"Hermes" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sudden turns, when love Gets overnear to doting; Keen lips, that shape soft sayings Like crystals of the snow, With pretty half-betrayings Of things one may not know; Fair hand whose touches thrill, Like golden rod of wonder, Which Hermes wields at will Spirit and flesh to sunder; Light foot, to press the stirrup In fearlessness and glee, Or dance, till finches chirrup, And stars sink to ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... gone much further in deifying humanity than in humanising divinity. The Hermes of Olympia is a man made into a god; no Christian artist has ever done a tenth as well in presenting the image of God made Man. When imagination soars towards an invisible world it loses love of life as ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... and echoing it in the curve of the wine-skin that swells around him. Himself, as a living man, were too loathsome for words; but here, thanks to Hokusai, he is not less admirable than Pheidias' Hermes, or the Discobolus himself. Yes! Swathed in his abominable surplusage of bulk, he is as fair as any statue of astricted god or athlete that ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... richer and more elevated view of nature; but he excelled them most of all in this, that the divine object which he worshiped was conceived both in form and character after the human. Zeus, Phoebus Apollo, Pallas Athene, Aphrodite, Ares, Hephaestus, Hestia, Hermes, Artemis, were originally powers of nature personified, as some epithets in Homer[4] still indicate; but they became, sometimes under the same names, types of power and lordship, science and art, courage and ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... blowing from the Attic valley carried to the ears of the two gods the sounds of laughter, singing, kissing. Apollo, in whose eyes nothing under the sun was fairer than a woman, turned to Hermes ...
— So Runs the World • Henryk Sienkiewicz,
... are sticks, stones, and material objects, or the 'ideas' which 'represent' them. They can be stuck together or taken apart, but all the words which express relations, categories, and the like, are in themselves meaningless. The special objects of his scorn are 'Hermes' Harris, and Monboddo, who had tried to defend Aristotle against Locke. Monboddo had asserted that 'every kind of relation' is a pure 'idea of the intellect' not to be apprehended by sense.[149] If so, according to Tooke, it ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... Aristotle saith, and assigneth the cause of this uncleanness and saith, that in boisterous lead is evil quicksilver heavy and fenny. Also that brimstone thereof is evil vapour and stinking. Therefore it freezeth not well at full. Hermes saith that lead in boiling undoeth the hardness of all sad and hard bodies, and also of the stone adamant. Aristotle speaketh of lead in the Meteorics and saith that lead without doubt when it is molten is as quicksilver, ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... Hermes roused the oxen vast; O'er shadowy mountain and resounding dell, And flower-paven plains, great Hermes passed; 120 Till the black night divine, which favouring fell Around his steps, grew gray, and morning fast Wakened the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... should return, To be avenged? Guide, then, Telemachus, Wisely, for thou canst, that, all unharmed, He reach his native land, and, in their barks, Homeward the suitor-train retrace their way." He spake, and turned to Hermes, his dear son: "Hermes, for thou, in this, my messenger Art, as in all things, to the bright-haired nymph Make known my steadfast purpose, the return Of suffering Ulysses. Neither gods Nor men shall guide his voyage. On a raft, Made firm with bands, he shall depart and reach, ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... friendship, now made terms, sending among other gifts tigers, which were then for the first time seen by the Romans, as also, I think, by the Greeks. They likewise presented to him a boy without shoulders (like the statues of Hermes that we now see). Yet this creature in spite of his anatomy made perfect use of his feet and hands: he would stretch a bow for them, shoot missiles, and sound the trumpet,—how, I do not know; I merely record the story. ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... testudo), the common lyre of the ancient Greeks, which had a convex back of tortoiseshell or of wood shaped like the shell. The word chelys was used in allusion to the oldest lyre of the Greeks which was said to have been invented by Hermes. According to tradition he was attracted by sounds of music while walking on the banks of the Nile, and found they proceeded from the shell of a tortoise across which were stretched tendons which the wind had set in vibration (Homeric Hymn to Hermes, 47-51). The word has been applied ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... the lake and morass near Tyana were ascribed to the wrath of Zeus and Hermes, who, having visited the cities which formerly stood there, and having been refused shelter by all the inhabitants save Philemon and Baucis, rewarded their benefactors, but sunk the wicked cities beneath the lake ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... the hearth, Or the Belmans drowsie charm, To bless the dores from nightly harm: Or let my Lamp at midnight hour, Be seen in som high lonely Towr, Where I may oft out-watch the Bear, With thrice great Hermes, or unsphear The spirit of Plato to unfold What Worlds, or what vast Regions hold 90 The immortal mind that hath forsook Her mansion in this fleshly nook: And of those Daemons that are found In fire, air, flood, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... Smith's Classical Dictionary. It had pictures in it so beautiful that you were happy just sitting still and looking at them. There was such a lot of gods and goddesses that at first they were rather hard to remember. But you couldn't forget Apollo and Hermes and Aphrodite and Pallas Athene and Diana. They were not like Jehovah. They quarrelled sometimes, but they didn't hate each other; not as Jehovah hated all the other gods. They fitted in somehow. ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... his whole fleet put in at a town distant from Carthage no less than two hundred and eighty stades (now it so happened that a temple of Hermes had been there from of old, from which fact the place was named Mercurium; for the Romans call Hermes "Mercurius"), and if he had not purposely played the coward and hesitated, but had undertaken to go straight for Carthage, he would have captured it at ...
— History of the Wars, Books III and IV (of 8) - The Vandalic War • Procopius
... the Hebrews with androgynic humanity, and thence it passed to extreme India, where Shiva as Ardhanari was male on one side and female on the other side of the body, combining paternal and maternal qualities and functions. The first creation of humans (Gen. i. 27) was hermaphrodite (Hermes and Venus), masculum et foeminam creavit eos—male and female created He them—on the sixth day, with the command to increase and multiply (ibid. v. 28), while Eve the woman was created subsequently. Meanwhile, say certain Talmudists, Adam carnally copulated with all races of animals. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... Petersburgh, and converses with the Empress— Persuades the Russians and Turks to cease cutting one another's throats, and in concert cut a canal across the Isthmus of Suez—The Baron discovers the Alexandrine Library, and meets with Hermes Trismegistus—Besieges Seringapatam, and challenges Tippoo Sahib to single combat—They fight—The Baron receives some wounds to his face, but at last vanquishes the tyrant—The Baron returns to Europe, and raises the ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... answered the complaisant demon, "the wedding of Hermes with the Black DragonBut take thy fire that thou camest to seek, and begone! no mortal may look ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... fly from the shapely limbs, the matchless curves are uncovered, the breathing mouth smiles through the petrifaction of a thousand ages, the shroud of stone falls from the godlike brow, and the Hermes of Olympia stands forth in all his deathless beauty. Another is born to the heritage of this world's power, fore-destined to rule and fated to destroy; the naked sword of destiny lies in his cradle; the axe of a king-maker awaits the awakening ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... chariot-wheel on cries for justice; Her deepest planted and her liveliest voice, Heard from the babe as from the broken crone. Behold him in his vessel of bronze encased, And tumbled down the cave. But rather look - Ah, that the woman tattler had not sought, Of all the Gods to let her secret fly, Hermes, after the thirteen songful months! Prompting the Dexterous to work his arts, And shatter earth's delirious holiday, Then first, as where the fountain runs a stream, Resolving to composure on its throbs. But see her in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to do with the Indian pantheon. The Gandharva, moon, is certainly one with the Persian Gandarewa, but can hardly be identical with the Centaur. Saram[a] seems to have, together with S[a]rameya, a Grecian parallel development in Helena (a goddess in Sparta), Selene, Hermes; and Sarany[u] may be the same with Erinnys, but these are not Aryan figures in the form of their respective developments, though they appear to be so in origin. It is scarcely possible that Earth is an Aryan deity with a cult, though different ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... offerings, and at his death passes away with a pious heart and with all that custom demands, the gods might at least send some one to meet him, at least one of the inferior gods, to show a man the way. ... But that reminds me. Many a time when I begged for good luck in traffic in hides, I promised Hermes calves——" ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... which, being not now doing, or having not yet been done, have a natural aptitude to exist hereafter, may be properly said to appertain to the future.'