"Sisyphus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... developing the whole of its accommodations, she was obliged to writhe in and out of the door like a beautiful serpent. Withers, the wan page, slept out of the house immediately under the tiles at a neighbouring milk-shop; and the wheeled chair, which was the stone of that young Sisyphus, passed the night in a shed belonging to the same dairy, where new-laid eggs were produced by the poultry connected with the establishment, who roosted on a broken donkey-cart, persuaded, to all appearance, that it grew there, and ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... their punishment; the incurable are such as Archelaus, who benefit others by becoming a warning to them. The latter class are generally kings and potentates; meaner persons, happily for themselves, have not the same power of doing injustice. Sisyphus and Tityus, not Thersites, are supposed by Homer to be undergoing everlasting punishment. Not that there is anything to prevent a great man from being a good one, as is shown by the famous example of Aristeides, the son of Lysimachus. But to Rhadamanthus the souls are only known as ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... sanguinary Mars, and the broken billows of the hoarse Adriatic; in vain shall we be apprehensive for ourselves of the noxious South, in the time of autumn. The black Cocytus wandering with languid current, and the infamous race of Danaus, and Sisyphus, the son of the Aeolus, doomed to eternal toil, must be visited; your land and house and pleasing wife must be left, nor shall any of those trees, which you are nursing, follow you, their master ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... Deities arise. This place is called "the accursed." Tityus[58] is giving his entrails to be mangled, and is stretched over nine acres. By thee, Tantalus,[59] no waters are reached, and the tree which overhangs thee, starts away. Sisyphus,[60] thou art either catching or thou art pushing on the stone destined to fall again. Ixion[61] is whirled round, and both follows and flies from himself. The granddaughters, too, of Belus, who dared to plot the destruction of their cousins, are everlastingly taking up the water ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... mere charge of treason he was almost prepared now to endure. If Mistress Fortune helped him, he might refute it, but to be branded before Hellas as the destroyer of his bosom friend, and that by guile the like whereof Tantalus, Sisyphus, and Ixion conjoined had never wrought—what wonder his knees smote together? Why had he not foreseen that Agis would fall into Lycon's hands? Why had he trusted that lying tale from Artemisium? And worst of all, worse than the howls of ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... more of useless articles, especially when there was a mountain-top to pass. Things went on thus for more than one hundred and twenty miles; they were worn out with ascending and falling again; the balloon, like another rock of Sisyphus, kept continually sinking back toward the ground. The rotundity of the covering, which was now but little inflated, was collapsing already. It assumed an elongated shape, and the wind hollowed large ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... efficient as an ally, from his eloquence, his untiring endurance, his inexhaustible resources under difficulty, and the mixture of daring courage with deep-laid cunning which never deserted him: the blood of the arch-deceiver Sisyphus, through an illicit connection with his mother Anticleia, was said to flow in his veins, and he was especially patronized and protected by the goddess Athene. Odysseus, unwilling at first to take part in the expedition, had even simulated insanity; but Palamedes, sent ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... the body of Melicertes was thrown on the Isthmus of Corinth where Sisyphus, his uncle, who reigned in that city, instituted the Isthmian games in his honor. For this fable we are indebted to the fertile invention of the Greeks, Melicertes being no other than the Melcarthus ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... that of Tantalus, who starves with fruits all round him, and burns with thirst with water at his lip. At one moment I seem to grasp the truth, at another it is far away from me; and, like another Sisyphus, I begin again to climb the hill which I have just rolled down, along with all ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... which I read in this book; I can only reply that I see it all so clearly that conviction is a necessity. There is no trouble in believing. To attempt disbelief, would be to illustrate the fable of Sisyphus." ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... man with the orange tie, in spite of Sisyphus-like efforts on the part of Goopes to get the topic on to a higher plane, displayed great persistence in speculating upon the possible distribution of the affections ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... Often the chance goes by, or the trail followed proves false; but the season is over, and one must wait for the return of another spring. The trade of observer in many cases resembles the exhausting labours of the Sisyphus beetle, painfully pushing his pellet up a rough and stony path; so that the team halts and staggers at every moment, the load spills over and rolls away, and all has to be ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... his aim? To be a lever powerful enough to heave great masses of rock, and when sprung to the utmost power to succeed only in giving an affected woman a bump in the forehead—to be a catapult dealing ruin on a pole-kitten! To accomplish the task of Sisyphus, to crush an ant; to sweat all over with hate, and for nothing at all. Would not this be humiliating, when he felt himself a mechanism of hostility capable of reducing the world to powder! To put into movement all the wheels within wheels, to work in the darkness all the ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... youth, do not carry the stone of Sisyphus on thy shoulder to pave the way to disappointment. If thou writest but indifferent poetry none will envy thee, and some will praise thee; but nature, in her malignity, hath denied unto thee a capacity for the enjoyment of such praise. In this she ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... some sort exemplified; and yet it may be suspected that in such resemblances the mind often governs the ear, and the sounds are estimated by their meaning. One of their most successful attempts has been to describe the labour of Sisyphus:- ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... to the deck. In vain I tried to stop it. I then made a desperate effort to replace it, but as it had taken probably two men some time to put it up I had not the slightest chance of succeeding. My task was something like that of Sisyphus, a man of ancient days, who had to roll a huge stone to the top of a mountain, but which always came down again as soon ...
— The Two Whalers - Adventures in the Pacific • W.H.G. Kingston
... from whom love of self and pride of intellect have forever fled. But such heaven can be attained by human soul only through struggle,—struggle often for life and death with sin, with doubt, with faithlessness, with despair. For the fable of Sisyphus is not mere fable; this ever rolling back of the stone to the hill-top for the tenth, for the hundredth, for the thousandth time, is only the history of the soul on its journey heavenward; the gold, ere it be freed from the dross, must be scorched, burnt, melted, dissolved; and the soul, ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... life in it miserably,' he said at last; 'it will be a toil of Sisyphus leaving no trace behind it; whereas such a book as you might write, if you gave your life to it, might live and work, and harry the ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sweeping, and it seems as though it could not be fatigued. Let us rid ourselves of this criminal blindness which prevents us from seeing the exhaustion of those who are always in the breach. Relieve the sentinels perishing at their posts, give Sisyphus an hour to breathe; take for a moment the place of the mother, a slave to the cares of her house and her children; sacrifice an hour of our sleep for someone worn by long vigils with the sick. Young girl, tired sometimes perhaps of your walk with your governess, take the ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... force of gravitation; controlled, and again made to return, but strong to insist on its own curve of predilection, rushing back under the same circle; strengthened by the downward movement to spring again from its original plane; beginning afresh its Sisyphus labour, and facing the next effort with the same grace and agility. Undying force, and eternal flowing unrest—these are the evident intention and symbol of the wave pattern. Though I believe the key pattern to be a modification ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... had accompanied it, with the explanation that a fable like that would disqualify the magazine for every denominational reader, though Howells hastened to express his own joy in it, having been particularly touched by the author's reference to Sisyphus and Atlas as ancestors of the tumble-bug. The "True Story," he said, with its "realest king of black talk," won him, and a few days later he wrote again: "This little story delights me more and more. I wish you had about ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... and Melesigenes afraid of Tartarus! In what region of the infernal world do you expect your domicile to be fixed? Shall you roll a stone like Sisyphus? Hard exercise, Speusippus! ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... frosty day, sent out of his hall by Boreas for the express purpose of looking black at one another. When they ask you, "how you do," you would think they were measuring the length of your coffin. They are ever, it is true, labouring to be agreeable; but they are like Sisyphus, the stone they roll up the hill with so much toil, runs down again, and hits you a thump on the legs. They are sometimes polite, but invariably uncivil; their warmth is always artificial—their cold never, they are stiff without dignity, and cringing without manners. They offer ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was first acted in the year 415 B.C. "The first prize was won by Xenocles, whoever he may have been, with the four plays Oedipus, Lycaon, Bacchae and Athamas, a Satyr-play. The second by Euripides with the Alexander, Palamedes, Troaedes and Sisyphus, a Satyr-play."—AELIAN, ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides
... to enter. What we have a right to insist on is that our general policy in the Philippines shall not be shaped now merely by the just discontent with the bad start. The reports of continual victories, that roll back on us every week, like the stone of Sisyphus, and need to be won over again next week, the mistakes of a censorship that was absolutely right as a military measure, but may have been unintelligently, not to say childishly, conducted—all these are beside the real question. They must not obscure the duty of ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... importance, as in difficulty, down to the present day. But that it should be other than a problem for the whites had not been thought of. How strange this seems to us, whose whole attention is concentrated upon it from morning till night, from childhood to the grave! We stand before it like Sisyphus before the great rock which he rolled so laboriously and so ...
— A Comparative Study of the Negro Problem - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 4 • Charles C. Cook
... off and leave everything—and the dishes and the food might stay up on the table until the next meal. There was nearly always a piled-up mass of dishes and skillets and sauce-pans in the house—to Thyrsis these soiled dishes were the original source of the myth of Sisyphus and his labor. ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... Like Sisyphus some ever roll The same old round of things Which dwarf the mind and starve the soul, Until they long for wings To fly from dull monotony, Which carries in its train That wreck of thought—Despondency— Which preys on ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... hand of an old woman! Verily, the stars flatter when they give me a type in this fool of war—when they promise to the ardour of my wisdom the same results as to the madness of his ambition—perpetual exercise—no certain goal!—the Sisyphus task, the mountain and the stone!—the stone, a gloomy image!—it reminds me that I am threatened with somewhat of the same death as the Epirote. Let me look again. "Beware," say the shining prophets, "how thou passest under ancient roofs, or besieged walls, or overhanging cliffs—a ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... sitting upon the shore near the sea. His name was Sisyphus. He felt sorry for the Ocean and said, "Listen, friend Ocean, I often watch you carrying the great ships and wish that I, too, had ...
— Nature Myths and Stories for Little Children • Flora J. Cooke
... had caused, I was proud of Ernest's exclusive devotion, and the notice it attracted. I knew I was, by the mortification I experienced, when that devotion was withdrawn. It is true, I knew he was inflicting on himself torments to which the fabled agonies of Tantalus, Sisyphus, and Ixion combined could not be compared; but others did not; they saw the averted eye, the coldness, the distance, the estrangement, but they did not, could not see, the bleeding heart, the agonized spirit hidden beneath ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... livor, and mother of hypocrisy, the moth of holiness, and cause of madness, crucifying and disquieting all that it takes hold of." [1813]Seneca calls it, rem solicitam, timidam, vanam, ventosam, a windy thing, a vain, solicitous, and fearful thing. For commonly they that, like Sisyphus, roll this restless stone of ambition, are in a perpetual agony, still [1814] perplexed, semper taciti, tritesque recedunt (Lucretius), doubtful, timorous, suspicious, loath to offend in word or deed, still cogging and colloguing, embracing, capping, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... these heavy-hearted and dull-eyed loiterers, what a relief it would have been to have met the soiled jacket, the brawny arm, and the manly brow, of one of our own artizans! I felt there were worse things in the world than hard work. Better it were to roll the stone of Sisyphus all life-long, than spend it in such idleness as weighs upon the cities of Italy. Better the clang of the forge than the rattle of the sabre. The Milanese seemed looking into the future; and a dismal future it is, if one may judge ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... but think of Hades, with Tantalus, Sisyphus, Tityus, and all the rest of them. How futile were the attempts of the old Greeks and Romans to lay before us any plausible conception of eternal torture. What were the Danaids doing but that which each one of us has to do during his or her whole life? What are our bodies if ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... Harpax; "for such has been the rule of our watch ever since the days of the excellent centurion Sisyphus, in whose time it first was determined, that all contraband commodities or suspicious weapons, or the like, which were brought into the city during the nightwatch, should be uniformly forfeited to the use of the ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... have bridegrooms betrothed. Lo Sparta is wide, and wide is Elis, a land of chariots and horses, and Arcadia rich in sheep, and there are the citadels of the Achaeans, and Messenia, and Argos, and all the sea-coast of Sisyphus. There be maidens by their parents nurtured, maidens countless, that lack not aught in wisdom or in comeliness. Of these ye may easily win such as ye will, for many are willing to be the fathers-in-law of noble youths, and ye are the very choice of heroes all, as your ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... is no certain goal in legislation; we go on colonizing Utopia, and fighting phantoms in the clouds. Let us content ourselves with injuring no man, and doing good only in our own little sphere. Let us leave States and senates to fill the sieve of the Danaides, and roll up the stone of Sisyphus." ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... You are there, are you? Sir," said he, turning to me, "I am the most unhappy man in the world. Talk of Sisyphus rolling the ever-recoiling stone—of Prometheus gnawed by the vulture since the birth of time. The fables yet live. There is my rock, forever crushing me back! there is my eternal vulture, feeding upon my heart! There! there! ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... 'This is pleasant,' he said to himself when the morning had turned to afternoon and the afternoon to night, 'and it is certainly new. A stratus of tepid cloud a thousand miles long and a thousand miles deep, and a man in a dug-out paddling through! Sisyphus was nothing to this.' But he made himself comfortable in a philosophic way, and went to the only place ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... stagnation, the "valuable statistical material" collected at such an expenditure of time and money is in great part antiquated and useless. The statistical department will be compelled, therefore, like another unfortunate Sisyphus, to begin the work anew, and it is difficult to see how the Zemstvo, unless it becomes a little more practical, is ever to get out ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... not able be To bear eternal pain nor furnish food From his own frame forever. But for us A Tityus is he whom vultures rend Prostrate in love, whom anxious anguish eats, Whom troubles of any unappeased desires Asunder rip. We have before our eyes Here in this life also a Sisyphus In him who seeketh of the populace The rods, the axes fell, and evermore Retires a beaten and a gloomy man. For to seek after power—an empty name, Nor given at all—and ever in the search To endure a world of toil, O this it is To shove with shoulder up the hill a stone Which yet comes rolling ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... and delays! Hold! here is the sombre helmet of Pluto with its thick bristling plume; Hieronymus(1) lends it to you; then open Sisyphus'(2) bag of wiles; but hurry, hurry, pray, for discussion ...
— The Acharnians • Aristophanes
... young man may avoid a few of the rocks in his necessarily rugged pathway to success. I emphasized this in two preceding chapters and shall reiterate it again and again; for I am trying to say a helpful word to you; and all your talents will be folly and all your toil the labor of Sisyphus if you companion ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... the problem which the revolutionists have and will eternally have to resolve. It is the rock of Sisyphus that will always fall back upon them. To exist a single instant, they are and always will be by fatality reduced to improvise a despotism without other reason of existence than necessity, and which, consequently, is violent and blind as Necessity. We escape from the harmonious ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... hardness (and nouns formed from similar adjectives); impracticability, &c. (see impossibility); tough-, hard-, uphill- work; hard-, herculean-, Augean-task; task of Sisyphus, Sisyphean labour, tough job, teaser, ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... Titus, Venus, and the many other disyllables wherein it was short in the ancient tongues. On the other hand we shall shorten the originally long stressed antepenultimate vowel in Brasidas, Euripides, Icarus, Lavinia, Lucilius, Lydia, Nicias, Onesimus, Pegasus, Pyramus, Regulus, Romulus, Scipio, Sisyphus, ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... lies beneath the sun's golden round and top of sovereignty to migrate into some untried region and state of being, or even to renounce existence altogether and lie down forever in the attractive slumber of the grave! Without death, mankind would undergo the fate of Sisyphus, no future, and in the present the oppression of an intolerable task with an aching vacuum of motive. The certainty and the mystery of death create the stimulus and the romance of life. Give the human race an earthly ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... moved to pity. Those, too, who were suffering punishment for evil deeds ceased to be tormented for themselves, and grieved only for the innocent Orpheus who had lost Eurydice. Sisyphus, that fraudulent king (who is doomed to roll a monstrous boulder uphill forever), stopped to listen. The daughters of Danaus left off their task of drawing water in a sieve. Tantalus forgot hunger and thirst, though before his eyes hung magical fruits that were wont to ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... himself, he had the humble effrontery to observe that it was necessary for him at that moment silently to submit his own unskilfulness to the superior judgment and knowledge of others. Having at last been relieved from the stone of Sisyphus, which, as he plaintively expressed himself, he had been rolling for twenty years; having, by the arrival of Tisnacq, obtained his discharge as President of the state council, he was yet not unwilling to retain the emoluments and the rank of President of the privy council, although ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... set of lambs! How he must have admired the hero of the "Odyssey," who in one way or other accounted for all the wooers that "sorned" upon his house, and had a receipt for their bodies from the grave-digger of Ithaca! But even this wily descendant of Sisyphus would have found it no such easy matter to deal with the English suitors, who were not the feeble voluptuaries of the Ionian Islands, that suffered themselves to be butchered as unresistingly as sheep in the shambles—actually ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... subterfuges and delays! Hold! here is the sombre helmet of Pluto with its thick bristling plume; Hieronymus[204] lends it to you; then open Sisyphus'[205] bag of wiles; but hurry, hurry, pray, for our discussion does not admit ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... and was on the point of marching into Caria, when Dercylidas arrived to take command of his army. The new general was a man whose genius for invention had won him the nickname of Sisyphus. Thus it was that Thibron returned home, where on his arrival he was fined and banished, the allies accusing him of allowing his ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... son of Copreus never performed any brilliant or notable action: but the descendants of Sisyphus and Autolycus and Phlegyas nourished in the glory and virtues of great kings. Pericles also sprang of a family under a curse,[825] and Pompey the Great at Rome was the son of Pompeius Strabo, whose dead body the Roman people cast ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... Sisyphus felt when the stone kept rolling back upon him. Did he ever look up to the top of the mountain and calculate the distance he must needs traverse before ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... that she was not to be spared one drop of the cup of bitterness; that to her had been assigned the task of Sisyphus, the ceaseless rolling upward of a stone that as ceaselessly rolled down; the continual re-establishment of Evelyn in the shrine of her husband's heart. And there would be no end to it, even after John's return. So long as these two had need of her, heart and brain and hands would be at their ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... these rude fatigues are of short duration. They are perpetual, and on that condition only does a dancer retain her activity and suppleness. A week's idleness must be atoned for by two months' double labour. The opera-dancer realises the fable of Sisyphus and his rock. She resembles the horse, who pays with his repose, his flesh and his liberty, the rapid victories of the racecourse. I have seen Mademoiselle Taglioni, after receiving a two hours' lesson from her father, fall helpless upon the floor, and allow herself to be undressed, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... incident and were prepared to offer satisfaction and compensation. The American Government were willing to confirm the receipt of this Memorandum and declare themselves satisfied. Fate, however, had decreed that I should play the role of Sisyphus at Washington. Scarcely were the negotiations terminated when the German Government, on the 8th February, declared the so-called "ruthless submarine war," i.e. announced to the sea powers their intention of sinking armed merchantmen without warning ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... Prometheus, or of Sisyphus are but the types of what his shall be. Let him try to hang, drown, stab himself—his efforts will ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... Resentment gorged his throat. It was unfair—so damned unfair. He had no business coming here. He should have stayed on Beta or at least on a human world where he would never have met Copper. He loved her, but he couldn't have her. It was Tantalus and Sisyphus rolled into one unsightly package and fastened to his soul. With a muttered curse he rose to his feet, and as he did he stopped—frozen—staring at Copper as though he had never ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... Sisyphus, who was condemned eternally to roll a stone up a hill? Well, Monsieur, that would be a simple task compared with an attempt to convert me to Catholicism. I believe in three things: life, pleasure, and death, because I know ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... irresistible gravitation, it has sunk back into the mare magnum of Hinduism. If we regard experience, purification from within is hopeless; the struggle for it is only a repetition of the toil of Sisyphus, and always with the same sad issue. Deliverance must come from without—from the Gospel ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... and in the cascades leaping like a flock of sheep, an idea of his passion shared with la Tinti. In the midst of his torrent of love a rock stood up against which the torrent broke. The Prince, like Sisyphus, was constantly ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... the next; and I shall find out who is wise, and who pretends to be wise, and is not. What would not a man give, O judges, to be able to examine the leader of the great Trojan expedition; or Odysseus or Sisyphus, or numberless others, men and women too! What infinite delight would there be in conversing with them and asking them questions! In another world they do not put a man to death for asking questions: assuredly not. For besides being happier than ...
— Apology - Also known as "The Death of Socrates" • Plato
... challenge the first place, nor is there any sort of people that please themselves like them: for while they daily roll Sisyphus his stone, and quote you a thousand cases, as it were, in a breath no matter how little to the purpose, and heap glosses upon glosses, and opinions on the neck of opinions, they bring it at last to this pass, that that study of all other ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... backbone while the strained, monotonous, half-weird chorus, "Hy-ah! Hullah! Hee-ah! Hey!" measures their tread and shifts the strain from man to man, step by step, with the precision of clock work. On the rivers in China, too, one sees boats run by human treadmill power: a harder task than that of Sisyphus is that of the men who sweat all day long at the wheel, forever ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... p. 747; Schol. on Pindar Pyth. iv. 263: 'And from Hellen the war-loving king sprang Dorus and Xuthus and Aeolus delighting in horses. And the sons of Aeolus, kings dealing justice, were Cretheus, and Athamas, and clever Sisyphus, and ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... sisyphus, and one day, in a flash of intuition, I located and showed the flaw in an obscure ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... life, yet weary of it; unable to use it well, because steeped in ignorance of the wonderful working of Nature.[539] He saw them, as we have already seen them, the helpless victims of ambition and avarice, ever, like Sisyphus, rolling the stone uphill and never reaching the summit.[540] Of cruelty and bloodshed in civil strife that age had seen enough, and on this too the poet dwells with bitter emphasis;[541] on the unwholesome luxury and restlessness of the upper classes,[542] and on their unrestrained indulgence ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... in 1Chronicles x.-2Chronicles xxxvi., is thus manifestly out of the question. As early as 1806 this had been conclusively shown by the youthful De Wette (then twenty-six years of age). But since that date many a theological Sisyphus has toiled to roll the stone again wholly or half-way up the hill—Movers especially, in genius it might seem the superior of the sober Protestant critic—with peculiar results. This scholar mixed up the inquiry into the historical value of those statements in Chronicles which we are ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... that it is the effort itself which forms the measure of, and constitutes, our riches. Progression is the increase of the proportion of the effort to the result. Its ideal extreme may be represented by the eternal and fruitless efforts of Sisyphus.[7] ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... allot the islands of the blessed to their brave men, whom they call heroes and demi-gods; and to the souls of the wicked, the region of the ungodly, in Hades, where their fables relate that certain persons, such as Sisyphus, and Tantalus, and Ixion, and Tityus, are punished; which is built on this first supposition, that souls are immortal; and thence are those exhortations to virtue and dehortations from wickedness collected; whereby good men are bettered in the ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... difficult one. If it had come in my time I might have tried it. But it would be uphill work, a sort of Sisyphus affair: you may get the stone to the top, but the chances are against it. And which party is one to join, when he sees nothing in either but selfish greed and stale traditions? Viewed as a missionary field, Bob, it's just like the ministry: you are weighed down with a lot ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... the same, And virtue cloaked the error with her name! Come, let us learn how friends at friends should look By a leaf taken from a father's book. Has the dear child a squint? at home he's classed With Venus' self; "her eyes have just that cast:" Is he a dwarf like Sisyphus? his sire Calls him "sweet pet," and would not have him higher, Gives Varus' name to knock-kneed boys, and dubs His club-foot youngster Scaurus, king of clubs. E'en so let us our neighbours' frailties scan: A friend ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... strangely old and ennuied, as if she must have lived in centuries past, and there was no new thing. Yet the face in the mirror does not tell that story. How curiously she has come into the lives of these Grandons a second time, and gone out with as little result. Is the stone of Sisyphus the ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... There was Sisyphus, that sees no end to his labours. His punishment is, to be for ever rolling up a vast stone to the top of a mountain, which when it gets to the top, falls down with a crushing weight, and all his work ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Offot, that was terribly well nosed for drinking at the barrel-head; Who begat Artachaeus, Who begat Oromedon, Who begat Gemmagog, the first inventor of Poulan shoes, which are open on the foot and tied over the instep with a lachet; Who begat Sisyphus, Who begat the Titans, of whom Hercules was born; Who begat Enay, the most skilful man that ever was in matter of taking the little worms (called cirons) out of the hands; Who begat Fierabras, that was vanquished by Oliver, peer of France and Roland's comrade; Who begat Morgan, the first in ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... thought of the thousands beneath struggling and striving, none with all desires satisfied, some in an agony of want and penury, all straining for the elusive Enough; like Sisyphus ever rolling the rock of labour up a hill too ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... generations of mankind, the new spring up as the old are passing away. If, then, you would learn my descent, it is one that is well known to many. There is a city in the heart of Argos, pasture land of horses, called Ephyra, where Sisyphus lived, who was the craftiest of all mankind. He was the son of Aeolus, and had a son named Glaucus, who was father to Bellerophon, whom heaven endowed with the most surpassing comeliness and beauty. But Proetus devised his ruin, and being stronger ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... vexation, the inability to gain support, the binding of his hands from free action by the machinery of State regulations only applicable to home ecclesiastics, the continual making beginnings that never were allowed to progress—or, as he himself called it, the continual rolling of the stone of Sisyphus—could not but exhaust his powers, above all in such a climate; and that same sickly summer of 1822 which proved fatal to Felix Carey was his last. In July, one of his clergy, on whom he had been obliged to pass censure, instituted proceedings against him in the Supreme ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... and touched his harp in tune with his words. All around him the lifeless ghosts came flocking, and as they heard they wept. Tantalus forgot his hunger and thirst. Ixion's wheel stood still, the Danaids set aside their leaky urns and Sisyphus sat on his stone to listen. Never yet had such sweet strains been heard in the world of gloom. Then, for the first time, tears moistened the cheeks of the Furies, and even the king and queen of the dead were moved to pity. They summoned Eurydice, and she came, yet ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... him guiltless who eats with his knife, but if the deadly steel be always well laden with toothsome morsels, divine justice will be tempered with mercy to that man's soul. When the author of the "Lost Tales" represented Sisyphus as capturing his guest, the King of Terrors, and stuffing the old glutton with meat and drink until he became "a jolly, rubicund, tun-bellied Death," he gave us a tale which needs no hc fabula docet to ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... loved her lord, or thought so; but that love Cost her an effort, which is a sad toil, The stone of Sisyphus, if once we move Our feelings 'gainst the nature of the soil. She had nothing to complain of, or reprove, No bickerings, no connubial turmoil: Their union was a model to behold, Serene and noble,—conjugal, ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... the "age of reason," it must next (and probably soon) pass into the fifth stage, that of decrepitude, and thence into infantile credulity and imbecility once more,—as a demonstration that history is such a Sisyphus, his induction is weak ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... universal lot ordains We seek the black Cocytus' stream, That languid strays thro' dreary plains, Where cheerless fires perpetual gleam; Where the fell Brides their fruitless toil bemoan, And Sisyphus uprolls the still-returning stone. ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... of disgust, he turned to stare behind him at the crowd on its way to Daphne, making such a business of pleasure as reduced the pleasure to a toil of Sisyphus (who had to roll a heavy stone perpetually up a steep hill in the underworld. Before he reached the top the stone always rolled ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... doubt, that the difference of human talents and human wants, would soon, spite of every law, lead to a difference in property again. Hence, that first revolution would have to be repeated from time to time—a real Sisyphus labor! No sooner have the bees produced anything, than the drones ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... for that mysterious dinner-party in some enchanted castle, wander disconsolately, in unaccountable rags and dirt, in search of that phantom carpet-bag which never gets found? Did you ever "realise" to yourself the sieve of the Danaides, the stone of Sisyphus, the wheel of Ixion; the pleasure of shearing that domestic animal who (according to the experience of a very ancient observer of nature) produces more cry than wool; the perambulation of that Irishman's model bog, where you slip two steps backward ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... of the world—foreign and domestic, moral, political, and literary. In the course of it he touched on Reform. 'The stone which Lord Michin Malicho—who was the Gracchus of the last Reform, and is the Sisyphus of the present—has been so laboriously pushing up hill, is for the present deposited at the bottom in the Limbo of Vanity. If it should ever surmount the summit and run down on the other side, it will infallibly roll over and ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... Imagine the Sisyphus' little pear with its hatching-chamber swollen into a globule a trifle smaller than the sphere at the other end; suppose the two protuberances to be divided by a sort of wide open groove like that of a pulley; and we shall have something very like the ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... ruin a play by Agathon. Yet in their Peripeties, as also in their simple plots, the poets I mean show wonderful skill in aiming at the kind of effect they desire—a tragic situation that arouses the human feeling in one, like the clever villain (e.g. Sisyphus) deceived, or the brave wrongdoer worsted. This is probable, however, only in Agathon's sense, when he speaks of the probability of even improbabilities coming to pass. (7) The Chorus too should be regarded ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... Van Hise, pp. 185-207.] the drainage of wet regions; the fuller utilization of the carrying power of water to relieve the costlier use of wheels. [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 164.] Making the escaping, unsatisfying stream of Sisyphus turn ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... between the two will ensure the comfort which solitary work, its strength overtaxed, would deny. This seems excellent reasoning; but it is much more often contradicted than confirmed by the facts. Why is the Sisyphus a hard working paterfamilias and the sacred beetle an idle vagabond? And yet the two pill rollers practice the same industry and the same method of rearing their young. Why does the Lunary Copris know what his near kinsman, the ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... tells in the end upon the most adventurous spirit. A man fashions himself to his lot, he accepts a commonplace existence; and Dr. Poulain, after ten years of his practice, continued his labors of Sisyphus without the despair that made early days so bitter. And yet—like every soul in Paris—he cherished a dream. Remonencq was happy in his dream; La Cibot had a dream of her own; and Dr. Poulain, too, dreamed. Some day he would be called in to attend a rich and ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... women—how Tommy had fought for it since first he drank of them in Pym's sparkling pages! To some it seems to be easy, but to him it was a labour of Sisyphus. Everything had been against him. But he concentrated. No labour was too Herculean; he was prepared, if necessary, to walk round the world to get to the other side of the wall across which some men can step. And he ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... Tantalus And Sisyphus were kings long time ago, But now they lie in the Lake Dolorous, The hills of hell are noisy with their woe; Ay, swift the tides of Empire ebb and flow, And that is quickly lost was hardly won, As Ilios herself o'erwell did know When high walls ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... far overwhelmed, from this moment, by a wave of unimaginable agony that he could not suppose anyone ever had suffered as he did. And he suddenly thought of the puerility of poets who have invented the useless labor of Sisyphus, the material thirst of Tantalus, the devoured heart of Prometheus! Oh, if they had foreseen, if they had experienced the mad love of an elderly man for a young girl, how would they had expressed the painful and secret effort of a being who can no longer inspire ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... Argonautic expedition, under AEolian leaders. In the north of Boeotia arose the city of Orchomenus, whose treasures were compared by Homer to those of the Egyptian Thebes. Another seat of the AEolians was Ephyra, afterward known as Corinth, where the "wily Sisyphus" ruled. He was the father of Phocus, who gave his name to Phocis. The descendants of AEolus led also a colony to Elis, and another to Pylus. In general, the AEolians sought maritime settlements in northern Greece, and the western ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... ancients so provokingly do, some of our most modern popular philosophers—"sweetness, both in language and in manner, is a very powerful attraction in the formation of friendships". He is by no means of the same opinion as Sisyphus in Lord ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... I beheld Sisyphus in strong torment, grasping a monstrous stone with both his hands. He was pressing thereat with hands and feet, and trying to roll the stone upward toward the brow of the hill. But oft as he was about to hurl it over the top, the weight would drive him back, so once again to the plain rolled ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... Hermitage, St. Petersburg, the other in the National Museum, Naples; Venus Listening to Music, two versions, the stately nude evidently a memory of the Venus reposing in the Uffizi: Adam and Eve (also a copy of this by Rubens); Prometheus, Sisyphus—long supposed to be copies by Coello; Christ Bearing the Cross, St. Margaret, a portrait of the Duke of Este, Salom, Ecce Homo, La Dolorosa, the once admired Allocution; Flight Into Egypt, St. Catalina, a self-portrait, St. Jerome, Diana and Actaeon, The Sermon on ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... Phlegyas, in perpetual terror of the stone suspended over him, which never falls; Ixion chained to his wheel; the daughters of Danaus still vainly trying to fill their sieve; Tantalus, immersed in water to his chin, yet tormented with unquenchable thirst; Sisyphus despairingly labouring at his ever-descending stone. Warned by such examples, we may learn not to contemn the gods. Beyond these sad scenes, extending far to the right, are the plains of pleasure, the Elysian Fields; and Lethe, the river of oblivion, of which whoever tastes, though he ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... you, are you afraid of the three-headed Cerberus in the shades below, and the roaring waves of Cocytus, and the passage over Acheron, and Tantalus expiring with thirst, while the water touches his chin; and Sisyphus, ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... see, And instant rise. Here dwell the suffering damn'd. Here Tityus, stretcht o'er nine wide acres, yields His entrails to be torn. Thou, Tantalus, Art seen, the stream forbid to taste;—the fruit Thy lips o'erhanging, flies! Thou, Sisyphus, Thy stone pursuing downwards; or its weight Straining aloft, with oft exerted power! Ixion whirling, too; with swift pursuit, Thou follow'st, and art follow'd! Belides! Your husband-cousins who in death dar'd steep, And ceaseless draw the unavailing ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... drinking, while the drink was yet in him, and Mick acknowledged the good advice by unhooking a leg of mutton and belabouring him soundly, to the detriment of himself and his mutton, till the police interfered. On another occasion he addressed his energies to the Sisyphus-like task of endeavouring to roll a very large water-barrel through his mother's very small door, all one winter night, while his mother alternately coaxed and threatened. Mick's pranks were endless, but lest they meet with a severer judge than Mick ever met with, I ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... instance: in the Cyclops we have Odysseus, the heroic trickster; in the fragmentary Ichneutae of Sophocles we have the Nymph Cyllene, hiding the baby Hermes from the chorus by the most barefaced and pleasant lying; later no doubt there was an entrance of the infant thief himself. Autolycus, Sisyphus, Thersites are all Satyr-play heroes and congenial to the Satyr atmosphere; but the most congenial of all, the one hero who existed always in an atmosphere of Satyrs and the Komos until Euripides made him the central figure of a tragedy, was Heracles. [Footnote: ...
— Alcestis • Euripides
... right and justice for his rule in politics. The Evangelical preacher continues to confess and deplore the desperate wickedness of the human heart. The Devil had been deposed, but his faithful subjects have restored him to his throne. The stone of Sisyphus has been brought to the brow of the hill only to rebound again to the bottom. The old battle has to be fought a second time, and, for all we can see, no closing victory will ever be in 'this country of Universe.' ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... scheme by which he hoped to utilise the motive power of the stone for the purpose of lighting Hades with electricity. The other was Agamemnon, who took good care to keep out of the stone's way when it was more than a quarter of the distance up the slope, but who delighted in teasing Sisyphus so long as he considered it safe to do so. Many of the other shades took daily pleasure in gathering together about stone-time to enjoy the fun and to bet on how ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... Maid," and her dulcimer which she never got a tune out of. We all know there was good reason why Coleridge should have been infirm of purpose. But when we look at that great unfinished picture over which Allston labored with the hopeless ineffectiveness of Sisyphus; when we go through a whole gallery of pictures by an American artist in which the backgrounds are slighted as if our midsummer heats had taken away half the artist's life and vigor; when we walk round whole rooms full of sketches, impressions, ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... From his bitter task of trying to quaff the stream that ever receded from the parched and burning lips, Tantalus ceased for a moment. The ceaseless course of Ixion's wheel was stayed, the vulture's relentless beak no longer tore at the Titan's liver; Sisyphus gave up his weary task of rolling the stone and sat on the rock to listen, the Danaides rested from their labour of drawing water in a sieve. For the first time, the cheeks of the Furies were wet ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... joy alone possessed me, but soon the great bitter burden came rolling back upon my soul, like the stone of Sisyphus, which my ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... lay dry as the desert sand at his feet. And nodding boughs of trees drooped, heavy with delicious fruit, over his head; but when he put forth his hand to pluck the fruit, a furious gust of wind swept it away far beyond his reach. And yet another famous criminal he saw, Sisyphus, the most cunning and most covetous of the sons of men. He was toiling painfully up a steep mountain's side, heaving a weighty stone before him, and straining with hands and feet to push it to the summit. But every time he ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... wrote a poem entitled Richmond Hill, but it contains nothing deserving of quotation after the above passage from Thomson. In the English Bards and Scotch Reviewers the labors of Maurice are compared to those of Sisyphus ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... Sisyphus, a king of Corinth, noted for his avarice and fraud. He was punished in the infernal regions by having to roll uphill a huge stone, which always rolled down again as soon as it reached the top. Sisyphos is a type of avarice, never satisfied. The avaricious man reaches the summit ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... Flaubert she laughed over the human documents of Zola, the elaborate note taking of Daudet, for she was blessed with an excellent memory and a huge capacity for scribbling. Not so Zola. Each book was a painful parturition, not the pain of a stylist like Flaubert, but the Sisyphus-like labor of getting his notes, his facts, his characters marshalled and moving to a conclusion. Like Anthony Trollope, when the last page of a book was finished he began another. He was a workman, not ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... schoolmen labored most intellectually and scientifically—practical result, nil, so these labor harder than other men—result, nil. This is literally 'beating the air.' The ancients imagined tortures particularly trying to nature, that of Sisyphus to wit; everlasting labor embittered by everlasting nihilification. We have made Sisyphism vulgar. Here are fifteen Sisyphi. Only the wise or ancients called this thing infernal torture; our old women ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... think it hard, very hard, to have their cups scored next morning upon their back; and, indeed, to keep all a frigate's crew from intoxication on a Christmas-day would be something like undertaking the labour of Sisyphus, for, as fast as one man could be frightened or flogged into ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... as the race remains radically the same, the stringent selection of the best specimens to rear and breed from, can never lead to any permanent result. The attempt to raise the standard of such a race is like the labour of Sisyphus in rolling his stone uphill; let the effort be relaxed for a moment, and the stone will roll back. Whenever a new typical centre appears, it is as though there was a facet upon the lower surface of the stone, on which it is capable of resting without ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... those chalk boulders seemed still to weigh against the muscles of his back. He felt that Sisyphus-like he was forever rolling, rolling a gigantic stone which, failing of its purpose—recoiled on him, rolling back down a precipitous incline, and crushing him beneath its weight ... only to release him again ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... nohow!" he would exclaim, setting to work again; and then, a sea would come floating in over the combings of the cabin bulkhead, tumbling him over and washing him aft amidst the debris, almost drowning the man before he could fish himself up again and set to his task anew. His toil, like that of Sisyphus, was ever being renewed when ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... was assiduously engaged in the "revision of the current laws concerning the Jews," in other words, was repeating the Sisyphus task abandoned by scores of similar bureaucratic creations in the past, the Government pursued with unabated vigor its old-time policy of making the life of the Jews unbearable by turning out endless varieties of new legal restrictions. These restrictions were ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... her into hopefulness, to have her assure him in her warm, loving way that he was doing some good in this strange place of brilliant gayety and black tragedy; that his work was not all in vain, though so often he likened it to the task of Sisyphus. But he found Dick Carleton with Rose, and their faces told him that there was no ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... repeating what he did in life. Perhaps not a heavy punishment for one who is fond of hunting; yet a tremendous burden, if never interrupted with rest; indeed it becomes a labor quite like the labor of Sisyphus, ever repeated. Of Tityos both the guilt and punishment are indicated; the legend is similar to and yet in contrast with that of Orion; in the one the Goddess approaches the mortal and in the other the mortal ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... profess to give the reader a translation of the genuine works of Plato only, I have not translated the Axiochus, Demodoeus, Sisyphus, &c. as these ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... I urg'd that, And clear'd to him, that Sisyphus was damn'd To roll the ceaseless stone, only because He would ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... false worship unto Love, And seek that which you never shall obtain; The endless work of Sisyphus you prove, Whose end is this, to know you strive in vain. Hope and Desire, which now your idols be, You needs must lose, and feel Despair with me. O sweet woods! the delight of solitariness! O how much ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... cannot recall just when I first began to believe in Mt. Vesuvius, but I am quite certain that it was not in my school-days. It may have been in my teaching-days, but I'm not quite certain. I have often wondered whether we teachers really believe all we try to teach. I feel a pity for poor Sisyphus, poor fellow, rolling that stone to the top of the hill, and then having to do the work all over when the stone rolled to the bottom. But that is not much worse than trying to teach Caribbean Sea and Mt. Vesuvius, if we can't really believe in them. But here is Brown, metamorphosed ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... would be with a slavish cringing glance—how different from the arrogance and contempt that had marked them in life! The poor were allowed half-time in their tortures, respite and punishment alternating. Those with whom legend is so busy I saw with my eyes—Ixion, Sisyphus, the Phrygian Tantalus in all his misery, and the giant Tityus—how vast, his bulk covering a ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... whenever they have the chance, are a studious and thoughtful race. The isolation and monotony of life in many parts are bound to drive men to study and reflection if the means for these are at hand. Sisyphus himself had hardly less variety of occupation than some of our shepherds whose work on the hills involves long absences from social intercourse. To such men (whose life is suggestive of a repeating decimal) the access to an ell or two of good books often ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... ye phantoms of the dark abyss: Bring, Tantalus, thy unextinguished thirst, And Sisyphus, thy still returning stone; Come, Tityus, with the vulture at thy heart; And thou, Ixion, bring thy giddy wheel; Nor let the toiling sisters stay behind. Pour your united griefs into this breast, And in low murmurs sing sad obsequies (If a despairing wretch such rites may claim) O'er my cold limbs, ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... of Glaucus and grandson of Sisyphus; having unwittingly caused the death of his brother, withdrew from his country and sought retreat with Proetus, king of Argos, who, becoming jealous of his guest, but not willing to violate the laws of hospitality, had ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... that the classical people had a gloomy Calvinism of their own time. True, as early as Homer, we hear of the shadowy existence of the souls, and of the torments endured by the notably wicked; by impious ghosts, or tyrannical, like Sisyphus and Tantalus. But when we read the opening books of the "Republic," we find the educated friends of Socrates treating these terrors as old-wives' fables. They have heard, they say, that such notions circulate among the people, but they seem never for a moment to have themselves ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... gone had it been possible. Women and logic are only cousins german. Six months ago I hadn't been in love with any one but myself, and now the Virgil of love's dream was leading me like a new Dante through his Inferno, and was pointing out the foster-brother of Sisyphus (if he had a foster-brother), pushing the stone of my lady's favor up the steeps of Forlorn Hope. Well, I would go up to the club, and if I didn't get home till mor-r-ning, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... allotted punishment; expiating by suffering the sins of an upper world. Virgil gave a glimpse, as it were, into that scene of retribution; Minos and Rhadamanthus passing judgment on the successive spirits brought before them; the flames of Tartarus, the rock of Sisyphus, the wheel of Ixion, the vulture gnawing Prometheus. But with Homer and Virgil, the descent into the infernal regions was a brief episode; with Dante it was the whole poem. Immense was the effort of imagination requisite to give variety to such a subject, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... ladder of his sins: the death of General Hendricks, the sacrifice of Molly Culpepper, the temptation and fall of her father, the death of his boyhood's friend, and then the headlines. These things were laid at his door, and over and over again, like Sisyphus rolling the stones uphill, he swept them away from his threshold, only to find that they rolled right back again. And with them came at times the suspicion that his daughter's unhappiness was upon him also. And besides these things, a ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... labours as an explorer had met with no adequate recognition, the Damascus Consulship could be remembered only with bitterness, his numerous books had sold badly. Every stone which for forty years he had rolled up proved to be only a Sisyphus stone. He was neglected, while every year inferior men—not to be mentioned in the same breath with him—were advanced to high honours. Small wonder that such treatment should have soured him or that—a vehement man by nature—he ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... which is right? Supposing even that all languages agreed as to primary ideas, it would be difficult to determine the original; but when this primary class of ideas is expressed by sounds entirely and totally different, the task becomes utterly hopeless, and the labor as vain as that of Sisyphus. Indeed, it would be very difficult to show how languages, derived from one stock, could possibly differ so far in their expression of the simplest ideas and wants as not to be mutually traceable: and truly, ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... unusually heavy confessional, was jubilant. Nothing exhilarates him like work. Given a scanty confessional, and he is as gloomy as Sisyphus; given a hard, laborious day, and he is as bright as Ariel. He was in uncommonly ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... her lord and master. She will have been married to a man who, though he does not pretend to be above the ordinary frailties and failings of human nature, tries honestly, for many years, to make her happy. Time after time does this domestic Sisyphus roll the stone of contentment up the hill of his wife's temper, and time after time does it slip from his hands, and go clattering down into the plain of despair. The Martyr is a very virtuous lady, yet she is not satisfied with the calm and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, May 3, 1890. • Various
... times brought alliteration to his aid in cases where no such device had been adopted by Homer, as when, in describing the labours of Sisyphus,[47] he wrote: ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... efforts towards an object in which we cannot hope for success, we shall not only exhaust our strength in fruitless exertions and remain at as great a distance as ever from the summit of our wishes, but we shall be perpetually crushed by the recoil of this rock of Sisyphus. ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... now it is the time; from Hell's abyss Come thirsting Tantalus, come Sisyphus Heaving the cruel stone, come Tityus With vulture, and with wheel Ixion come, And come the sisters of the ceaseless toil; And all into this breast transfer their pains, And (if such tribute to despair be due) Chant in their deepest tones a doleful dirge Over a corse unworthy of a shroud. Let the ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Who is that must not, if question'd, say...... "What I would have remain'd or become, I am not"? We are ever behind, or beyond, or beside Our intrinsic existence. Forever at hide And seek with our souls. Not in Hades alone Doth Sisyphus roll, ever frustrate, the stone, Do the Danaids ply, ever vainly, the sieve. Tasks as futile does earth to its denizens give. Yet there's none so unhappy, but what he hath been Just about to be happy, at some time, I ween; ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... that stone)—Ver. 1084. Donatus thinks that he alludes to the story of Sisyphus, who, in the Infernal Regions, was condemned eternally to roll a stone up a hill, which, on arriving at the summit, immediately ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... Ixion turned on a wheele,[*] For daring tempt the Queene of heaven to sin; And Sisyphus an huge round stone did reele Against an hill, ne might from labour lin; 310 There thirsty Tantalus hong by the chin; And Tityus fed a vulture on his maw; Typhoeus joynts were stretched on a gin, Theseus condemnd to endlesse slouth by law, ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... is to maintain this bank metal reserve, and it is the task of Sisyphus and of herculean proportions. Outside of the United States, Germany has probably little, if any, credit to-day. She must pay in gold for what she buys from without, and from without she must get copper ...
— The Audacious War • Clarence W. Barron
... regarded all these disquisitions with indolence and indifference. At present they seem to be in a very lamentable condition, and such as the poets have given us but a faint notion of in their descriptions of the punishment of Sisyphus and Tantalus. For what can be imagined more tormenting, than to seek with eagerness, what for ever flies us; and seek for it in a place, where it is impossible it ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... once to the position of cartoonist; for the first six months he contributed only one big cut to five of Leech's, and his proportion during several years that followed did not exceed one in three. His first cartoon, entitled "The Modern Sisyphus"—representing Sir Robert Peel, as the tormented one, engaged in rolling the stone (O'Connell) up the hill, with Lord John Russell and others, as the Furies, looking on—appeared on March 16th, 1844; and from ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... &c adj.; inefficacy^, futility; ineptitude, inaptitude; unsubservience^; inadequacy &c (insufficiency) 640; inefficiency, &c (incompetence) 158; unskillfulness &c 699; disservice; unfruitfulness &c (unproductiveness).. 169; labor in vain, labor lost, labor of Sisyphus; lost trouble, lost labor; work of Penelope; sleeveless errand, wild goose chase, mere farce. tautology &c (repetition) 104; supererogation &c (redundancy) 641. vanitas vanitatum [Lat.], vanity, inanity, worthlessness, nugacity^; triviality &c (unimportance) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... out of torment till the last trump shall sound. He has become, indeed, a figure of legend, merged with such strange persons as the Wandering Jew and all those restless and unreleased spirits who, like Sisyphus of Greek legend or Tregeagle of Cornish, for ever toil at a for ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... tears. Tantalus, in spite of his thirst, stopped for a moment his efforts for water, Ixion's wheel stood still, the vulture ceased to tear the giant's liver, the daughters of Danaus rested from their task of drawing water in a sieve, and Sisyphus sat on his rock to listen. Then for the first time, it is said, the cheeks of the Furies were wet with tears. Proserpine could not resist, and Pluto himself gave way. Eurydice was called. She came from among the new-arrived ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... some divine judgment, is no sooner drawn than it is replaced in its position. This ascending and descending stopper is hollow, carpeted, with cushioned seats, and is watched over by two condemned souls, called conductors, one of whom is said to be named Igion, and the other Sisyphus. ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... "draws nearer to happiness and perfection, and is most capable of truth-disclosing conversation." Cf. Plat. "Apol." 41: "What would not a man give, O judges, to be able to examine the leaders of the great Trojan expedition, or Odysseus, or Sisyphus, or numberless others, men and women too! What infinite delight would there be in conversing with them and asking them ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... love is a moral sentiment, a community of thought rather than of sense. If that is the case, this community of thought ought to find expression in words and conversation. Nothing of the sort. It was extremely difficult for us to talk with each other. What a toil of Sisyphus was our conversation! Scarcely had we thought of something to say, and said it, when we had to resume our silence and try to discover new subjects. Literally, we did not know what to say to each other. All that we could think of concerning ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... snake-lock'd Eumenides, To pity of my measureless despair. I sang thy beauty, O Eurydice! I sigh'd my love forth, O Eurydice! With tears and weary sighs, Eurydice! And at thy name the pains of Hell grew light; Ixion's wheel stopp'd in its weary rounds, The rock of Sisyphus forgot to roll, And draughts of comfort flow'd o'er Tantalus:— Then from old Dis's hands the keys slipp'd down, And words of hope and pity spake he forth. He promised thee again if I would go, Never back-looking, from those realms of gloom, Those ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... in uncertainty, as may be collected from the sentiments of Socrates. The poets inculcated a belief in Tartarus and Elysium. They have drawn a picture of Tartarus in the most gloomy and horrific colors, where men, who had been remarkable for impiety to the gods, such as Tantalus, Tityus and Sisyphus, were tormented with a variety of misery ingeniously ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 11, November, 1880 • Various
... cork, which, by some divine judgment, is no sooner drawn than it is replaced in its position. This ascending and descending stopper is hollow, carpeted, with cushioned seats, and is watched over by two condemned souls, called conductors, one of whom is said to be named Ixion, and the other Sisyphus. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... gettin' so many letters is mor'n I can tell. Seems to me he must be neglectin' sumthin', for I tell ye things won't git along without puttin' your shoulder to the wheel." (Mrs. Spriggins had evidently heard of the fable of Sisyphus, and gave it an ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... as on a pivot where it lies, gradually sinking in the course of centuries deeper and deeper into the rock, and in new freshets receiving the aid of fresh stones, which are drawn into this trap and doomed to revolve there for an indefinite period, doing Sisyphus-like penance for stony sins, until they either wear out, or wear through the bottom of their prison, or else are released by some revolution of nature. There lie the stones of various sizes, from a pebble to ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... the man who can make haste, even uphill, the only haste worth making; and it must be up the right hill, too: not that Corinthian Acropolis, of which, I suppose, the white specter stood eighteen hundred feet high, in Hades, for Sisyphus to roll his fantastic stone up—image, himself, forever of the greater part ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... the son of Hermes and father of Anticleia, mother of Odysseus. He lived at the foot of Mount Parnassus, and was famous as a thief and swindler. On one occasion he met his match. Sisyphus, who had lost some cattle, suspected Autolycus of being the thief, but was unable to bring it home to him, since he possessed the power of changing everything that was touched by his hands. Sisyphus accordingly burnt his name into the hoofs of his cattle, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... god of the night. Merope—fugitive Merope! lost to thyself and thy lover, Cast, like a dream, out of thought, with the moons which have passed into sleep, What shall avail thee? Alcyone's tears, or the sight to discover Of Sisyphus pallid for thee by the blue, bitter lights of the deep— Pallid, but patient for sorrow? Oh, thou of the fire and the water, Half with the flame of the sunset, and kin to the streams of the sea, Hast thou the songs of old times for desire of thy dark-featured ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... beloved wife. Armed only with his golden lyre, the gift of Apollo, he descended into the gloomy depths of Hades, where his heavenly music arrested for a while the torments of the unhappy sufferers. The stone of Sisyphus remained motionless; Tantalus forgot his perpetual thirst; the wheel of Ixion ceased to revolve; and even the Furies shed tears, and withheld for a time their persecutions. Undismayed at the scenes of horror and suffering ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... I can see, there is only one resource left for those modern representatives of Sisyphus, the reconcilers of Genesis with science; and it has the advantage of being founded on a perfectly legitimate appeal to our ignorance. It has been seen that, on any interpretation of the terms water-population and land-population, it must be admitted that invertebrate representatives ...
— The Interpreters of Genesis and the Interpreters of Nature - Essay #4 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... of speech that I have spent a quarter of a century in a vain endeavor to eliminate from the extraordinary vocabulary of this section of the United States, but I recognize it to be a Sisyphus task. That, however, is aside the question. The vital ones at this moment are: By whom was this letter written? When did you receive it? What is the meaning of its contents, and how you could have had the audacity to hold clandestine meetings ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... Ixion, whirling round upon the wheel, teaches {us} what a rolling thing is fortune. Sisyphus, with immense labour, pushing the stone up the lofty hill, which ever, his labour lost, rolls back from the top, shows that men's miseries are endless. When Tantalus is athirst, standing in the midst of the river, the greedy ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus |
