"Procrustes" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... announcing his opposition policy. The vulgar political suggestion might have crept into a more trivial mind than Mr. Crewe's that Mr. Painter was being, "put to bed," the bed being very similar to that of Procrustes. Mr. Botcher extracted himself from the nooks ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of reciprocity, cause and effect, and similar relations? It is difficult enough to conceive all the powers of nature and mind gathered up in one. The difficulty is greatly increased when the new is confused with the old, and the common logic is the Procrustes' bed into ...
— Sophist • Plato
... stiff and swelling phrase; Their Muse must walk in stilts, and strut in stays; The sense they murder, and the words transpose, Lest poetry approach too near to prose. See tortured Reason how they pare and trim, 360 And, like Procrustes, stretch, or lop the limb. Waller! whose praise succeeding bards rehearse, Parent of harmony in English verse, Whose tuneful Muse in sweetest accents flows, In couplets first taught straggling sense to close. In polish'd numbers ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... Talmudist borrow this story from the Greek legend of the famous robber of Attica, Procrustes, who is said to have treated unlucky travellers after the ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... "the sonorous beauty of lyrical work" in the two opening lyrics of the Songs of Experience, while he introduces into the five short stanzas quoted no less than seven emendations of his own, involving additions of syllables and important changes of meaning.' This is Procrustes admiring the exquisite proportions of his victim. As one observes the countless instances accumulated in Mr. Sampson's notes, of the clippings and filings to which the free and spontaneous expression of Blake's genius has been subjected, one ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... It seemed agreed that for a young gentleman of twenty-three, seventeen was the only admissible age; and to reach that desirable date, as great cruelty was practised on the baptismal register books as on ancient travellers by the bed of Procrustes-girls of twenty-four were shortened by seven years, and little children of fourteen elongated by three. In some families there were three or four daughters all of the same age, yet not the least like twins; brothers and fathers were kept in marching order, ready ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... was Sinnias. He was a robber who slew men cruelly by tying them to strong branches of trees and letting the branches fly apart. On him Theseus had no mercy. The second was a robber also, Procrustes: he had a great iron bed on which he made his captives lie; if they were too long for that bed he chopped pieces off them, and if they were too short he stretched out their bodies with terrible racks. On him, likewise, Theseus had no mercy; he slew Procrustes ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum
... lives, and never at all against the splendid temptations that are the royal garments of sin? God is just, and justice weaves a fair judgment. It is not an unchangeable standard. A learned Greek in Constantinople was telling me he other day a story of one Procrustes, a terrible highway robber. He had a bed which he offered to those he took captive, on condition that they should exactly fit its length; and if a man was too long, the robber hewed off his feet by so much, but if he was too short, he stretched him on a ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... be true that one cannot do much. "You are not Hercules, and you are not able to purge away the wickedness of others; nor yet are you Theseus, able to drive away the evil things of Attica. But you may clear away your own. From yourself, from your own thoughts, cast away, instead of Procrustes and Sciron, [4] sadness, fear, desire, envy, malevolence, avarice, effeminacy, intemperance. But it is not possible to eject these things otherwise than by looking to God only, by fixing your affections on Him only, by being ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... said Harpax, in a tone of affected rapture, always lowering his voice, however, as respecting the slumbers of the Varangian. "Such were the robbers of ancient days, the Diomedes, Corvnetes, Synnes, Scyrons, Procrustes, whom it required demigods to bring to what was miscalled justice, and whose compeers and fellows will remain masters of the continent and isles of Greece, until Hercules and Theseus shall again appear upon earth. Nevertheless, shoot not, my valiant Sebastes—draw ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... Ionian city of Athens, whose prowess was almost equal to that of Hercules. He had caught and killed the great white bull which Hercules had brought from Crete and let loose, and he had also destroyed the horrid robber Procrustes (the Stretcher), who had kept two iron bedsteads, one long and one short. He put tall men into the short bed, and cut them down to fit it, and short men into the long bed, pulling them out till they died, until Theseus finished his life on one ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... it must be from the mental preoccupation of this unlucky "ex pede Herculem," that they have so often put their foot in it. They have worked up Alcides' shoe into a sort of antithesis to Cinderella's; and, like Procrustes, they are resolved ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 193, July 9, 1853 • Various
... principle arise, however, and sometimes they are recognised, sometimes not. The most beautiful examples for internal condition, binding, even intrinsic interest, are occasionally sacrificed to this Procrustes—this case-hardened Bagford of our own day. Not so long since we remarked as a treasure beyond our purse a copy of Donne's Sermons, with a brilliant portrait of the author, and a long inscription by Izaak Walton presenting the volume to his ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... actual progress of humanity has been, on the whole, in conformity with his law. To secure, however, even this semblance of harmony between the facts of history and his hypothetical law, he has to treat the facts very much as Procrustes treated his victims,—he must stretch some, and mutilate others, so as to make their forms fit the iron bed. The natural organization of European civilization is distorted and torn asunder. "As the third or positive stage had accomplished ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... in spacious apartments, can live so happily, cooped up as they now are; but their bodies, as well as minds, seem to have a contractile power, which adapts them to their present confined circumstances. Procrustes, though he was a mighty tyrant, could fit only the body to the bed. I found all at home as cheerful and contented as in the days when we lived magnificently at Percy-hall. I have not seen the Hungerfords yet; Colonel H. is, I hear, attached to Lady Elizabeth Pembroke. ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... might be as tyrannical and unreasonable as they were. I do not say that people don't judge their neighbours' conduct, sometimes, doubtless, unfairly. But I do say that there is no unvarying conventional set of rules by which people are judged; no bed of Procrustes to stretch or cramp their minds and lives; no hypocritical excommunication which people are forced to pronounce, either by unconsidered habit, or by the unexpressed threat of the lesser interdict if they are lax in their ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... Pierres Precieuses," published by Didot in 1776. Now the play is naturally a larger book than the treatise on precious stones, so the binder has cut down the margins to the size of those of the work on amethysts and rubies. As the Italian tyrant chained the dead and the living together, as Procrustes maimed his victims on his cruel bed, so a hard-hearted French binder has tied up, and mutilated, and spoiled the old play, which otherwise would have had considerable value as well ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... which he has chosen, and, for aught I know, invented, is most unfit for such a work. Translations ought never to be written in a verse which requires much command of rhyme. The stanza becomes a bed of Procrustes; and the thoughts of the unfortunate author are alternately racked and curtailed to fit their new receptacle. The abrupt and yet consecutive style of Dante suffers more than that of any other poet by a version diffuse in style, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Waldenses were a set of men, who, in the flourishing provinces of Languedoc, in the darkest ages, and when the understandings of human creatures by a force not less memorable than that of Procrustes were reduced to an uniform stature, shook off by some strange and unaccountable freak, the chains that were universally imposed, and arrived at a boldness of thinking similar to that which Luther and Calvin after a lapse of centuries advocated with happier auspices. With these ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... miserable victims to the tops of two pine-trees bent towards one another and then allowed the trees to spring back, the young hero dealt with as he had dealt with others; Kerkuon, the wrestler, was slain by him in a wrestling bout; Procrustes, who enticed travellers to his house and made them fit his bed, stretching the short upon the rack and lopping the limbs of the over-tall, had his own measure meted to him; and various other plagues of society were abated by the young hero. Not long after ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie |
