"Laocoon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "pyramids," and what is the "desert"? Take away Stonehenge from Salisbury Plain, and it is nothing more than Hounslow Heath, or any other uninclosed down. It appears to me that St. Peter's the Coliseum, the Pantheon, the Palatine, the Apollo, the Laocoon, the Venus dei Medici, the Hercules, the Dying Gladiator, the Moses of Michelangelo, and all the higher works of Canova (I have already spoken of those of ancient Greece, still extant in that country, or transported to England), are as poetical as Mont Blanc, or Mount AEtna, perhaps ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... woman he must have screamed under the nervous tension which he was now undergoing. But that relief being denied to his virility, he clenched his teeth in misery, bringing lines about his mouth like those in the Laocoon, and ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... Weight of bodies was upon him; yellow hands clutched for his throat; he felt hot breaths and heard throaty cries. A madness of horror possessed him, a horror that was like the blind madness of Laocoon struggling with his sons in the coils of the giant serpent. In these moments he was not fighting men. They were monsters, yellow, foul-smelling, unhuman, and he fought as Laocoon fought. As if it had been a cane, he snapped the bone of an arm whose hand was throttling him; he twisted back ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... trunks which put forth a wealth of foliage, rank and unhealthy. In others, obstinacy plants itself like a rock, which the winds and waves of opinion cannot move. In a few, jealousy coils itself with lengthening fold, which, like the serpent that wrapped itself round Laocoon and his sons, makes parents and children its ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... a person as Venus?" said Dr. O'Grady. "There wasn't. And yet every museum in Europe is half full of statues of her. Was there ever such a person as the Dying Gladiator? Was there ever a man called Laocoon, who strangled sea serpents? You know perfectly well that there weren't any such people, and yet some of the most famous statues in the world are ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... Laocoon storming from Princelie Castel is hastning, And a far of beloing: What fond phantastical harebraine Madnesse hath enchaunted your wits, you townsmen unhappie? Weene you (blind hodipecks) the Greekish nauie returned, Or that their presents want ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... what I aim to say, I hope, for I aim to say much. Put it that instead of a girl whom you idealised, it was a principle—some scheme of reform which you honoured with all the passion of young hope and dream, and which knit your alert being into a Laocoon of striving. Your maturer eyes see this ideal impossible and narrow. In no wise can it satisfy your bolder reach and larger sympathy. But you do not laugh at what has been. If you strove for it sincerely at any time, no matter how remote, you could ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... the question of theories of criticism—can he do with less than, say, an acquaintance with Aristotle, and Lessing's "Laocoon," or even with so little? With Shakespeare and some of his commentators he ought to be at home; the "Paradoxe sur le Comedien" he can hardly escape, and the works of some of the modern English and latest French critics may not be overlooked. Of course ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... Castiglione enshrined his memory in the pages of the Cortigiano. Then, again, we find him in his native city, Rome, searching for antiques in the ruins of the Eternal City, and examining the newly discovered Laocoon with Michelo Angelo, until at last the incurable malady which had long undermined his strength put an end to his life, and he died in the prime of manhood at the Santa Casa of Loreto. But his best work was done, and his happiest years were spent, in the service of Duchess ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... might therefore possess as much value as a treasure. Signor de Fredis went at once to the Prefect of the City, who followed him in company with the Aedile and some learned antiquaries. The work of art was brought to the light, and inspected. Its subject was seen to be the Trojan priest Laocoon, against whom Apollo had sent two snakes because he had warned his countrymen against receiving the dangerous Greek gift of the Trojan horse, in which warriors ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... who suspected a treacherous design in this huge contrivance was Laocoon, a priest of Apollo, who, in company with his two young sons, had issued from the city with the Trojans in order to offer a sacrifice to the gods. With all the eloquence at his command he urged his countrymen not to place confidence in any gift of the Greeks, and even went so far as ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... name honoured in the history of literature, is little known in England, save by his exquisite comparison of art and poetry, called the Laocoon.(694) He was one of those whose labours remain for the benefit of other ages, like that of the coral worms, which die, but leave their work. That a native German literature exists, is the work of Lessing as pioneer; that it is worth studying, ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... which the mother was the centre figure; this makes it more probable, but the difficulty to this hypothesis is, that there do not appear to be the necessary gradations in the size or altitude of the other figures; the sons in the 'Laocoon' are certainly ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... way, and contrasts very unfavourably with the Exhibition of Sculpture at the Royal Academy, in which are three really fine works of art—Mr. Leighton's Man Struggling with a Snake, which may be thought worthy of being looked on side by side with the Laocoon of the Vatican, and Lord Ronald Gower's two statues, one of a dying French Guardsman at the Battle of Waterloo, the other of Marie Antoinette being led to execution with bound hands, Queenlike and ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... magnificent cedar, with a tall straight stem, covered over with a curious sort of fretwork, wove by the branches of some strong parasitical plant, which had warped itself round and round it, by numberless snakelike convolutions, as if it had been a vegetable Laocoon. The tree itself shot up branchless to the uncommon height of fifty feet; the average girth of the hunk being four—and twenty feet, or eight—feet in diameter. The leaf of the cedar is small, not unlike the ash; but when I looked up, I ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... and Lucille over Raphael's superb frescoes in the Loggie, and in the chambers adjoining. The few pictures in the gallery are scarcely surpassed. The museum contains some of the noblest treasures of art, including the Laocoon, and Apollo Belvidere. The library is very valuable. The superb palace of the Quirinal ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... anything to redeem it and surface ugliness, which may be only a veil over the beauty that lies underneath. It might be possible, for instance, to show children the difference between the real ugliness in the priest's face of the "Laocoon" group, because of the motive of courage and endurance behind the suffering. Many stories in everyday life could be found to ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... said Cassandra, with a sly glance at Helen. "The fact is, until you mentioned it yourself, it never occurred to me that there was much fun in any portion of the Trojan incident, excepting perhaps the delirium tremens of old Laocoon, who got no more than he deserved for stealing my thunder. I had warned Troy against the Greeks, and they all laughed at me, and said my eye to the future was strabismatic; that the Greeks couldn't get into Troy ...
— The Pursuit of the House-Boat • John Kendrick Bangs
... the quietude of a moment, standing and looking before one at the moss-bearded trees and the python-like loops of the lianas, one can see the struggle crystallized, just as in the still marble of the Laocoon one sees the struggle ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... help out the sense, and sometimes (as one cannot but suspect) to help out the sound of the verses. I do not believe, for instance, that Lord Lytton himself would defend the lines in which we are told how Laocoon "Revealed to Roman crowds, now Christian grown, That Pagan anguish which, in Parian stone, the Rhodian artist," and so on. It is not only that this is bad in itself; but that it is unworthy of the company in which it is found; that such verses should not have ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... breath with these beautiful compositions, condemned to perpetual twilight. They were secured by the late and lamented Von Tschudi, who left the National Gallery after their purchase and retired to Munich, where he bought a great example of El Greco for the old Pinakothek, the Laocoon, a service, I fancy, not quite appreciated by the burghers of Munich. The masters who have thus fallen under the ban of official displeasure are Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley, and Cezanne—the latter represented by two of the ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... Silenuses, aspiring to become angels; so many deformities laboring for our own embellishment; so many clumsy chrysalises each working painfully toward the development of the butterfly within him. Our ideal is no longer a serene beauty of soul; it is the agony of Laocoon struggling with the hydra of evil. The lot is cast irrevocably. There are no more happy whole-natured men among us, nothing but so many candidates ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... ATHENAEUM,—on whose sunny roof and beautiful chambers may the benediction of centuries of students rest with mine!—added to its library, in 1823, a small, but excellent museum of the antique sculpture, in plaster;—the selection being dictated, it is said, by no less an adviser than Canova. The Apollo, the Laocoon, the Venuses, Diana, the head of the Phidian Jove, Bacchus, Antinous, the Torso Hercules, the Discobolus, the Gladiator Borghese, the Apollino,—all these, and more, the sumptuous gift of Augustus Thorndike. It is much that one man should have power to confer on so many, who never saw him, ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... their design; and the moment which they select is not that in which a particular or transient emotion may be displayed, but in which the settled character of mind may be expressed. With the two exceptions of the Laocoon and the Fighting Gladiator, there are none of the statues in the Louvre which are not the representation of the human figure in a state of repose; and the expression which the finest possess, is invariably that permanent expression which has resulted from the habitual frame and character ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... doubling or trebling the effect on the spectator. Sculpture has never realised to the full the chances offered by grouped plastic art of heroic proportions. Classical groups cannot be fairly judged by the Laocoon, the Farnese Bull, or even the Niobe reliefs. Their theatrical character is so patent, that it is obvious how far inferior they must be to the work of greater men whose genuine productions have perished. But, even ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... enjoy the experience. On my right sat an army captain, who had given more thought to the possible secrets of French chaffinches than to the approaching barrage. There was also the artist, who could draw a lizard's head like a Japanese print, but preferred to depict impressionistic Laocoon roots. ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... of 'Eros and Psyche,'—by far the best of the drawings,—in which the figures seem literally to float in ether. 'Laocoon' is grand and dignified, and all deserve to be noticed ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... one, or what was coming. So even the boldest of us 'held his breath for a time.' All at once Mr. C., at the further end from me, began to gurgle and groan like a person in an epileptic fit. Some one cried, 'Turn up the gas.' It was done, and we beheld the medium with his head twisted like a young laocoon in the folds of a red tablecloth. He disentangled himself with a disturbed, suffering air. The spirits were upon us, though why they should stifle their interpreter I could not quite see. The sceptics smiled sardonically. I suspected ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... end of the gallery is a fine copy in marble of the Laocoon, by Bandinelli, one of the rivals of Michael Angelo. When it was finished, the former boasted it was better than the original, to which Michael made the apt reply: "It is foolish for those who walk in the footsteps of others, to say ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor |
