"Holy Grail" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Hallowell Miller (Md.) paid a beautiful tribute to Miss Anthony, "the Sir Galahad in search of the Holy Grail," and closed with an eloquent prophecy of future success. Mrs. Lillie Devereux Blake (N. Y.) gave a clever satire on The Rights of Men, ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... eccentric arabesques and fantastic flower-pictures of this poem we are greeted by the admirable Iwain, the all-surpassing Lancelot du Lac, and the bold, gallant, and true, but somewhat tiresome, Wigalois. Nearly allied and interwoven with this cyclus of sagas is that of the Holy Grail, in which the spiritual knighthood is glorified; and in this epoch we meet three of the grandest poems of the Middle Ages, the Titurel, the Parsifal, and the Lohengrin. Here indeed we find ourselves face to face with Romantic Poetry. We look deeply into her great ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... pales before certain relics of our Lord's life on earth which gained currency. Of these the most famous were the Veronica, a cloth on which Christ, on His way to Calvary, was supposed to have left the impress of His face, and a vessel of a green colour which was identified with the holy grail, the cup which our Lord used at the Last Supper. Of garments purporting to be the seamless coat of Christ there were a considerable number shown in different places; but the most famous to this day remains ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... This is the "Holy Grail" of selfhood and in the light of our higher understanding we look downward and outward and upward, and the length and the breadth and the height are equal. We pass from the old race thought of limitation and live in a divine atmosphere, and ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.
... operatic business of sending out or bringing in characters as seems advisable there is not a sign. The story is on the whole simpler than that of Tannhaeuser. Lohengrin is son of Parsifal, head of the mystic Montsalvat monastery where the Holy Grail is kept; where the monks never seem precisely to die; and where, without marriage and even without women, children are somehow born to the favoured ones. He comes in a magic boat drawn by a swan to aid Elsa against Telramund and his wife, who falsely accuse her ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... have gone a full step beyond those of the religious type. Societies like the Knights of King Arthur, Knights of the Holy Grail, Modern Knights of St. Paul, and others of such ilk have in symbolism sought to teach and find expression for the religious impulse. The method has been more or less the religious type in disguise—ancient titles, ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... indiscriminate enthusiasm. Manuscripts were worshipped by these men, just as the reliques of the Holy Land had been adored by their great-grandfathers. The eagerness of the crusades was revived in this quest of the holy grail of ancient knowledge. Waifs and strays of pagan authors were valued like precious gems, revelled in like odoriferous and gorgeous flowers, consulted like oracles of God, gazed on like the eyes of a beloved mistress. The good, the bad, and the indifferent received an almost equal homage. Criticism ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... centuries' advantage of him: that Balboa was a meddlesome old chap who might better have stayed in Spain and left American oceans to American boys to discover? Oh! the unutterable regret of youthful hearts that the Golden Fleece and the Holy Grail and other high adventures passed ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... wet with rain; but he has cleansed the hostile land of villains on that day. In human nature is a bias to escape the world, to get out of the turmoil, to seek cloisters of quiet, which bias "The Holy Grail" attacks. Arthur was no friend to the pursuit of the grail; not that he loves not, with a passion white as sun's flame, the good and pure, but that he has sagacity to see such quest will scatter the round table and its fellowship, and would dispeople his forces, whose ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... in a poet's frame, Heart of a hero in a body frail; Thine was the courage clear that did not quail Before the giant champions of shame Who wrought dishonour to the city's name; And thine the vision of the Holy Grail Of Love, revealed through Music's lucid veil, Filling thy life with heavenly ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... bold-faced heroines and sensual amours of some of the old French romances, an ideal of exaggerated asceticism, of stainless chastity, notoriously pervades the portion of Malory's work which deals with the Holy Grail. Lancelot is distraught when he finds that, by dint of enchantment, he has been made false to Guinevere (Book XI. chap. viii.) After his dreaming vision of the Holy Grail, with the reproachful Voice, Sir Lancelot said, "My sin and my wickedness have ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... of one's meditations, and her presence a temple wherein we cleanse our souls. She is