—Harris's 'Hermes,' book I, chap. viii (p. 155, foot-note, ed. 1771). For Harris's being not now doing, which is to translate μὴ γινόμενα, the modern school, if they pursued uniformity with more of fidelity than of taste, would have to put ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... Doron. Hermes the winged Horse bestrid, And thorow thick and thin he rid, 70 And floundred throw ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... The great child-hero was the son of the god Jupiter and Alcmena, daughter of Electryon, King of Argos. He was exposed by his mother, but the goddess Athene persuaded Hera to give him her breast (another version says Hermes placed Hercules on the breast of Hera, while she slept) and the infant Hercules drew so lustily of the milk that he caused pain to the goddess, who snatched him away. But Hercules had drunk of ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... hoped would be the irresistible form—a recently discovered fragment of Polybius, an advance copy of the forthcoming issue of "The Historical Review," the note-book of Professor Carl Voertschlaffen... One day, all-prying Hermes told him of Clio's secret addiction to novel-reading. Thenceforth, year in, year out, it was in the form of fiction that Zeus wooed her. The sole result was that she grew sick of the sight of novels, and found a perverse pleasure in reading history. These ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... gods then left us in our need Like base and common men? Were even the sweet grey eyes Of Artemis a lie, The speech of Hermes but a trick, The ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... ascertain the motive which determined Bacon to give to the supposed author the name of Valerius Terminus, or to his commentator, of whose annotations we have no remains, that of Hermes Stella. It may be conjectured that by the name Terminus he intended to intimate that the new philosophy would put an end to the wandering of mankind in search of truth, that it would be the TERMINUS AD QUEM in which when it was ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... Thinking about the Hermes of Olympia, and the fact that so far he is pretty well the only Greek statue which historical evidence unhesitatingly gives us as an original masterpiece, it struck me that, could one become really familiar with him, could eye and soul learn all the fulness of his perfection, we should ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... eighteenth century landscape had had no place; Hermes once gave a few lines to sunset, but excused it as an extravagance, and begged readers and critics not to think that he only wanted to ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... Broken with painful remorses, with shrinkings of soul, and relentings, Foolish delays, more foolish evasions, most foolish renewals. But I am in for it now,—I have quitted the ship of Ulysses; Yet on my lips is the moly, medicinal, offered of Hermes. I have passed into the precinct, the labyrinth closes around me, Path into path rounding slyly; I pace slowly on, and the fancy, Struggling awhile to sustain the long sequences, weary, bewildered, Fain must collapse in despair; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... soon as might be, at the rendezvous of his tribe, gave notice to the hundreds, and summoned the muster which appeared for the most part upon good horses, and already indifferently well armed; as to instance in one for all, the tribe of Nubia, where Hermes de Caduceo, lord orator of the same, after a short salutation and a hearty welcome, applied himself to his business, ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... Hermes cunning Poor Argus funning, He made him drink like a buffer; To his great surprise Sew'd up all his eyes, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 380, July 11, 1829 • Various
... man-of-war at that port, and when he was informed that we intended to remain strictly neutral, the decision was also come to to inform the Taepings of this fact. Therefore in April, 1853, before the army had left for the northern campaign, Sir George Bonham sailed for Nankin in the "Hermes" man-of-war. On the twenty-seventh of that month the vessel anchored off Nankin, and several interviews were held with the Taeping Wangs, of whom the Northern King was at this time the most influential. ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... merchants pass by the kingdom of Persia, and go to a city that is Clept Hermes, for Hermes the philosopher founded it. And after that they pass an arm of the sea, and then they go to another city that is clept Golbache. And there they find merchandises, and of popinjays, as great ...
— The Travels of Sir John Mandeville • Author Unknown
... part. For one election I have seen, he has been concerned in twenty. Nobody is less of a visionary theorist; nobody has drawn his speculations more from practice. No peer has condescended to superintend with more vigilance the declining franchises of the poor commons. "With thrice great Hermes he has outwatched the Bear." Often have his candles been burned to the snuff, and glimmered and stunk in the sockets, whilst he grew pale at his constitutional studies; long, sleepless nights has he wasted, long, laborious, shiftless journeys ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... doorway of the temporary office. The Arizonan stepped in with his easy, swinging stride, a lithe, straight-backed Hermes showing strength of character back of ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... a stranger from the door, took its origin from a fear lest the wayfaring man should be a Divinity in disguise. According to the Greek story, Orion owed his birth to the fact that the childless Hyrieus, his reputed father, had once received unawares Zeus, Poseidon, and Hermes, or, to call them by their Latin names, Jupiter, Neptune, and Mercury. In the beautiful story of Philemon and Baucis, Jupiter and Mercury reward the aged couple who had so hospitably received them by warning them of the approaching deluge. The fables of Phaedrus and Aesop ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... of universal nature, they might gain such an insight into physical causes, as would enable them to perform actions, that should fill the vulgar with astonishment; and it is hardly to be doubted, but this was all the knowledge that many of them aspired to. In this sort of magic, Hermes Tresmegistus and Zoroaster excelled, and indeed it gained great reputation among the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Persians, Indians and Jews. In times of ignorance, a piece of clock-work, or some other curious machine, was ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... on the day before, and framed in the mummy, moulded within its cartonnage, the workmanship of which was remarkably fine and rich. Never had ancient Egypt more carefully wrapped up one of her children for the eternal sleep. Although no shape was indicated by the funeral Hermes, ending in a sheath from which stood out alone the shoulders and the head, one could guess there was under that thick envelope a young and graceful form. The gilded mask, with its long eyes outlined with black and brightened with enamel, the nose with its delicate nostrils, the ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... her ideal up and to take as her ideal thousands of great and small Napoleons and Bismarcks, and Goethes and Spencers, or Medics and Cromwells or Kaisers and Kings—no, in the latter case it would be much nicer for the Church to point out the saintly men outside of Christian walls, like St Hermes and St Pythagoras, or St Krishna and St Buddha, or St Lao-Tse and St Confucius, or St Zoroaster and St Abu-Bekr. Better even is unbaptised saintliness than ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... stem of moly, If thou touch at Circe's isle,— Hermes' moly, growing solely To undo enchanter's wile. When she proffers thee her chalice,— Wine and spices mixed with malice,— When she smites thee with her staff To transform thee, do thou laugh! Safe thou art if thou but bear The least leaf of moly rare. Close it grows beside her portal, ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... O Hermes, your craft cannot make me confident. I know my own steel to be almost spent, and therefore entreat my peace with you, in time: you are too cunning for me to encounter at length, and I think it my ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... Baden-Baden of Asia Minor; that thither repaired all the victims of gluttony, debauchery, and general physical bankruptcy. Its name in ancient Caria denotes its seaside-resort location, Hali-Karnas-Sos meaning literally "Karnassus-by-the-sea," like Boulogne-sur-mer. The city was under the protection of Hermes and Aphrodite, whose temples were near each other. Human nature in the days of Halicarnassus did not much differ from human nature at Monte Carlo or Baden-Baden. The baths had a number of young and handsome eunuchs who waited on the old, debauched, and nervous ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... these are subordinate to the ruling power of the air, as the demigods of the fountains and minor seas are to the great deep; but, as the cloud-firmament detaches itself more from the air, and has a wider range of ministry than the minor streams and seas, the highest cloud deity, Hermes, has a rank more equal with Athena than Nereus or Proteus with Neptune; and there is greater difficulty in tracing his character, because his physical dominion over the clouds can, of course, be asserted only where clouds ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... timid or mysterious attitudes. These were vestals hidden beneath the long Greek peplum, with its thick, heavy folds: agile watchers, covered with their marble veils and guarding the palace with their furtive glances. A statue of Hermes, with his finger on his lips; one of Iris, with extended wings; another of Night, sprinkled all over with poppies, dominated in the gardens and the outbuilding's, which could be seen through the trees. All these statues threw ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... possession after supper made the meal, so far as Lyveden was concerned, an Olympian banquet. The assemblage, indeed, was remarkable, and the hostess—a very Demeter—must have been the oldest present by some twenty years. The sprightliness of Hermes alone, in the guise of the man called Berry, kept a lively ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... Harris, the author of Hermes, says, "It is certainly as easy to be a scholar as a gamester, or any other character equally illiberal and low. The same application, the same quantity of habit, will fit us for one as completely as for the other. And as to those who tell us, with an air of seeming wisdom, that it is ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... the Hermetic philosophers of ancient Egypt, all things were interrelated by correspondence, analogy, and similitude. "As above, so below," is the teaching on the Smaragdine Table of Hermes. Therefore, whatever happened to the divine Epinoia, the Supreme Mother, among the Aeons, happened also to the human Spiritual Soul or Monadic Essence, in its evolution through all stages of manifestation. This Soul is shut into all forms and bodies, ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... Diogenes. Hermes and Pallas! I wanted but a cubit of it, or at most a fathom, and thou art pulling it ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... used to dwell with a peculiar delight, a paternal fondness, expressive of conscious exultation in being so intimately acquainted with her. One day, in speaking of her to Mr. Harris, author of 'Hermes,' and expatiating on her various perfections,—the solidity of her virtues, the brilliancy of her wit, and the strength of her understanding, &c.—he quoted some lines (a stanza, I believe, but from what author I know not[1]), with which he concluded ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... voice of waves) Aum! Hek! Wal! Ak! Lub! Mor! Ma! White yoghin of the gods. Occult pimander of Hermes Trismegistos. (With a voice of whistling seawind) Punarjanam patsypunjaub! I won't have my leg pulled. It has been said by one: beware the left, the cult of Shakti. (With a cry of stormbirds) Shakti Shiva, darkhidden Father! (He smites with his bicycle pump the crayfish in his left ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... of farewells, even in art; even our proficiencies are deciduous and evanescent. So here with these exquisite pieces the XVIIth, XVIIIth, and IVth of the present collection. You will perhaps never excel them; I should think the "Hermes," never. Well, you will do something else, and of that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... graciously make some better use of us in promoting his glory. I met a Dr. King in Simon's Bay, of the 'Cambrian' frigate, one of our class-mates in the Andersonian. This frigate, by the way, saluted us handsomely when we sailed out. We have a man-of-war to help us (the 'Hermes'), but the lazy muff is far behind. He is, however, to ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... reaches Olympus, only to find that the gods have gone elsewhere, and that the heavenly abode is occupied solely by the demon of War, who is busy pounding up the Greek States in a huge mortar. However, his benevolent purpose is not in vain; for learning from Hermes that the goddess Peace has been cast into a pit, where she is kept a fast prisoner, he calls upon the different peoples of Hellas to make a united effort and rescue her, and with their help drags her out and brings her back in triumph to earth. The play ...
— Peace • Aristophanes
... styles of architecture are piled close to one another. Egyptian pylons rise above Greek temples. Obelisks exhibit themselves like spears between battlements of red brick. In the centres of squares there are statues of Hermes with pointed ears, and of Anubis with dogs' heads. Antony notices the mosaics in the court-yards, and the tapestries hung from the cross-beams of ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... dance projected the Megistos Kouros, the greatest of youths, who is the incarnation of spring or the return of life, and lies at the back of so many of the most gracious shapes of the classical pantheon. The Kouros appears as Dionysus, as Apollo, as Hermes, as Ares: in our clearest and most detailed piece of evidence he actually appears with the characteristic history and ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray |
