"Sisyphus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... heroes to woo their wives, wives that already have bridegrooms betrothed. Lo Sparta is wide, and wide is Elis, a land of chariots and horses, and Arcadia rich in sheep, and there are the citadels of the Achaeans, and Messenia, and Argos, and all the sea-coast of Sisyphus. There be maidens by their parents nurtured, maidens countless, that lack not aught in wisdom or in comeliness. Of these ye may easily win such as ye will, for many are willing to be the fathers-in-law of noble youths, and ye ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... that it is the effort itself which forms the measure of, and constitutes, our riches. Progression is the increase of the proportion of the effect to the result. Its ideal extreme may be represented by the eternal and fruitless efforts of Sisyphus.[A] ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... Conference as a brother of a common family, that now, after the labor of three weeks, and upon the very verge of adjustment, you should not destroy all we have done by interposing questions of this kind. Do not let us be seen engaged in the idle labor of Sisyphus. Do not let us now, just as we are about placing on the top of the mountain the block of constitutional adjustment, suffer that block to rebound. Dismiss the amendment with, I pray you earnestly, all questions of this sort, and let us proceed to the practical ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... soul in vain," this is the man who can make haste, even uphill, the only haste worth making; and it must be up the right hill, too: not that Corinthian Acropolis, of which, I suppose, the white specter stood eighteen hundred feet high, in Hades, for Sisyphus to roll his fantastic stone up—image, himself, forever of the greater part ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... a sleepless sisyphus, and one day, in a flash of intuition, I located and showed the flaw in an obscure process; I ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... the suffering damn'd. Here Tityus, stretcht o'er nine wide acres, yields His entrails to be torn. Thou, Tantalus, Art seen, the stream forbid to taste;—the fruit Thy lips o'erhanging, flies! Thou, Sisyphus, Thy stone pursuing downwards; or its weight Straining aloft, with oft exerted power! Ixion whirling, too; with swift pursuit, Thou follow'st, and art follow'd! Belides! Your husband-cousins who in death dar'd steep, And ceaseless draw the unavailing ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... especially when there was a mountain-top to pass. Things went on thus for more than one hundred and twenty miles; they were worn out with ascending and falling again; the balloon, like another rock of Sisyphus, kept continually sinking back toward the ground. The rotundity of the covering, which was now but little inflated, was collapsing already. It assumed an elongated shape, and the wind hollowed large cavities in the ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... "Aureng-Zebe," that Dryden only wanted encouragement to enter upon the composition of an epic poem, and to abandon the thriftless task of writing for the promiscuous audience of the theatre,—a task which, rivalled as he had lately been by Crowne and Settle, he most justly compares to the labour of Sisyphus. His plot, he elsewhere explains, was to be founded either upon the story of Arthur, or of Edward the Black Prince; and he mentions it to Mulgrave in the following remarkable passage, which argues great dissatisfaction with dramatic labour, arising perhaps from a combined feeling ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... inefficacy^, futility; ineptitude, inaptitude; unsubservience^; inadequacy &c (insufficiency) 640; inefficiency, &c (incompetence) 158; unskillfulness &c 699; disservice; unfruitfulness &c (unproductiveness).. 169; labor in vain, labor lost, labor of Sisyphus; lost trouble, lost labor; work of Penelope; sleeveless errand, wild goose chase, mere farce. tautology &c (repetition) 104; supererogation &c (redundancy) 641. vanitas vanitatum [Lat.], vanity, inanity, worthlessness, nugacity^; triviality &c ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... judgment, is no sooner drawn than it is replaced in its position. This ascending and descending stopper is hollow, carpeted, with cushioned seats, and is watched over by two condemned souls, called conductors, one of whom is said to be named Igion, and the other Sisyphus. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist) |
