"Thebaid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... though many may be indifferent to the tempting of men, few indeed are impenetrable to the smile and the sneer of women; that to live your own life in the midst of the world is a harder thing than it was of old to withdraw to the Thebaid; that to risk "looking strange" requires a courage perhaps cooler and higher than the soldier's or the saint's; and that to stand away from the contact and custom of your "set" is a harder and sterner work than it was of old to go into the sanctuary ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... put purple powder on her hair, and hastily got together a few beguiling devices, and went into the Thebaid. Jurgen went back to the Library, and the System of Worshipping a Girl, and the unique manuscripts of Astyanassa and Elephantis and Sotades, and the Dionysiac Formulae, and the Chart of Postures, and the Litany of the Centre of Delight, and the Spintrian Treatises, and the Thirty-two ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... performed by her body after death. Many childish incidents were treasured up which, had her life proved different, would have been forgotten, or have found their proper place among the catalogue of common things. Thus on one occasion, after hearing of the hermits of the Thebaid, she took it into her head to retire into the wilderness, and chose for her dwelling one of the caverns in the sandstone rock which abound in Siena near the quarter where her father lived. We merely see in this event a sign of her monastic ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... mistaken. This would bore you after a while. You can't shake the fever of the other life. I've tried it. There was a time when the gay fellows of Rome could trot down into the Thebaid and burrow into the sandhills and get rid of it. But it's all too complex now. You see we've made our dissipations so dainty and respectable that they've gone further in than the flesh, and taken hold of the ego proper. You couldn't ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... foliage grew here and there. Grottos had been ingeniously contrived; and broad terraced walks, now in ruin, though the steps were broken and the balustrades eaten through with rust, gave to this sylvan Thebaid a certain character of its own. The art of man and the picturesqueness of nature had wrought together to produce a charming effect. Human passions surely could not cross that boundary of tall oak-trees which shut out the sounds of the outer world, and screened the fierce ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... Religious Orders," were of later institution. From the oriental deserts of the Thebaid, where Saint Anthony had early practised the austerities of monkish life, Saint Martin drew his inspiration for the monasticism of the West. But it was not until the last of the IV century that he ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... have seen the artless admiration with which those estimable portly deputies, torpid with good living, listened to that ascetic, that man of another epoch, as if some Saint-Jerome had come forth from the depths of his thebaid to overwhelm with his burning eloquence, in the Senate of the Empire of the East, the unblushing profligacy of prevaricators and extortioners. How fully they understood the noble sobriquet of "My Conscience," which the Palais de Justice ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... cordwainer, as on a raft at anchor in the stream of time, he would survey the changes and wonders of two thousand years: the Roman and the Arab were to figure there; the Crusader and the Circumnavigator, the Eremite of the Thebaid and the Pope of Rome. Joannes himself, the Man existing out of Time and Space, Joannes the unresting and undying, was to be a deeply tragic personage. Schubart warmed himself with this idea; and ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... a corner of a valley in the Thebaid. On the right hand of the stage is a cavern. In front of the cavern stands ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... fruit in tall baskets woven of reeds and lined with leaves. Copts with the rich reddish skins, the long eyes and boldly curving profiles of Egyptian warriors and monarchs as presented on the walls of ancient temples of Libya and the Thebaid, moved about in leather-girdled blue linen tunics and hide sandals, keeping account of the laden panniers, roped upon the backs of diminutive asses and carried to the winepresses as fast ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... monk within his studious cloister's pale, are thus more akin to the modern scientific thinker than he commonly realises—perhaps because he is still, for the most part, of the solitary individualism of the hermit of the Thebaid, of Diogenes in his tub. Assuredly, they are less removed in essential psychology than their derived fraternities, their [Page: 85] respective novices and scholars, have often thought. It is thus no mere play of language which hands on from the one ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... kiss, and, as Clara retired to her own room, Beulah turned up the wick of her lamp and resumed her book. The gorgeous mazes of Coleridge no longer imprisoned her fancy; it wandered mid the silence, and desolation, and sand rivulets of the Thebaid desert; through the date groves of the lonely Laura; through the museums of Alexandria. Over the cool, crystal depths of "Hypatia" her thirsty spirit hung eagerly. In Philammon's intellectual nature she found a startling resemblance to her own. Like him, she had entered a forbidden temple, and ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... the Thebaid found that they became selfish wild beasts, or went mad, if they remained alone; and they formed themselves into lauras, 'lanes' of huts, convents, under a common abbot or father. The evangelical converts of the last century formed themselves into powerful and highly organized ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... men into living with the fear of death before their eyes. The first displays the solitary vigils, self-imposed penances, cruel temptations, firm endurance, and beatific visions of the anchorites in the Thebaid. The second is devoted to the triumph of Death over the pomp, strength, wealth, and beauty of the world. The third reveals a grimly realistic and yet awfully imaginative vision of judgment, such as it has ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... A.D.) was the author of the Silviae, Thebaid, and Achilleid. The "Silviae" are the rude materials of thought springing up spontaneously in all their wild luxuriance, from the rich, natural soil of the imagination of the poet. The subject of the "Thebaid" is the ancient Greek legend respecting the war ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Moliere travelled through France as the manager of a company of strolling players. It is said that with the natural turn of young authors, who are more desirous to combine scenes of strong emotion than of comic situation, he attempted to produce a tragedy called "The Thebaid." Its indifferent success disgusted him with the buskin; and it may be observed, that in proportion as he affects, in other compositions, anything approaching to the tragic, his admirable facility of expression seems to abandon him, and he becomes ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne |
