"Mythical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... let those who wish to purify men's minds, to retain honour in their dealings, and to imprint on their minds gratitude for kindnesses, let them speak in sober earnest and act with all their strength; unless you imagine, perchance, that by such flippant and mythical talk, and such old wives' reasoning, it is possible for us to prevent that most ruinous consummation, ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... as far afield as Asia or the South Seas; some buried themselves in the secluded courts of Oxford and Cambridge and became mythical figures in academic lore. Not many were to be found within hail of London or Edinburgh in these forceful days. Brougham, the most omniscient of reviewers, with the most ill-balanced of minds, belongs more properly to the preceding age, though he lived to 1868; ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... the strength of the muscles ought to be increased or the weight of the human body must be decreased, so that the same proportion obtains in it as exists in birds. Hence it is deducted that the Icarian invention is entirely mythical because impossible, for it is not possible either to increase a man's pectoral muscles or to diminish the weight of the human body; and whatever apparatus is used, although it is possible to increase the momentum, the velocity or the power employed can never equal the resistance; and therefore ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... and bade Duplessis tell you that you were a monstre for not doing so. Whether or not Duplessis will take that liberty I know not; but you must pardon me if I do. She is a very charming woman, full of talent; and that stream of the world which reflects the stars, with all their mythical influences on fortune, flows through ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... gilt, and in the nostrils is niello. Round the neck is a band with four small figures, probably representing the nuptials of Poseidon and Saturia, daughter of Minos, from which sprang Taras, the mythical founder of Taranto. Two of the figures are seated, two standing; their draperies are gilded. The handle curves gracefully to the back of the jawbones, where it is attached to a palmette. The work may be of the fourth century B.C., the doe's head being much ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... supposed that the story of Herodotus about the pigmies of Africa was mythical, but within the past twenty years abundant evidence has accumulated of the existence of a number of tribes of curious little folks in equatorial Africa. The chief among these tribes are the Akka, whom Schweinfurth found northwest of Albert Nyassa; the Obongo, discovered by DuChaillu in west ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... thirteenth century," when thousands of people perished. It was only after this inundation took place that the city of Amsterdam arose on the southwest shore of the Zuyder Zee. The story, with the exception of the inundation, is purely mythical.] ...
— Contes et lgendes - 1re Partie • H. A. Guerber
... praise enough—his speech may be mythical; but as written by Richard of Ely, only one generation after, it must describe faithfully what the place was like—the wonders of the isle: its soil the richest in England, its pleasant pastures, its noble hunting-grounds, its store of sheep and cattle (though its vines, ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... and traditions as had come to his knowledge respecting his family history; a sort of history that is quite as liable to be mythical, in its early and distant stages, as that of Rome, and, indeed, seldom goes three or four generations back without getting into a mist really impenetrable, though great, gloomy, and magnificent shapes of men often seem to ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... strange and varied crop that has grown from the leaden plates with French inscriptions, planted by St. Lusson, La Salle, and Celoron by lakes and rivers in that western country. The mythical story of the sowing of Cadmus in the Boeotian field is again rather tame by comparison with a true relation of what has actually occurred within the memory of a few generations in a valley as wild when Celoron traversed the course of La Belle ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... visited and named by poets. My birthplace grows unfamiliar when I take down an atlas and run my finger over the parti-colored divisions of the Norfolk County of Massachusetts and trace the perimeter which confines Bellingham to its oblong precinct, surrounded by those mythical lands of Mendon, Milford and Medway. They wear an authoritative appearance on the map; but for me they occupied no such positions in my childhood and stand as stubborn realities hindering my feet when ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... caste-system on the Indians; the idea of the city on the Greeks; empire on the Romans; the Church on the Middle Ages; commerce, plutocracy, colonial dominion, on the modern world; militarism on Germany. For these imposed forces men lived and died; they had only a mythical conception of where they came from, and they believed and some still believe them ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... you will," Babbalanja, "but say little aloud, unless in a merry and mythical way. Lay down the great maxims of things, but let inferences take care of themselves. Never be special; never, a partisan. In safety, afar off, you may batter down a fortress; but at your peril you essay to carry a single turret by escalade. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... enters the Yellow River about lat. 35" 30' N., long. 110 degrees 30' E.) was colonized by a branch of the imperial family quite capable of holding its own against the Tartars; in fact, the valley of this river as far north as P'ing-yang Fu had been in semi-mythical times (2300 B.C.) the imperial residence. It will be noticed that the River Wei joins the Yellow River on its right bank, just opposite the point where this latter, flowing from the north, bends eastwards, the Wei itself flowing from the west. This Wei ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... naturally excited by this, and an hour before it was time to dress for dinner I slunk upstairs and hurried into the bathroom and locked myself in and turned on all the taps at once. It was strangely disappointing. The sea-water was mythical. Many of the taps refused to function at the same time as any other, and the only two which were really effective were WAVE and FLOOD. WAVE shot out a thin jet of boiling water which caught me in the chest, and FLOOD filled the bath with cold water long before it could ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 31, 1920 • Various
... life of the hills went on all about us in the sunshine, the pressure of the encircling line of death grew more intolerably real. It is not in the mud and jokes and every-day activities of the trenches that one most feels the damnable insanity of war; it is where it lurks like a mythical monster in scenes to which the mind has always ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... brown, and who, accepting, for the moment, the terms Puritan and Cavalier in the sense an effete sectionalism once sought to ascribe to them—descriptive labels at once classifying and separating North and South—verbal redoubts along that mythical line called Mason and Dixon, over which there were supposed by the extremists of other days to be no bridges—I am much disposed to say, "A plague ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... warriors, could they have returned from their happy hunting-grounds, would have found the brave old fence of the Agency a sturdy barrier still. But the Indian warriors could not return. The United States agent had long ago moved to Lake Superior, and the deserted residence, having only a mythical owner, left without repairs year after year, and under a cloud of confusion as regarded taxes, titles, and boundaries, became a kind of flotsam property, used by various persons, but belonging legally to no one. Some tenant, ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... is called in Cora Quemalusi, after the principal one of the five mythical men who in ancient times lived in the Sierra del Nayarit. Reports say an idol now hidden was once found here. A few miles east of Santa Teresa is a deep volcanic lake, the only remnant of the large flood, the Coras say. It is called "Mother," or "Brother," the last name containing ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... in every posture, and with all possible gestures, his master, the artist, wanted him to look "heraldical"; that is, like some of the mythical beasts that were combinations of any and all creatures having fins, fur, feathers, or scales, such as the dragon or griffin. One day, he attempted to make out of a live lion a fanciful creature of curlicues and curliewurlies. So he strapped the lion down, and used a curling iron ...
— Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks • William Elliot Griffis
... seeing suffering; but she could be both when she was roused to defend her beliefs, her ideals, or even her tastes. The cool ferocity of some young women is awful. Judith, Jael, Delilah, and Athaliah were not mythical. Is there a man who has not wakened from dreams, to find that the woman he trusted has stolen his strength or is just about to hammer the great nail home through ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... of man, Mrs. Eddy accepts the first account given in Genesis, but the second, which states that God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, she rejects as untrustworthy. The first account, she says, "was science; the second was metaphorical and mythical, even the supposed utterances of matter; the scripture not being understood by its ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... has been telling us a mythical story of your intending to walk with him from Cambridge to Concord. We should be delighted to see you, though more for our own sakes than yours, for our aspect here is still a little winterish. When you come, ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... man, sir, he was on a level with his elders in pleading on my behalf with Miss Dale," said Vernon. Willoughby strode and muttered. Providence had grown mythical in his thoughts, if not malicious: and it is the peril of this worship that the object will wear such an alternative aspect when ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and it was seen that there was nothing of the mythical in the conspiracy against Forster's life, public indignation flamed up afresh at the treatment he had received. When he next came to Leeds, after the trial of the Invincibles, a crowd followed him through the streets from the railway station to the Mercury office, cheering ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... To the south was a wide inlet with a ship seemingly in the act of sailing towards it. The eastward edge of this inlet was labelled Cape Fea and just around from this, in an easterly direction wa a small cove called Try-Again Inlet. In the sea to the west of the island was drawn a mythical sea-monster. ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... Charlemagne. A' jax, a Greek hero second only to Achilles. Al ex an' dros, a name applied to Paris, prince of Troy. Al phe' us, a hunter transformed into a river of Greece. Al the' a, queen of Calydon, mother of Meleager. A mil' i as, a mythical smith of Burgundy. And' vae ri, a dwarf, the keeper of the Rhine treasure. An til' o chus (-kus), a Greek prince and friend of Achilles. A os' tae, a town in northern Italy. Aph ro di' te, in ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin
... saint, hovers round the bed of the poet, and even bestows rare gifts from that wealth of imagination which a host of imitators could not exhaust,—still I am far from wishing to deny that the author of these great poems found a rich fund of tradition, a well-stocked mythical storehouse, from whence he might derive both subject and embellishment. But it is one thing to use existing romances in the embellishment of a poem, another to patch up the poem itself from such materials. What consistency of style and execution can be hoped for from such an ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... foreshadows, wittily enough—that if one or two thousand years hence, when the history of the late Emperor Napoleon the Third, his rise and fall, shall come to be subjected to critical analysis by future Philistine historians of New Zealand or Australia, it will be proved by them to be utterly mythical, incredible, monstrous—and that all the more, the more the actual facts remain to puzzle their unimaginative brains. What will they make two thousand years hence, of the landing at Boulogne with the tame eagle? Will not that, and stranger ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... number '14' mythical if you will, Professor, until we have evidence to the contrary. Nevertheless, seven suicides out of such a small group ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... found in them and their deeds prolific and genial themes, while the obscure suggestions of hidden treasures and mysterious caves have inspired many expeditions in quest of buried fortunes which, like the Argo of old, have carried their Jasons to the mythical Colchis. ...
— Pirates and Piracy • Oscar Herrmann
... the rooted antipathy between the ash and the serpent is not to be explained merely by the fact in natural history of its being an antidote, but it has a deeply mythical meaning. See, in the Prose Edda, the account of the ash Yggdrasill, and the serpents gnawing its roots. Loskiel corroborates Pliny as to the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 193, July 9, 1853 • Various
... very little that is valuable to the general reader. Their terms and signs are to the uninitiated suggestive of a doctor's prescription. But the anecdotes of the game are, many of them, remarkable; and we believe they are known to have less of the mythical about them than those told in other departments. One who knows the game will feel that it is sufficiently absorbing to be woven in with the textures of government, of history, and of biography. It is of the nature of chess ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... ANTAEUS, a mythical giant, a terrae filius or son of the earth, who was strong only when his foot was on the earth, lifted in air he became weak as water, a weakness which Hercules discovered to his discomfiture when wrestling with him. The fable has been used as a symbol ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... the name of a mythical king, about whom the most astonishing stories were told. He was supposed to be lord of a country where gold was as plentiful as dust. It was in search of these golden lands that many of the famous discoverers ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 41, August 19, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... mythical account of Sakadwipa embodies some vague tradition current in ancient India of some republic in Eastern Asia or Oceanic Asia (further east in the Pacific). Accustomed as the Hindus were to kingly form of government, a government without a king, would strike them exactly in ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... afraid Mr. Redbrook exaggerates," he said. "The popular demand of which he spoke is rather mythical. And I should be inclined to accuse him, too, of a friendly attempt to install me in your ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... ran away with the idea of Power, and attributed to a potent being just such tricks as a waggish and libidinous savage would like to play if he could. Moreover, I have actually traced (in 'Myth, Ritual, and Religion') some plausible processes of mythical accretion. The early mind was not only religious, in its way, but scientific, in its way. It embraced the idea of Evolution as well as the idea of Creation. To one mood a Maker seemed to exist. But the institution of Totemism ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... was taken over by the Government, Bordeaux as sutler sold much flour and bacon to men hurrying down the South Fork to the early Colorado diggings. Meantime in his cups he often had told the mythical tale of the Gros Ventre woman—long after California, Idaho, Nevada, Montana were all afire. But one of his halfbreed children very presently had commandeered the tin cup and its contents, so that to this day no man knows whether the child swallowed the nugget or threw it into ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... is, "rich in gold," and "rich in silver;" two mythical islands, often mentioned in documents of that time; thus named, according to Gemelli Careri, because some earth taken from them, accidentally heated on a ship, was found to contain grains of precious metal. There is an interesting ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XIV., 1606-1609 • Various
... "Boston, 42 (in reality 32), destroyed at Washington," which had been a condemned hulk for ten years, and had no guns or anything else in her, and was as much a loss to our navy as the fishing up and burning of an old wreck would have been; and 8 gun-boats whose destruction was either mythical, or else which were not national vessels. By deducting all these we reduce James' total by 120 guns, and 2,600 tons; and a few more alterations (such as excluding the swivels in the President's tops, which he counts, etc.), brings his number down to that given above—and also affords a good ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... trials of this world work onward to a second and completer harmony. Humanity, therefore, passes through three stages, the fall from perfection, the period of trial and the final re-birth or return to perfection. In the dim records of mythical times may be traced the obscure outlines of primitive society and of its fall. Actual history exhibits the conflict of two great principles, which may be said to be realized in the patricians and plebeians of Rome. Such a distinction of caste is ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... post-road was made by an unbeaten track over the Ala Tau mountains. From the Chu valley, dotted here and there with Kirghiz tent villages and their grazing flocks and herds, we pushed our wheels up the broken path, which wound like a mythical stairway far up into the low-hanging clouds. We trudged up one of the steepest ascents we have ever made with a wheel. The scenery was grand, but lonely. The wild tulips, pinks, and verbenas dotting ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... The mythical Fitzgerald origin of the clan, hitherto accepted by most of its leading members, is exhaustively dealt with, I venture to hope effectively, if not completely and finally disposed of. That it is now established beyond any reasonable dispute to have been ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... bards, proportionately, more unrestrained, he would pass into the world of the supernatural. Even in the case of a hero so surrounded with historic light as Cuculain we find a halo, as of godhood, often settling around him. His gray warsteed had already passed into the realm of mythical representation, as a second avatar of the Liath Macha, the grey war-horse of the war-goddess Macha. This could be believed, even in the days when the imagination was controlled by the annalists and ...
— Early Bardic Literature, Ireland • Standish O'Grady
... they have but purified and embalmed Christianity; not aware that they have first made a mummy of it. They are so greedy of paradox, that they, in fact, aspire to be Christians and infidels at the same time. Proclaiming the miracles of Christianity to be illusions of imagination or mythical legends,—the inspiration of its records no other or greater than that of Homer's 'Iliad,' or even 'Aesop's Fables;'—rejecting the whole of that supernatural clement with which the only records which can tell us any thing about the matter are full; declaring its ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... her to do something heroic, something that would make her live again in the mind of McGregor. She wanted to serve him, to give him something out of herself, and thought wildly that there might yet come a time and a way by which the beauty of her body could be laid like a gift before him. The half mythical figure of Mary the lover of Jesus came into her mind and she aspired to be such another. With her body shaken with emotions she pulled at the sleeve of her father's coat. "Listen! It is going to come now," she murmured. "The brain of labour is going to express the dream of labour. An impulse ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... This apparent anachronism carries us back to the history of the mythical Island of Brazil, which appeared upon our charts as late as the middle of the ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... of a number of things before he suddenly exclaimed: "Oh Katie, I must tell you. That fellow—what's his name? Mann? The mythical being known as the man who mends the boats is a fellow you'll have to avoid, should you ever see him again—which of course is ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... altogether too important a matter to be taken seriously. The quality of fine fooling shown in the creation of a mythical character called "John Libbel" remained with Stevenson to the end ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... critiques have no appreciable bearing on our argument and we cite them rather for historical interest and retrospect.[13] [Sidenote: Festus] [Sidenote: Brix] While Festus[14] makes a painful effort to explain the location of the mythical "Portus Persicus" mentioned in the Amph.,[15] Brix[16] in modern times shows that there is no historical ground for the elaborate mythical genealogy in Men. 409 ff. We contend that "Portus Persicus" ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... that abound in the Principality have much in common with like legends in other countries. This points to a common origin of all such tales. There is a real and unreal, a mythical and a material aspect to Fairy Folk-Lore. The prevalence, the obscurity, and the different versions of the same Fairy tale show that their origin dates from remote antiquity. The supernatural and the natural are strangely blended together in these legends, and this also points to ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... dubiously striven nor for shallow effect. They had, though labouring incessantly apart, built up a ghost which was in no fear of glimmering or dissolution; and now Berthold Tours, spright of another element of sentimental, I should say continental mythical music, upon the scene springs with his amazing apparatus of staves and octaves, aiding the chef-de-musique and his trained voices to make sound within the very presence chamber of Divine Worship this phantasmagoria of ...
— Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes • J. Atwood.Slater
... line of progressive nations. So favorable is the climate that nearly the whole country might be turned into a botanical garden. Indeed, Australia would seem to be better entitled to the name of Eldorado (a mythical country abounding in gold), so talked of in the sixteenth century, than was the imaginary land of untold wealth so confidently believed by the adventurous Spaniards, to exist somewhere between the Orinoco ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... with a brilliant period of the Georgian age, so the name of Irving must always be linked with the later brilliant period of the Victorian. To the younger generation of theatre-goers he is fast becoming like a half-mythical demigod—one of those whom the elder folk mention with regretful shakings of the head when newer favourites are lauded. The actor was not born in Cornwall, but in Somerset; his mother, however, was a Cornish woman named Behenna, and one of his aunts was Mrs. Penberthy, ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... been still amused by the hour, in studying the devices and ornaments on the shelves and chiffonieres; and Blanche had romanced about it to the little ones, till they were erecting it into a mythical palace. ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... inclined to consider Quetzalcoatl a real personage, and not a mythical one. He is said to have been a white, bearded man, to have come from the East, to have reigned in Tollan, and to have been driven out from thence by the votaries of human sacrifices, which he opposed. He took ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... Spaniard was a firm believer in the noxiousness of night air, which he said produced paludismo. [499] Most Filipinos were afraid of an imaginary spirit, devil or mythical creature known as asuang, and closed their windows and doors after dark as a protection against it. Thus it came about that in a country where fresh air is especially necessary at night ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... tradition of the introduction of fire-worshipping priests from Persia into Dwarka in Kathyawar is probably of a much later date (Reinaud, Memoire sur l'Inde, 391-397). Another link, and this time of an entirely political nature, is discovered in the mythical conquests of Northern India, which, according to Persian writers, must have followed from the year 1729 B.C. (Troyer, Rajatarangini, ii. 441). In historical times the Punjaub formed part of the Persian dominions since its conquest by Darius Hystaspes (510 B.C.) down to the end of the dynasty ...
— Les Parsis • D. Menant
... behind them, the eye swept across the fertile valley, through which the rapid, yellow Moldau courses, to the opposite line of cliffs crested with the half imaginary fortress-palaces of the Wyscherad. There, in the mythical legendary past of Bohemia had dwelt the shadowy Libuscha, daughter of Krok, wife of King Premysl, foundress of Prague, who, when wearied of her lovers, was accustomed to toss them from those heights into the river. Between these picturesque precipices lay the two Pragues, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... during the Revolution by Gov. Tryon to capture or murder Washington. They communicate their knowledge to Gen. Putnam and are commissioned by him to play the role of detectives in the matter. They do so, and meet with many adventures and hairbreadth escapes. The boys are, of course, mythical, but they serve to enable the author to put into very attractive shape much valuable knowledge concerning one phase of the ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... this early time are historical, how far traditionary, or even mythical, it is impossible to say, but for many years afterwards the record gives us merely the scanty information we should expect. We hear of the depredations of the Danes, and the destruction by them of the monastery, and later ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New
... of Suomi, descending unwritten from the mythical age to the present day, kept alive from generation to generation by minstrels, or song-men, is regarded as one of the most precious contributions to the literature of the world, made since the time of Milton and ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... slavery for ever, lend us your powerful aid toward this great object. This fine country is blighted, as with a curse from above, in order that the slavery privileges of the petty Sultan of Zanzibar may not be infringed, and the rights of the Crown of Portugal, which are mythical, should be kept in abeyance till some future time when Africa will become ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... of the pioneer was that of conquest. It was his task to fight with nature for the chance to exist. Not as in older countries did this contest take place in a mythical past, told in folk lore and epic. It has been continuous to our own day. Facing each generation of pioneers was the unmastered continent. Vast forests blocked the way; mountainous ramparts interposed; desolate, ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... both cases the word "Jabbirah" is used, the plur. of Jabbr, the potent, especially applied to the Kings of the Canaanites and giants like the mythical Og of Bashan. So the Heb. Jabbrah is a title of the Queens ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... to be more ancient than this corporeal birth." The idea of Reincarnation spread so fast amongst the early Christians that Justinian was obliged to suppress it by passing a law in the Council of Constantinople in 538 A.D. The law was this: "Whoever shall support the mythical presentation of the pre-existence of the soul, and the consequently wonderful opinion of its return, let him be Anathema." The Gnostics and Manichaeans propagated the tenets of Reincarnation amongst the ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... not impossible that we have in these passages a trace of some forgotten mythical personage. "Whitaker," says Mr. Wright, "supposes, without any reason, the 'Roberde's knaves' to be 'Robin Hood's men.'" (Vol. ii. p. 506.) It is singular enough, however, that as early as the time of Henry III. we find the term 'consors Roberto' ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... much importance was attached for a time, are now almost forgotten. The Mythical theory fails to account for the immediate effect produced by belief in the Resurrection. Myths require time for their growth and development, but the disciples of Jesus set the Resurrection in the forefront from the very first. On the day of Pentecost Peter sounded the keynote of Apostolic ...
— Exposition of the Apostles Creed • James Dodds
... helped him, what could he say to show his appreciation? He knew that all humans weren't robe-haters, why it was even rumored that some humans treated robots as equals instead of machines. The driver must be one of these mythical individuals, there was no other ...
— The Velvet Glove • Harry Harrison
... machinery. Then we think we are saving doctors' bills, when at the same time we are spending twice as much on questionable repairs—patent medicines, which often do more harm than good. Frequently they contain stimulants which produce a mythical improvement but leave the system worse off ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry
... done the very best for them that I could. For it is plain that they can only take one of two positions, namely, EITHER that Christ really died upon the Cross but was never seen alive again afterwards at all, and that the stories of His having been so seen are purely mythical, OR, if they admit that He was seen alive after His Crucifixion, they must deny the completeness of the death; in other words, if they are to escape miracle, they must either deny the reappearances ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... The mythical realty company prospered, at least if prosperity is measured merely by the bank book. In less than a week the skilful pen and brush of Constance had secured them a balance, after straightening out Carlton's debts, that came well up to a hundred ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... To turn from the mythical to the hypothetical-the young Solomon probably received his early education in his own family, and what this education was, can easily be conceived. It was the duty of the father himself to take charge of the elementary instruction of his son and ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... be conclusive, as it would still leave open other questions; such, for instance, as those which enter into the theories of Paulus and other Rationalists, and such as are not even excluded from the incidental adjuncts of Strauss's mythical theory. It might also be urged, that, allowing the question to be paramount in its relation to the whole issue, it is one which is not so judiciously dealt with in the discursiveness of dialogues after dinner, as in the solitary study, with piles of huge ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... you see I have reached my present subject, which is, Ogres. You fancy they are dead or only fictitious characters—mythical representatives of strength, cruelty, stupidity, and lust for blood? Though they had seven-leagued boots, you remember all sorts of little whipping-snapping Tom Thumbs used to elude and outrun them. They were so stupid that they gave into the most shallow ambuscades ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the bend sinister, which he said he would never have disclaimed, had it been his, but which he did not happen to inherit. On the other side he may have descended from kings; but, as in the case of "The Fair Cuban," he must have added, "African, unfortunately." Did his father perform these mythical feats of strength? did he lift up a horse between his legs while clutching a rafter with his hands? did he throw his regiment before him over a wall, as Guy Heavistone threw the mare which refused the leap ("Memoires," i. 122)? No doubt Dumas believed what ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... the worst fear of all. He realized that he had been afraid of Ste. Marie from the beginning, and that, of course, was why he had tried to draw him into partnership with himself in his own official and wholly mythical search for Arthur Benham. He could have had the other man under his eye then. He could have kept him busy for months running down false scents. As it was, Ste. Marie's uncanny instinct about the Irishman O'Hara had led him true—that and ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... entirely neglected in Bulgaria, Bulgarian artists have tried their hand at almost every form of art. Ethnographical pictures, national scenes, pictures of military subjects, landscapes, interiors, flower pieces, animals, portraits, icons, allegories, mythical subjects, ruins, architecture—all these are fully represented in the art gallery of the National Museum, and have figured in nearly all the art exhibitions. The first place among these varieties is held by landscapes, genre, ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... and very black; but he had his pride. He would not be seen smoking a huqa for anything; and he looked down on natives as only a man with seven- eighths native blood in his veins can. The Vezzis Family had their pride too. They traced their descent from a mythical plate-layer who had worked on the Sone Bridge when railways were new in India, and they valued their English origin. Michele was a Telegraph Signaller on Rs. 35 a month. The fact that he was in Government employ made Mrs. Vezzis lenient to the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... his themes seem to you to be of his own invention? Name those based, ostensibly at least, upon the poet's own experience. To what extent do you find his narrative work purely objective, i. e., without admixture of reflective or didactic elements? What themes are of mythical or legendary origin? Of those having a historical basis, how many are drawn from English sources? Does his use of narrative material ever show a deficiency of emotion; i. e., could the story have been better told in prose? ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... runs through and makes up the bulk of this book is my own. The intention has been, however, to make it conform to the laws governing certain beings commonly regarded in this country as mythical, as those laws are revealed in the folk-lore of many peoples, and particularly of the Irish people. Almost every incident in which the fairies are concerned might occur, and very many of them do actually occur, in Irish folk-lore. But in a real folk-tale there ...
— Fairies and Folk of Ireland • William Henry Frost
... tapestries rustled with the legends of the Cornelii of long, long ago, on the shores of the Rivo Alto, before the story of Venice had won its honored place in the chronicles of nations—yet not the less for their indistinguishable outlines and mythical color were they woven into the proud consciousness of the duty the Cornari ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... who is too weak to work be refused a right to the ownership of a coat? Or must the discoverer of a continent prove a real occupancy, by performing the ridiculous task of the abnormal center of the mythical mathematical infinite circle, by being ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... Street. St. Sidwell's was one of the nineteen old city parishes although without the walls. The site of St. Sidwell's Church is said to be on the spot where a saint of this name suffered martyrdom. She is one of those half-mythical British saints, said by tradition to have been beheaded by a scythe whilst praying beside a well. A church is said to have been built in her honour so early as 749. The present building has undergone repeated restorations, but some ancient pillars still remain with ...
— Exeter • Sidney Heath
... lyrical poetry of the Hebrews; and the schools of the prophets were, however partially and imperfectly, represented by the mysteries derived through the corrupt channel of the Phoenicians. With these secret schools of physiological theology, the mythical poets were doubtless in connexion, and it was these schools which prevented polytheism from producing all its natural barbarizing effects. The mysteries and the mythical hymns and paeans shaped themselves gradually into epic poetry and history on the one hand, and ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... is half-mythical, half-ethical; and he himself, true to the character which is given him in the Dialogue bearing his name, is half-sophist, half-enthusiast. He is the critic of poetry also, who compares Homer and Aeschylus in the insipid and irrational manner of the schools of the day, characteristically ...
— Symposium • Plato
... returned to the use of the old Imperial phraseology and Yuan Shih-kai, even before his "election," was memorialized as though he were the legitimate successor of the immense line of Chinese sovereigns who stretch back to the mythical days of Yao and Shun (2,800 B.C.). The beginning of December saw the voting completed and the results telegraphed to Peking; and on the 11th December, the Senate hastily meeting, and finding that ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... remark as to the antiquated methods of that mythical publicity promoter rose to Mr. Magee's lips, but before he spoke he looked into her eyes. And the remark was never made. For in their wonderful depths he saw worry and fear and unhappiness, as he had seen them there ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... lo—the Sun-god, brother of Artemis and son of Zeus and Leto. The island of Delos was his mythical birthplace and his principal oracle was ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... most of his life previous to the time of his enlistment in the army. Judge Bradley was successful, as such matters go in such communities, and it was his open boast that he owed his success to himself and no one else. He had no faith in such mythical factors as circumstances in the battle of life. This is the common doctrine of all men who have arrived, and Judge Bradley had long since arrived, in so far as the possibilities of his surroundings ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... the author relates the stirring tale of the Scottish War of Independence. The extraordinary valour and personal prowess of Wallace and Bruce rival the deeds of the mythical heroes of chivalry, and indeed at one time Wallace was ranked with these legendary personages. The researches of modern historians have shown, however, that he was a living, breathing man—and a valiant champion. The hero of the tale fought ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... two opinions were held to belong to "natural theology" which the philosophers gathered from their study of the world and taught in the schools: while the other, relating to the worship of men, was said to belong to "mythical theology" which was wont to be represented on the stage according to the fancies of poets. The remaining opinion relating to images was held to belong to "civil theology," which was celebrated by the pontiffs in the temples [*De ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... of an African Hercules, mythical as these labors might be, was so interesting to the four men who had been drinking and smoking in the tavern, that they determined to pursue it as far as their ignorance of the African's language, and his ignorance of English ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... extraordinary ends. She was madly in love. The details of those curious battles are unknown to us; but Prince Ernest, who remained in England with his brother for some months, noted them with a friendly and startled eye. One story, indeed, survives, ill-authenticated and perhaps mythical, yet summing up, as such stories often do, the central facts of the case. When, in wrath, the Prince one day had locked himself into his room, Victoria, no less furious, knocked on the door to be admitted. "Who is there?" he asked. "The Queen of England" was the answer. He did not move, ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... ancestors of the present race; others consider that the history of the race has been forgotten through the lapse of ages; while the more intelligent and better educated look upon the Menehunes as a mythical class of gnomes or dwarfs, and the account of their exploits as having been handed down by tradition for social entertainment, as other peoples relate ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... my first introduction to were-wolves, and the circumstance of finding the superstition still so prevalent, first gave me the idea of investigating the history and the habits of these mythical creatures. ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... day, the following day for instance.... He rather inclined to the belief that the phoenix was extinct—that is, died out; and then, again, when he called to mind the singular habits with which this bird was credited, he conceived that it had never had a real but only a mythical existence—that is, it was a makebelieve bird, a kind of ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... times the Anglo-Saxon and Plantagenet kings, and last of all the Tudors, had sought to achieve by force of arms or by policy, but ever in vain—the union of the whole island under one rule, like that which native legendary lore ascribed to the mythical Arthur. When he came to Berwick, around which town the two nations had engaged in so many bloody frays, he gave utterance, so it is said, to his intention of being King not of the one or of the other country but of both united, and of assuming the name of King ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... this. He had, he said, not called anything a myth. There was the printed book, and one might have supposed that it would be easy enough to settle this question. But it was far from being so. The words myth and mythical were used half a dozen times, and the rabbis declared that they were applied to the statements of Scripture. Bertram declared that they were applied to the appearance those statements must have as at present put before the English world. Then he said something not complimentary to the translators, ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... that the most refined and noble and disinterested of women—a woman who cannot be induced to accept anything but a bouquet—can be as dangerous an acquaintance for a young man as any opera girl of former days. As a matter of fact, the opera girl is an almost mythical being. As things are now at the theatres, dancers and actresses are about as amusing as a declaration of the rights of woman, they are puppets that go abroad in the morning in the character of respected and respectable mothers ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... new book is called, rests the whole of its effect upon just such an edifice as young Hugh was familiar with. The Cathedral of the story stands in Polchester, in the west of England, in the county of Glebeshire—that mythical yet actual county of Walpole's other novels. Like such tales as The Green Mirror and The Duchess of Wrexe, the aim is threefold—to give a history of a certain group of people and, at the same time, (2) ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... upon, other records millenniums older? If the Christian historian, hampered by his chronology, and the freethinker by lack of necessary data, feel bound to stigmatize every non-Christian or non-Western chronology as "obviously fanciful," "purely mythical," and "not worthy of a moment's consideration," how shall one, wholly dependent upon Western guides get at the truth? And if these incompetent builders of Universal History can persuade their public to accept as authoritative their ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... little more than a clever adaptation of Plautus to English manners and customs; but a comedy written soon after, Gammer Gurton's Needle, is really an Interlude cast in the Plautean mold. The first English tragedy, Gorboduc, closely imitative of Seneca, but on {30} a mythical British subject and written in English blank verse, did not appear until 1562, nearly a quarter of a century later. Seneca's tragedies had little action, slight characterization, and many extremely long speeches, which often display, however, much brilliant rhetoric. ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... who are industriously cutting each other's throats to settle which one of two smooth-tongued rascals shall be their President. While you were dicing to settle the fate of an already deposed King, and I was sentencing you to a mythical death, we were all alike ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... form some idea of the general position of American exploration and discovery at the time when Cartier made his momentous voyages. The maritime nations of Europe, in searching for a passage to the half-mythical empires of Asia, had stumbled on a great continent. At first they thought it Asia itself. Gradually they were realizing that this was not Asia, but an outlying land that lay between Europe and Asia and that must be passed by the navigator before Cathay and Cipango could ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... school while Apemama was yet republican, ruled by a noisy council of Old Men, and torn with incurable feuds. And Tembinok' is no Bourbon; rather the son of a Napoleon. Of course he is well-born. No man need aspire high in the isles of the Pacific unless his pedigree be long and in the upper regions mythical. And our king counts cousinship with most of the high families in the archipelago, and traces his descent to a shark and a heroic woman. Directed by an oracle, she swam beyond sight of land to meet her revolting paramour, and ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Himene Tatou Arearea. Kelly, the wandering I.W.W., self-acclaimed delegate of the mythical Union of Beach-combers and Stowaways, was at the valves of the accordeon, and about him squatted a ring of joyous natives. "Wela ka hao! Hot stuff!" ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... is the art of canvassing for a sewing machine company. I did it for two weeks. My teacher taught me how to canvass a tenement. The janitor is the traditional arch enemy of the canvasser. My teaching consisted largely in how to avoid him, circumvent him, or exploit him. A Mrs. Smith—a mythical Mrs. Smith—always lived on the top floor. I was taught to interview her first; then I ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... has been a mythical sort of place for a good while. I couldn't quite believe in it. I've thought a thousand times of this blue couch and these pillows. I've thought of that old grand piano of yours, and of how it would seem to hear you play it again. Play for me ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... such advantages." In short, no man living who has written any book about it dares say that anybody has looked upon the certain site of Sybaris for more than a hundred years.[C] If a man wanted to write a mythical story, where could he find a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... the window of the Negro Boy, and I discovered that the tavern was under Entirely New Management. The picture sign over the principal door had been renewed. The mythical little figure which had given the public-house its name was no longer lost in the soot of half a century. He was now an obvious negro boy, resplendent in a golden coat. The reticence of the green window-curtains had become a bright vacancy of mirrors, and the tavern was modern within. Reform ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... the direction Houston was facing, and had two beings just then descended from the mythical regions, he could not have been more astonished than at sight of the pair approaching from the lake. The first was a young girl, apparently about sixteen, but tall and well developed, the scant garments that she wore revealing the beautifully ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... might be of use to us for our hospitals or our supplies. In fact, our scrupulous regard for enemy property will probably result in very many fraudulent claims against our Government when the war is over. How easy to add mythical articles of great value to the list attested to by the signature of a British Staff officer. Who could blame a Hun when the British were such fools and forgery of receipts ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... civilizing, the humanizing, ages had been withdrawn a hand's-breadth to give him a clear outlook on primordial chaos. Once across the mystic threshold, untrammeled by the hamperings of tradition, unterrified by the threat of the mythical future, the human atom becomes its own law, the arbiter of its own momentary destiny. What it wills to do, it may do—if iron-shod chance, blind and stumbling blindly, does not happen to trample on and efface it. Who first took it ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... mythical lores, with which the priests of all times and all countries cajole the credulity of ignorant and superstitious people, we find that among the traditions of the past, treasured in the mysterious recesses of the temples, is a history of the life of Osiris on Earth. Many wise men of our ...
— Vestiges of the Mayas • Augustus Le Plongeon |