mysterious, worshipful, and inaccessible, something perhaps of the woman, possibly even propitious and helpful, and yet something of the Holy Grail as well. You have no rights with her, nor she with you; you owe her no definite duties, and yet she is singularly yours. A smile is a favour, a touch of her fingers, a faint pressure of your hand, is an infinite privilege. You cannot demand the slightest help or concern ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... expectation. Perhaps to-night he may realise it; certainly in the morning it will be much nearer; and as for the third day, it will be realised in some great festival of delight. There is, too, a subtle selfishness in this quest after the ideal—the Holy Grail of the imagination. The artist keeps the secret from his brother artists until he can startle them with some gracious surprise. He almost pities them, as he thinks of the revelation that is about to dawn upon unsuspecting ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the North Pole. That quest—which has written in its history as many tales of heroism, self-sacrifice, and patient resignation to adversity, as the poets have woven about the story of chivalry and the search for the Holy Grail—was begun only in the middle of the last century, and by an American. But for three hundred years English, Dutch, and Portuguese explorers, and the stout-hearted American whalemen, had been pushing further and further into the frozen deep. The explorers sought the "Northwest ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... showed as a social iniquity naked children crawling with chains about them in the galleries of coal-mines. Was it really wrong to make children do that? Or was Ruskin only an impossible idealist? They were the happy years, radiant with the certain knowledge of the British that the Holy Grail would be recognized immediately it was seen, for over it would be proudly floating the confirmatory Union Jack. We had not even begun to suspect that our morals, manners, and laws were fairly poor compared with the standards ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... of the Romancers, the San Greal, or Holy Grail, was the cup out of which Jesus partook of the Last Supper with his disciples. It was brought into England by Joseph of Arimathea, and remained there, an object of pilgrimage and adoration, for many years in the keeping of his lineal descendants. It was incumbent upon those who had charge ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... great and noble as these must ever be? Did not one or more of their number feel that there was yet another and a holier quest asked of a true knight? Did not Sir Galahad leave all else to seek after the Holy Grail? Thou knowest all the story; have we not read it often together? And seems it not to thee to point us ever onward and upward, away from things of earth towards the things of heaven, showing that even chivalry itself is but an earthly thing, unless it have its final hopes and aspirations ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... how we pledged us in the fancies of our youth, We would run the quest forever for the Holy Grail of Truth! ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... sacred vessel surrounded by a sort of wreath of Millies with open arms and wings and had drawn fifty pounds on the strength of it. After that came a series of vexatious delays. The chalice became less and less of a commercial man's chalice, acquired more and more the elusive quality of the Holy Grail, and at last ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... Bristol, on the Brue; it is associated with many interesting legends and historical traditions that point to its existence in very early times; thus it was the Avalon of Arthurian legend, and the place where Joseph of Arimathea, when he brought the Holy Grail, is said to have founded the first Christian Church; ruins are still extant of the old abbey founded by Henry II., which itself succeeded the ancient abbey of St. Dunstan (946); there is trade in ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... put on the traditional blond wig, took his spear in hand, and set forth to conquer. His first phrase, "Das weiss ich nicht" which is about all he has to say in the first act, was coldly received. However, his bare legs and arms were admired from the rear as he stood his half-hour looking at the Holy Grail. In the second act, where he resists Kundry's questionable allurements, he did passably well, though he gave the impression that even for a reiner Thor—the German for a virtuous fool—she had no charms. She was a masterful, fat, and hideous German lady, and when she ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... Desnoyers had seen in Berlin reflecting the light on metal and leather straps, the magnificent and terrifying Hussars, the Cuirassiers in pure white uniform like the paladins of the Holy Grail, the artillerymen with breasts crossed with white bands, all the military variations that on parade had drawn forth the Hartrotts' sighs of admiration—these were now all unified and mixed together, of uniform color, ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez |
