighth avatar appeared in the person of Krishna, and the ninth ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... of Brahma as a fish—the Matsya Avatar—is recounted in much Sanscrit; but it appears to be only a symbolical reference to a great division of Nature,—a heathen assertion of God in the sea, as well as elsewhere. The same is true of the marine deities ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... me your handkerchief, my friend, that I may wipe away my tears. I have a sausage wrapped up in mine, but what are sausages compared with art! How divinely SEEBACH walks. To me, she seems like an incarnation of Pure Reason, an Avatar of the spirit of transcendental philosophy. Come, we ...
— Punchinello Vol. II., No. 30, October 22, 1870 • Various
... Francesca, swept like leaves on the wind of hell. He was in high good humour, and as he worked he talked incessantly, quoting from an imaginary review. "In the genius of Mr. Edward Haviland we have a new Avatar of the spirit of Art. Mr. Haviland is the disciple of no school. He owes no debt either to the past or to the present. He works in a noble freedom from prejudice and preconception, uncorrupted by custom as he is untrammelled by tradition. If we may classify what is above and beyond classification, ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... am touched by the desire of accuracy. This is no furniture for the scholar's library, but a book for the winter evening school-room when the tasks are over and the hour for bed draws near; and honest Alan, who was a grim old fire-eater in his day has in this new avatar no more desperate purpose than to steal some young gentleman's attention from his Ovid, carry him awhile into the Highlands and the last century, and pack him to bed with some engaging images ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... laws, acquiescing in his just will, and returning love for love: such a phase could not be better shadowed out to creatures than by an Eternal Son; the dutiful yet supreme, the subordinate yet coeequal, the amiable yet exalted Avatar of our God. This was probable to have been the second impersonation of Deity. ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Peru, are familiar instances of this. In the later Brahminism of India, Vishnu, having already accomplished nine avatars, or incarnations, for special emergencies in the past, was yet to have one more avatar for the final destruction of the wicked and the restoration of goodness at the end of the present age; he would then be revealed in the sky seated on a white horse and wielding a blazing sword. I need not specify others: it will be manifest that the traditions ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... of her own soul. She claims the toga virilis, and all the strengthening burdens of freedom. Now it is difficult to represent such a demand in terms of argument. Liberty is no mere conclusion of linked logic long-drawn out: it is an axiom, a flaming avatar. The arguments by which it is defended are important, but they bear to it much the same relation that a table of the wave-lengths of various rays of light bears to the immediate glory of a sunrise. There is another obstacle. ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... need manifests itself in a simultaneous move in the direction of universal education at government expense throughout the two continents. All the populations snatch up their satchels and hurry to school. Athens revives the Academe and reinstates the Olympic games under a literary avatar. Italy follows suit. Hornbooks open and shut with a suggestive snap under the pope's nose, and Young Rome calculates its future with slate and pencil. Gaul, fresh from one year's term in the severest of all schools, adversity, joins the procession, close by ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... have Euphuism with its antithetical tricks and poises, taking all prose by storm for a time: Euphuism, to be revived two hundred years later, and find a new avatar in the Johnsonian balance; Euphuism, dead now, yet alive ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... the Augustan age or by the romanticizing poets who followed them with their elegiac refinement, and their unimpassioned strain of reflection and description. They appeared, for the moment, to be the new avatar of the tragic muse whereof Akenside and Collins and Warton had prophesied, the answer to their demand for something wild and primitive, for the return into poetry of the Naturton, and the long-absent power of exciting the tragic emotions, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... and sap of the sweet swift Spring, Fire of our island soul, Burn in her breast and pulse in her wing While the endless ages roll; Avatar—she—of the perilous pride That plundered the golden West, Her glance is a sword, but it sweeps too wide For a rumour to trouble her rest. She goeth her glorious way, the hawk, She nurseth her brood alone; She will not swoop for an owlet's whoop, She hath calls ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... at Marly, and, with the ssistance of much sarcasm from Hohenfels, am getting on with considerable spirit at my Progressive Geography. When man's Hope ceases temporarily to take a merely Human aspect, may it not suffer a fresh avatar and begin in a new and Geographical form its beneficent career? The Dark Ladye has sunk beneath my horizon, but speculations over the Atlantean and Lunar Mountains are still succulent ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... a hero of the Arabian Nights at her name, and has visions of her as St. Francis has of Christ; this younger and brighter Sir Launcelot, is an ideal little figure, whom you might mistake for Love himself as described in the "Romaunt of the Rose;" Love's avatar or incarnation, on whose appearance the year blooms into spring, the fruit trees blossom, the birds sing, the girls dance at eve round the maypoles; behind whom, while reading this poem, we seem to see the corn ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... Theophile Gautier and Prosper Merimee, told in English by Myndart Verelst and delayed with a proem by Edgar Saltus."[10] Translation again. The stories are "Avatar" and "The Venus of Ille." The essay at the beginning is a very charming performance. This book is ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... millions of imaginations daily turned upon him, rarely appears in that fiction which sprang from local color except as the canny trader of some small town or as the ruthless magnate of some glittering metropolis. David Harum remains his rural avatar and The Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son his most popular commentary. Doubtless the existence of this type in every community tends to warn off the searchers after local figures, who have preferred, in their fashion, to be monopolists ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... regions of country like an ignis fatuus. He appears suddenly like an avatar, or saunters over weary wastes a poor and starving hunter. His voice is at one moment deep and sonorous as a thunder-clap, and at another clothed with the softness of feminine supplication. Scarcely any two persons agree in all the minor ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... very well, but thought him rather a quack. Possibly he meant to convey the idea that he was Moses, and that he had dwelt in the palaces of the Ramessids. The grave of the prophet was never known, and Saint-Germain may have insinuated that he began a new avatar in a cleft of Mount Pisgah; ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... gods were called "self-begotten," because each was father to the son who was his true image or himself. Likeness implied identity, in primitive belief. Thus the belief in mortal descent from the gods among the Celts may have involved the theory of a divine avatar. The god became father of a mortal by a woman, and part of himself passed over to the child, who ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch |
