"Gordian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and evidently for a purpose, four credible witnesses are required to prove fornication, adultery, sodomy and so forth; and they must swear that actually saw rem in re, the "Kohl-needle in the Kohl-tui," as the Arabs have it. This practically prevents conviction and the sabre cuts the Gordian knot. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... hopelessly in love to be amusing. And as for you—well—you would do very nicely, no doubt, my dear Arnold, but you are too stuffed up with principles for a girl of Isobel's antecedents. So she has cut the Gordian knot herself! Well, I ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... fatalism. He would not accept the boisterous mode of cutting the Gordian-knot proposed by the noble British Philisterwe know were free and theres an end on it! He prefers Lamarcks, The will is, in truth, never free. He believes man to be a co-ordinate term of Natures great progression; a result of the interaction ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... One is almost inclined to believe with the Eskimos that demons take possession of these animals. Sometimes they seem to be quite crazy. A favorite trick of theirs is to leap over and under and around each other, getting their traces in a snarl beside which the Gordian knot would be as nothing. Then, in a temperature anywhere between zero and 60 deg. below, the driver has to remove his heavy mittens and disentangle the traces with his bare hands, while the dogs leap and snap and bark and seem to mock ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... same way it may be said that a teacher of law is an inverted moralist (viz., a teacher of the duties of justice), or that politics are inverted ethics, if we exclude the thought that ethics also teaches the duty of benevolence, magnanimity, love, and so on. The State is the Gordian knot that is cut instead of being untied; it is Columbus' egg which is made to stand by being broken instead of balanced, as though the business in question were to make it stand rather than to balance it. In this respect the State is like the man who thinks that ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... allied with those serious questions pertaining to State rights which gave rise, in part, to our late war. But the root of the dissensions, and the subject of most animated debates, was slavery,—that awful curse and difficult question, which was not settled until the sword finally cut that Gordian knot. But so far as compromises could settle the question, they were made in the spirit of patriotism,—not on principles of abstract justice, but of expediency and common-sense. It was evident from the first that there could be no federal, united government, no nation, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... to cut the Gordian knot by considering the shoulder structure of the pterodactyle as independently educed, and having relation to physiology only. This conception is one which harmonizes completely with the views here advocated, and with those of Mr. Herbert Spencer, who also calls ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... of Europe inactive during these years. In 1824 Elizabeth Heyrick, a Quaker woman, cut the gordian knot of difficulty in the anti-slavery struggle in England, by an able essay in favor of immediate, unconditional emancipation. At Leipsic, in 1844, Helene Marie Weber—her father a Prussian officer, and her mother an English woman—wrote a series of ten tracts on "Woman's Rights and Wrongs," covering ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... service and at the same time cheapen it to small users—that was the Gordian knot; and the man who unquestionably did most to untie it was Edward J. Hall. Mr. Hall founded the telephone business in Buffalo in 1878, and seven years afterwards became the chief of the long-distance traffic. He was then, and is to-day, one of the statesmen of the telephone. For more than ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... regular stages of a plot, the writer, by the act of publishing the introductory parts, pledges himself to unweave the whole tissue to the last. The knot that he has tied, though it should prove a very Gordian knot, he is bound to untie. And, if he fails to do so, I doubt whether a reader has not a right of action against him for having wantonly irritated a curiosity that was never meant to be gratified—for having trifled with his feelings—and, possibly, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... art of man can never bind them so fast, but that an easy distinction shall give them a starting-hole to escape the scandal of being baffled. They will cut asunder the toughest argument with as much ease as Alexander did the gordian knot; they will thunder out so many rattling terms as shall fright an adversary into conviction. They are exquisitely dexterous in unfolding the most intricate mysteries; they will tell you to a tittle ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... Kean; but how are you to judge of an actor who in his comic moments certainly approaches the image we have formed to ourselves of Munden and Dowton, of Bannister and Suett? To say that he is a Genius, and the Prince of Eccentrics, is perhaps the only way to cut the Gordian knot of criticism ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... present writer these questions present no Chinese puzzle. He simply brushes all speculation and theorizing aside by responding "Yes," to both interrogatories, on the principle that it is sometimes just as well to cut the Gordian knot as to waste precious time trying to untie it. The burrowing owl makes me think of a denizen of the other side of the river Styx, and why should one try to love that which nature has made unattractive, especially when ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... forward was exactly to his taste. He would have preferred a man of title, but the peers who were not penniless were too proud; and the best baronet was an aged bankrupt, who had been twice through the courts, and enjoyed an indifferent name. It was strange that Isabel did not cut the Gordian knot, and choose for herself; but she was a dutiful daughter, and little less cautious than her father. In the midst of it all he was called away on some particular business of his own—to another world—and Isabel was left alone, ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... manned and the city saved. The officers English, Dutch, and French, listened respectfully to his remarks, but, without any suggestions on their own part, called on him as their Alexander to untie the Gordian knot. Alexander solved it, not with the sword, but with a trick which he hoped might prove sharper than a sword. He announced his intention of proposing at once to treat, and to protract the negotiations as long as possible, until the wished-for sails should be discerned in the offing, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Gordian knot of law at a stroke, by saying, "Get the grace of God in your hearts, and it is really no difference what you do, or do not do." Now this is a very old idea. The elect few who get their heads into a certain ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... dream. He was more passive than active in the affair; though, if his reason had not fully approved of the step he was tending to—if he had not believed that a second marriage was the very best way of cutting the Gordian knot of domestic difficulties, he could have made an effort without any great trouble to himself, and extricated himself without pain from the mesh of circumstances. It ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... large fragments of the records of the Brotherhood, dating from shortly after the battle of Actium, show that it continued to work and to flourish down to the reign of Gordian (A.D. 241), and from other sources we know that it was still in existence in the fourth century.[919] These records have been found on the site of the sacred grove, at the fifth milestone on the via Campana between Rome and Ostia, which ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... occupied the year before he left America. He stepped quickly across the chamber to a certain beam, where he had, fifteen years before, written four initial letters, and intertwined them so curiously that the Gordian knot was easy weaving in comparison. The Gordian one was cut;—and this had ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... the horizon of our thoughts and can be seen as two. No contradiction, no consciousness; no cross, no crown; contradictions are the very small deadlocks without which there is no going; going is our sense of a succession of small impediments or deadlocks; it is a succession of cutting Gordian knots, which on a small scale please or pain as the case may be; on a larger, give an ecstasy of pleasure, or shock to the extreme of endurance; and on a still larger, kill whether they be on the right side or the wrong. Nature, as I said in "Life and Habit," ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler |
