"Olympics" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... plain in a valley in Elis, on the Peloponnesus, traversed by the river Alpheus, and in which the Olympic Games were celebrated every fifth year in honour of Zeus, and adorned with temples (one to Zeus and another to Hera), statues, and ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... have an opportunity in the country of witnessing Olympic games. I am looking forward to seeing so many young Atalantas run races. Where are the wreaths of laurel and parsley that are to grace the occasion?" said Mr. Cross, the genial rector, who was fond of a joke, and at home ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... are scarcely to be paralleled by "Bentley's Notes on Milton." How Warburton turned "an allegorical mermaid" into "the Queen of Scots;"—showed how Shakspeare, in one word, and with one epithet "the majestic world," described the Orbis Romanus, alluded to the Olympic Games, &c.; yet, after all this discovery, seems rather to allude to a story about Alexander, which Warburton happened to recollect at that moment;—and how he illustrated Octavia's idea of the fatal consequences ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... patriotism, truth and goodness, he may well defy the harmless darts of angry criticism and invective, emanating from writers who are foreign in blood, language, sympathy and taste. When the Greeks delighted in their olympic games of running for a laurel crown, the Romans witnessed with savage pleasure the deadly contentions of their gladiators, the Spaniards gazed with joy on their bloody bull fights, and the English crowded to look at the horse race or prize ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... little hand, and start running, you'll find you'll soon be running too. And, years hence, when you win the Marathon at the Olympic Games, you'll come to me with tears in ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... but of all other nations, in the great and wonderful century which has just closed. Every department of human activity will be represented there, and perhaps I may be allowed, as honorary president of the athletic association which, under European management, started to revive the memory of the Olympic games, to say that I am glad that, in addition to paying proper heed to the progress of industry, of science, of art, we have also paid proper heed to the development of the athletic pastimes which are useful ...
— American Boy's Life of Theodore Roosevelt • Edward Stratemeyer
... stands Zeus himself. A chariot race is about to be run, and the contestants stand on either side of Zeus. Zeus gave the victory to Pelops, and Pelops became husband of Hippodameia, and king of Pisa, and founded the Olympic Games. These games were held every fourth year for more than a ...
— Buried Cities: Pompeii, Olympia, Mycenae • Jennie Hall
... strengthen the lights," said the torch-bearer. "This is the headquarters of the union of all those who chant hymns, take part in the Olympic games, dance after the manner of satyrs and play the Greek trilogies. A league of fun-makers they are. Also these actors do lay claim to the greatest of all antiquity for their order, saying that no less a one than Homer himself ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock
... presented by a group of beautiful young females, crowned with flowers, who accompanied Bonaparte's carriage, and which at that period, when the Revolution had renewed all the republican recollections of Greece and Rome, looked like the chorus of females dancing around the victor at the Olympic games. ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... the principal city of Syria, where a broad street cuts through the place lengthways, he built cloisters along it on both sides, and laid the open road with polished stone, and was of very great advantage to the inhabitants. And as to the olympic games, which were in a very low condition, by reason of the failure of their revenues, he recovered their reputation, and appointed revenues for heir maintenance, and made that solemn meeting more venerable, as ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... subject exceeding strong. He represents (1 Cor. ix. 27) his mind and body as engaged in combat, and says, "I buffet my body, and subject it." The word here translated " subject," in the original, means "to carry into servitude," and is a term taken from the language of the olympic games where the boxers dragged off the arena, their conquered, disabled, and helpless antagonists like slaves, in which humbled condition the Apostle represents his body to be ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... hundred years ago" in Yorkshire, and incidentally he also made records. For instance, he cleared four-and-twenty feet at a "run-jump," and with this in my mind I find it satisfactory to think that he lived in another century, or I might find myself regretting the eclipse of the Olympic Games. As an upholder of law and order I ought to be (I am not) ashamed to admire a man who, to say the least of it, was a very prickly thorn in the side of the police. My excuse is that Jack Sincler and his brother Lishe were kindly men ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914 • Various
... masses—some pretence to the favour of heaven—some element of good giving power to evil, tyranny, even for a short time, cannot be maintained. The Greek tyrants were not insensible to the importance of awakening in their cause a Pseudo-Hellenic feeling; they were proud of successes at the Olympic games; they were not devoid of the love of literature and art. Plato is thinking in the first instance of Greek poets who had graced the courts of Dionysius or Archelaus: and the old spirit of freedom is roused within him at their prostitution of the Tragic Muse in the ...
— The Republic • Plato
... Olympic Committee, which controls all the modern Olympic meets, conferred upon the Exposition the right to hold the Modern Pentathlon, this being the first time it has been contested outside of the Olympic Games. In addition, America is to have for the first time the Decathlon, and the famous Marathon race originated in Greece centuries ago, and impressively revived during recent years by the more important athletic bodies ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... speaking strings, What God, what hero, wilt thou sing? What happy man to equal glories bring? Begin, begin thy noble choice, And let the hills around reflect the image of thy voice. Pisa does to Jove belong, Jove and Pisa claim thy song. The fair first-fruits of war, th' Olympic games, Alcides offer'd up to Jove; Alcides too thy strings may move! But, oh! what man to join with these can worthy prove? Join Theron boldly to their sacred names; Theron the next honour claims; Theron to no man ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... philosophers Beheld mankind, as mere spectators of The Olympic games. When I behold a prize Worth wrestling for, I may be ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... Deerfoot to this day we boast the noted names of Longboat, Sockalexis, Bemus Pierce, Frank Hudson, Tewanima, Metoxen, Myers, Bender, and Jim Thorpe. Thorpe is a graduate of the Carlisle school, and at the Olympic Games in Sweden in 1912 he won the title of the greatest ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... structures on the site, the "house of Nero" is the most interesting and extensive. The Olympic games were still celebrated, even after the Roman domination, and Nero himself entered the lists in his own reign. He caused a palace to be erected for him on that occasion—and of course he won a victory, for any other outcome would have been ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... dedicated to the god, with this inscription: Aristomache, the poetess of Erythraea, dedicated this after she had got the prize at the Isthmian games. Nor is there any reason, I continued, why we should so admire and reverence the Olympic games, as if, like Fate, they were unalterable, and never admitted any change since the first institution. For the Pythian, it is true, hath had three or four musical prizes added; but all the exercises of the body were for the most part the ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... ideals. And yet there is no one so gifted that he cannot improve through a study of the game he is to play. Most great athletes are by nature athletic. And yet every one of them trains to perfect himself. The best athletes America sent to the Olympic games were wonderfully capable men, but they were wonderfully trained men, as well. They had studied the methods of their particular sports. Great singers are born with great vocal potentialities, but the greatest singers become so as the result of thorough training. Methods elevate them to fame. ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... and their freedom from the adventitious ornaments of an exaggerated rhetoric or a sentimental morality, the golden age of Greece. We seem to stand within the Parthenon, to gaze upon the Venus of Cnidus, to be jostled by the gay crowd at the Olympic games. It was indeed a golden age, when all that was beautiful in nature was reverently and assiduously nurtured, and all that was noble and natural in art was magnificently encouraged; an age in which refinement and nobility were not accidents, but necessities; when ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... that I went to school with is on the famous Meadowbrook team; another has played in Davis Cup matches; another brought home a First from the Olympic games. In the pack that I run with there is even one Roper who achieves a large income by writing fiction for the magazines, but even he isn't in the least like that brilliant little circle to which Fulton belonged. For we feel that we are paying ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... did something else besides placing an austere and merciless system upon Sparta. He helped to re-establish the famous and ancient Olympic Games (776 B.C.). ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 25, April 29, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... to go to see the ruins of the enormous temple of Jupiter where chariot races were run and the Olympic games wuz fought that Paul speaks of so many times in his letters to ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... supposed to be a native of western Asia, but now grows abundantly in Italy, Spain, and the south of France. Among the ancients the myrtle was held sacred to Venus and was a plant of considerable importance, wreaths of it being worn by the victors of the Olympic games and other honored personages. Various parts of the plant were used in medicine, in cookery, and by the Tuscans in the preparation of myrtle wine, called myrtidanum. It is still used in perfumery, and a highly ...
— Catalogue of Economic Plants in the Collection of the U. S. Department of Agriculture • William Saunders
... reward talent, as well as bodily vigor. They afforded orators, poets, and historians the best opportunities of rehearsing their productions. Herodotus is said to have read his History, and Isocrates to have recited his Panegyric at the Olympic games. The four sacred games were the Olympic, Pythian, Isthmian, and Nemean; and to these should be added the Panathenaea, or festival of Minerva. The five exercises before mentioned, together with music, in its classic sense, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... is such a feature of that sport. And the modern prize fight and boxing championship has something of the gladiatorial spirit. The enormous interest in the Dempsey-Carpentier contest is evidence of the increasingly debauched taste of the world's democracies. The Olympic Games have much more to be said in their favour. But whilst they encourage professional athleticism it can hardly be said that they encourage Europe to be more athletic. The Sokol movement in Czecho-slovakia and the Boy Scout movement are much more promising. The more you look on ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... useful in a variety of ways in which the sixpence and threepenny bit are of no service whatever. In thoroughly honest households they could be employed as letter-weights or for practising the discus-throw for the next Olympic Games (if any), or for keeping open a swing door while a tea-tray is carried through. We hope the idea will be vigorously followed up. A 15/-piece representing the British Army crossing the Aisne River under fire would be certain to be popular, as ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 2, 1914 • Various
... musical cadence, or even possibly an instrumental accompaniment, may have marked the Homeric chant about Achilles and Ulysses. Whereas, obviously, in regard to Herodotus, the readings given by him at the Olympic games were readings in the modern sense, pure and simple. Lucian has related the incident, not only succinctly, ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... names but three. Periclymenus, the youngest of the family, was a warlike prince, and, according to Apollodorus, accompanied Jason in the expedition of the Argonauts. Hercules, after having instituted the Olympic games, marched into Messenia, and declared war with Neleus. The ancient writers differ as to the cause of this expedition; but they agree in stating, that Hercules made himself master of Pylos, a town which Neleus had ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... unanimous, antique or modern. Those authors who work well in this field—though their reward, instead of a handsome percentage, or royalty, may be but simply the laurel-crown of the victors in the great Olympic games—will be dearest to humanity, and their works, however esthetically defective, will be treasur'd forever. The altitude of literature and poetry has always been religion—and always will be. The Indian Vedas, the Nackas of Zoroaster, the Tal mud of the Jews, the Old Testament, the Gospel ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... abode at Thu'rii, a new Athenian colony near the site of the former Syb'aris. Here he lived the rest of his life, dying about the year 420. Lucian relates that, on completing his work, Herodotus went to Olympia during the celebration of the Olympic games, and there recited to his countrymen the nine books of which his history was composed. His hearers were delighted, and immediately honored the books with the title of the Nine Muses. A later account of this scene says that Thucydides, then a young man, stood at the side of Herodotus, ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... residence there the whole city was once thrown into excitement by the news that one of her sons had won the first prize in prose and verse in competition, before the emperor, with the assembled scholars of the empire—an [Page 21] an honour comparable to that of poet laureate or of a victor in the Olympic games. When that distinction falls to a city, it is believed that, in order to equalise matters, the event is sure to be followed by three years of dearth. In this instance, the highest mandarins escorted ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... who has need of leisure in order to give you good advice? There is nothing so suitable, O Athenians! as that such a man should be maintained in the Prytaneum, and this much more than if one of you had been victorious at the Olympic games in a horserace, or in the two or four horsed chariot race: for such a one makes you appear to be happy, but I, to be so; and he does not need support, but I do. If, therefore, I must award a sentence according to my just ...
— Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates • Plato
... destroys ships—Thomas, a foundling, brought up by Mr. Allworthy." It is from such sources as these that Temple seems to have learned all that he knew about the ancients. He puts the story of Orpheus between the Olympic games and the battle of Arbela; as if we had exactly the same reasons for believing that Orpheus led beasts with his lyre, which we have for believing that there were races at Pisa, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... be anticipated that if the Olympic Games are ever held in our neighbourhood the sprint and the hurdles will be simply at the mercy of our local post-office. They take no credit for it. It is simply ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 7th, 1920 • Various
... Pollux slew Amycus, son of Neptune, and king of Bebrycia, who had challenged all the Argonauts to box with him. This victory, and that which he gained afterwards at the Olympic games which Hercules celebrated in Elis, caused him to be considered the hero and patron of wrestlers, while his brother Castor distinguished himself in the race, and ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... excursions. I could not refuse attending my father, in the summer of 1759, to the races at Stockbridge, Reading, and Odiam, where he had entered a horse for the hunter's plate; and I was not displeased with the sight of our Olympic games, the beauty of the spot, the fleetness of the horses, and the gay tumult of the numerous spectators. As soon as the militia business was agitated, many days were tediously consumed in meetings of deputy-lieutenants ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... a Greek athlete, Milo of Crotona (in southern Italy), frequent victor in the Olympic games. By lifting and carrying a bull-calf daily, he was able, so the legend runs, ultimately to carry the full-grown bull. He came to his death by trying to pull asunder a split tree, which, reacting, held him fast ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... and that the "drowsy hum" is made by the wings; a fact which, being beyond all cavil, puts to the blush the old-world story of Plutarch, who tells us that when Terpander was playing upon the lyre, at the Olympic games, and had enraptured his audience to the highest pitch of enthusiasm a string of his instrument broke, and a cicada or grasshopper perched on the bridge supplied by its voice the loss of the string and saved the fame ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... judges' compliments at the end of the day. She loved the race for its own sake, this young athlete; and though she took the crowns and the compliments very much as a matter of course, she had come to look on life as nothing but an endless round of Olympic games. And just as she forgot each successive event in the excitement of the next, she also had forgotten the losers and those who were tumbled in the dust. Until she ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... present himself at any court of Christendom is recognised upon his producing a ticket signed by a Lord Chamberlain of some other court, to the effect that 'the Bearer is known at St. James's,' or 'known at the Tuileries,' etc.; so, after the final establishment of the Olympic games, the Greeks looked upon a man's appearance at that great national congress as the criterion and ratification of his being a known or knowable person. Unknown, unannounced personally or by proxy at the great periodic Congress of Greece, even a prince was a homo ignorabilis; one whose ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... Olympic games are coming! Who are England's hopes in the discus-throwing and the fancy diving? What Britisher must we rely on in the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 15, 1914 • Various |
