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Charybdis   Listen
noun
Charybdis  n.  A dangerous whirlpool on the coast of Sicily opposite Scylla on the Italian coast. It is personified as a female monster. See Scylla.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Charybdis" Quotes from Famous Books



... war had ended. Then, as now, half the world was prostrated by the wounds of fratricidal strife. As Washington said: "The whole world was in an uproar," and he added that the task "was to steer safely between Scylla and Charybdis." The problem, then as now, was not only to make "the world safe for democracy," but to make democracy, for which there is no alternative, safe for the world. The thirteen colonies in 1787, while small and relatively unimportant, were, however, ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck

... Guthrie brought me to shore, and the remainder of the battle was fought out from the shingle. There was one rush of nearly a hundred yards, then the fish calmed down and answered to the winch, moving down, nevertheless, much too persistently to Scylla and Charybdis. ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior

... turn the joke into earnest and sue him for breach of promise after they got home. To be sure, she looked as innocent as an angel, but it is a notorious fact that women are just the most dangerous in that guise. In escaping Scylla he had plunged headlong into Charybdis. He got up with a painful sense of indecision, walked toward the window, and concluded, after a moment's thought, that he could not, as a man of honor, withdraw from a bargain which he had himself proposed. It would be wiser to abide by it, and to trust to his own ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various

... understood; but, of course, none of us had any objections. This circumstance gave an additional impetus to the shares, and they once more went up. I was, however, too cautious to plunge a second time in to Charybdis, but M'Corkindale did, ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various

... being pessimistic, it is blamed for being optimistic. From this position Chesterton deduces that it is the only rational religion, because it steers between the Scylla of pessimism and avoids the Charybdis of a facile optimism. Regarding presumably the early Church she has also kept from extremes. She has ignored the easy path of heresy, she has adhered to the adventurous road of orthodoxy. She has avoided the Arian materialism by dropping a Greek Iota; ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke

... heretic. Olympus, in the eyes of the Church, still existed, and Zeus, the man-god, still quaffed the sacred ambrosia in its shady groves. The Sirens still sang their entrancing songs, while Scylla and Charybdis were ever stretching out eager arms toward unwary mariners. Gigantic one-eyed Cyclops, with Polyphemus as their leader, still patrolled the shores of Sicily, and kept their "ever-watchful eyes" turned toward the ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir

... voracious fish, and makes a startling dash at 'Meg with the muckle mouth.'[10] Sharply did I strike the caitiff; whereat he rolled round disdainful, making a whirl in the water of prodigious circumference; it was not exactly Charybdis, or the Maelstrom, but rather more like the wave occasioned by the sudden turning of a man-of-war's boat. Being hooked, and having by this time set his nose peremptorily down the stream, he flashed and whizzed away like a rocket. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various

... inner sense, yes; but to the outer sense not always. Virtues are often harsh to the ear—errors very sweet-voiced. The sirens did not sing out of tune. Better to stop one's ears than glide on Scylla or be merged into Charybdis." ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... wilderness, Owen Dugdale had probably never heard of the kindred terrors that used to lie in wait for the bold mariners of ancient Greece—the rock and the whirlpool known as Scylla and Charybdis—if they missed being impaled upon the one they were apt to be engulfed in the other—and yet here in the rapids of this furious Saskatchewan feeder he was brought face to face with a proposition exactly similar ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne

... one who had through life advocated abolition principles. He heaped reproaches on poor Virginia, whose position as the chief of the border States has given to her hardly the possibility of avoiding a Scylla of ruin on the one side, or a Charybdis of rebellion on the other. When he spoke as he did of Virginia, ridiculing the idea of her sacred soil, even I, Englishman as I am, could not but think of Washington, of Jefferson, of Randolph, and of Madison. He should not ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope

... 20. "My Charybdis conducted me to the barracks where a lot of undisciplined philosophers were discussing the parceling out of land.... The ringleader was a round-headed, long-nosed and bulky individual with a shaggy beard and dirty uniform.... I knew him in an instant, but he did not recognize me ... ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe

... accounted for by an accident she had met with while carrying a heavy weight of rice on her head; she had fallen on a sharp stake, or snag, as she called it, and had never recovered the injury she had received. She complained also of falling of the womb. Her companion (who was not Charybdis however, but Phoebe) was a cheery soul who complained of nothing, but begged for flannel. I asked her about her family and children; she had no children left, nothing but grandchildren; she had had nine children, and seven of them died quite ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble

... mind. She must know the hygiene of childhood and the psychology of children's clothes. For the growing girls there must be a proper recognition of the growing interest in adornment, avoiding the Scylla of vanity on one hand and the Charybdis of unhappy consciousness of being "different from the other girls" on the other. For the sons there must be careful provision for the athletic life so dear to the boy, together with due recognition of the approaching dignities of manhood, with special ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson

... the way he took snuff from his waistcoat pocket, who was in the way of expressing a grave conviction that it was possible to make a capital living at Roulette, so long as you stuck to the colours, and avoided the Scylla of the numbers and the Charybdis of the Zero. By degrees, then, the shyness of the neophyte wears off. Perhaps in the course of his descent of Avernus, a revulsion of feeling takes place, and, horror-struck and ashamed, he rushes out of the Kursaal, determined to enter its portals no more. Then ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz

... bridge, from which many were lost. The Zunis set apart a day in each year which they spent among the graves of their dead, communing with their spirits, and bringing them presents—a kind of All-souls-day. (Dorman, "Prim. Superst.," p. 35.) The Stygian flood, and Scylla and Charybdis, are found among the legends of the Caribs. (Ibid., p. 37.) Even the boat of Charon reappears in the ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly

... would doubtless have proved a beneficial reform, but the act of 1849 proceeded on a very different principle. Instead of reforming, it practically abolished judicial control. By avoiding Scylla it fell into Charybdis. To give any majority of creditors the power to release a debtor from his obligations to non-assenting creditors without full disclosure of his affairs, and without any exercise of judicial discretion or any investigation into the causes of the failure, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... sword half from its scabbard with that purpose. But he was not the sort of a man upon whom I could use my blade. He was hardly more than a boy—a wild, half-crazed fanatic, whose reason, if he had ever possessed any, had been lost in the Charybdis of his zeal. He honestly thought it was his duty to insult persons who apparently disagreed with him. Such a method of proselyting is really a powerful means of persuasion among certain classes, and it has always been used by men who have successfully founded permanent religious sects. To plant ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major

... vomit.* * * When he had seized Pompey's property he rejoiced like some stage-actor who in a play is as poor as Poverty, and then suddenly becomes rich. All his wine, the great weight of silver, the costly furniture and rich dresses, in a few days where were they all? A Charybdis do I call him? He swallowed them all like an entire ocean!" Then he accuses him of cowardice and cruelty in the Pharsalian wars, and compares him most injuriously with Dolabella. "Do you remember how Dolabella fought for you in Spain, when you were getting drunk ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope

... villas rear[68] Ennobled by the charity we spare. There let them warble in the tainted breeze, 75 Or sing like widow'd orphans to the trees: There let them chant their incoherent dreams, Where howls Charybdis, and where Scylla screams! Or where Avernus, from his darksome round, May echo to the winds the blasted sound! 80 As fair Alcyone,[69] with anguish press'd, Broods o'er the British main with tuneful breast, Beneath the white-brow'd cliff protected ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins

... heard or read of them, were never inhabited by any Christian or heathen people, but were ever esteemed and reputed a most prodigious and inchanted place, affording nothing but gusts, stormes, and foul weather, which made every navigator and mariner to avoide them, as Scylla and Charybdis, or as they would shun the Divell himself." [Footnote: "A Plaine Description ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving

... a poor, mean-spirited, creeping baseness, altogether unworthy of his imitation, and best befitted with ineffable contempt. He neither dreads the contact of the baker—the Scylla of the metropolitan peripatetic, nor yet shuns the dire collision of the chimney-sweep—his Charybdis. Try to pass him as he walks leisurely on, making the solid earth ring with his bold tread, and you will experience more difficulties in the attempt than did that famous admiral, Bartholomew Diaz, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume X, No. 280, Saturday, October 27, 1827. • Various

... man runs from Scylla to Charybdis! I was so intent on securing the disappearance of a single epithet that I accepted the rest of the advertisement and all that it involved without discussion. So it befell that the words "well-known connoisseur" were deleted; but that H. Loudon Dodd became manager and honorary ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... between the Scylla of local neglect and the Charybdis of centralized jobbery. At first the settler was burdened with the task of clearing roughly the road in front of his own land, but the existence of vast tracts of Clergy Reserves, or other grants exempt from clearing duties, ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton

... as it shows the source of what Mrs. Stowe loves to call the "Christ-worship" which characterized the religion of the younger Beechers. Writing at the age of seventeen, when her soul was tossing between Scylla and Charybdis, Harriet says: "I feel that I love God,—that is, that I love Christ"; and in 1876, writing of her brother Henry, she says, "He and I are Christ-worshippers, adoring him as the Image of the Invisible God." Her son refers us to the twenty-fourth chapter of the Minister's Wooing for a complete ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach

... into the history of Letters or of Arts, never at a loss for authorities or original ideas, often even illuminating intellectual problems by some happy analogy with the problems of his trade, and rarely grounding on either the Scylla of overbearing conceit or the Charybdis of ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee

... especially (which is a rather large implement for the mouth), not to allow even the clogging influences of cabinet pudding to induce him to give his spoon too much leeway; as in all etiquette of the table, the spoon has its difficulties and dangers. Particularly has the soup-spoon its Scylla and Charybdis, and if a careless eater make a hissing sound as he eats his soup, the well-bred diner-out ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood

... of the greatest dangers of the passage on a flood tide. As everybody bestirred themselves, however, she was got round and filled on the opposite tack, just in time to clear the rocks. Spike breathed again, but his head was still full of the boat. The danger he had just escaped as Scylla met him as Charybdis. The boatswain again roared to go about. The order was given as the vessel began to pitch in a heavy swell. At the next instant she rolled until the water came on deck, whirled with her stern down the tide, and her bows rose as if she were about to leap out of water. ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper

... have taught us how to climb some mountains, but here we have to construct our ladders, for anyone less sure of foot than the chamois or the mountain sheep must stay at the bottom of the falls. Scylla and Charybdis are stationary now, and the gaping chasm has swallowed us upward, where we reach an opening into a wide park, a veritable fairyland. On the top of one of those ponderous laminations tilted edgewise is the king of the gnomes of the new glen. We call him Pharaoh. How archly ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan

... he stepped to the rock's rough brow Looking down on the gulf so black, The waters which it had swallowed, now Charybdis bellowing rendered back; And, with a roar as of distant thunder, Foaming they burst from the ...
— Rampolli • George MacDonald

... rides. Distinguish'd by the straits, on either hand, Now rising cities in long order stand, And fruitful fields: so much can time invade The mold'ring work that beauteous Nature made. Far on the right, her dogs foul Scylla hides: Charybdis roaring on the left presides, And in her greedy whirlpool sucks the tides; Then spouts them from below: with fury driv'n, The waves mount up and wash the face of heav'n. But Scylla from her den, with open jaws, ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil

... spouse, "For whom all earth's possessions were too small "To change. His spouse become, supremely blest, "Dear to the gods, the loftiest stars I'll reach. "What are those rocks, they tell, which 'mid the waves "Meet in encounter? Fell Charybdis what,— "Hostile to ships, now sucking in the tide, "Now fierce discharging? What the savage bounds, "Which compass greedy Scylla 'mid the main "Sicilian? O'er the wide-spread ocean borne, "Him whom I love embracing; sheltering close "In Jason's bosom; clasp'd by him, no fear ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid

... century, like that of Homer, might indeed defy time; but the setting of his pathetic tales, the misery of the poor, the wrongs of power, the pitiless cruelty of the system of society, had passed away as utterly as Circe and the sirens, Charybdis and Cyclops. ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy

... little Puritan," cried the Judge, "would not object. But do not fancy that in avoiding Scylla I must run upon Charybdis. Be sure I would not imitate the trim moustaches and peaked chins of those old dandies, Winthrop and Endicott. I prefer the full flowing ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams

... narrent, (saith Ouid) Quasq; Scilla infestat, quasue Charybdis aquas. Let others tell you wonders of the winde, How ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash

... fresh meat, fruit, and vegetables of Timor—a change by which I hoped to banish every appearance of scurvy, might have had an influence in producing the disease; and if so, it was avoiding Scylla to fall upon Charybdis, and was ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders

... happiness as those that are aimless and unoccupied. Apart from all considerations of right and wrong, one of the first conditions of a happy life is that it should be a full and busy one, directed to the attainment of aims outside ourselves. Anxiety and Ennui are the Scylla and Charybdis on which the bark of human happiness is most commonly wrecked. If a life of luxurious idleness and selfish ease in some measure saves men from the first danger, it seldom fails to bring with it the second. No change of scene, no multiplicity of selfish pleasures will in the long run enable ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... in a zigzag or a curve. That is to say that at every erotic moment her action is the resultant of the combined force of her desire (conscious or unconscious) and her modesty. She must sail through a tortuous channel with Scylla on the one side and Charybdis on the other, and to avoid either danger too anxiously may mean risking shipwreck on the other side. She must be impenetrable to all the world, but it must be an impenetrability not too obscure for the divination ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... no way to steer clear of Scylla and keep out of Charybdis but to do what by the common use of the word we are allowed; viz., to take Modifications with such breadth of signification that it will apply to meaning and to use, as well as to form. Primarily, of course, it meant inflections, ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg

... leaving guards in Syracuse and Panormus, crossed with the rest of the army from Messana to Rhegium (where the myths of the poets say Scylla and Charybdis were), and every day the people of that region kept coming over to him. For since their towns had from of old been without walls, they had no means at all of guarding them, and because of their hostility toward the Goths they were, as was natural, greatly dissatisfied ...
— Procopius - History of the Wars, Books V. and VI. • Procopius

... severe, and a great helper at St. Matthew's, the church round the corner. She gave up all her time to church work and the care of the poor, and it wasn't her fault that the poor hated her. Between the Scylla of politics and the Charybdis of religion there was very little left for poor Barbara; she faded away under the care of an elderly governess who suffered from a perfect cascade of ill-fated love affairs; it seemed that gentlemen were always "playing with her feelings." But in all probability a too vivid imagination led ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole

... dare are as correlative as complementary colours; and the circulation of wealth, which ought to be soft, steady, strong, far-sweeping, and full of warmth, like the Gulf stream, being narrowed into an eddy, and concentrated at a point, changes into the alternate suction and surrender of Charybdis. Which is indeed, I doubt not, the true meaning of that marvellous fable, "infinite," as Bacon said of it, "in matter ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... on his return trip from Messina to Naples he wrote at the sight of Scylla and Charybdis: "These two natural curiosities, standing so far apart in reality and placed so close together by the poet, have furnished men with an opportunity to abuse the fables of the bards, not remembering that the human imaginative faculty when it would represent ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various

... Reed had been threatening to cut his hair. The boys said, "Sissy, why don't your mother put your hair up in curl papers?" It looked so dreadful when it was first cut that Charles always spent these weeks between Scylla and Charybdis. He knew all about the rock and the whirlpools. But something had been happening all the time, even to this Saturday afternoon, when all the silver had to be scoured. Mr. Reed inspected his son as he sat at the supper-table. He had a rather ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas

... the lampreys that once went to better Alexandrian luxury, are still the spoil of the fishers, the shrimps are delicate to the palate, and the marbles will endure as long as this rock itself. The rock lasts, and the sea. The most ancient memory here is of them, for this is the shore of Charybdis. It is stated in Sallust and other Latin authors, as well as by writers throughout the Middle Ages, that all which was swallowed up in the whirlpool of the straits, after being carried beneath the sea for miles, was finally cast up on the beach ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry

... suppose that the elector having successfully passed the ordeal of the registration officer would be allowed smooth sailing during the remainder of the voyage to the polls. But no; having passed Scylla, he must encounter Charybdis at the very brink of the ballot box; for section 3644 of the above mentioned Code provides that any of the managers ...
— The Disfranchisement of the Negro - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 6 • John L. Love

... particularly mentions their separation, as a circumstance beyond all doubt. The dangers which were supposed to beset mariners in their passage through the narrow strait which divides it from Italy, on one side of which was Sylla, and on the other Charybdis, sufficiently point out the ignorance and inexperience of the ancients in the construction and management ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson

... the Conference to the other, and after he receives it he is liable to find himself among a people, who had rejected him in the canvass, and now only acquiesce in the decision from sheer necessity. But if he escape Scylla in this particular, he is certain to drive upon Charybdis in another. Granting that his relations and labors may be acceptable, he falls upon the inevitable necessity of devoting his time and labor, during the vigor and strength of his days, for a meager compensation, and then pass into old age, and its attendant infirmities, as ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller

... enormous sums of money were taken. Then Boyton proceeded to Messina. Before leaving Naples, he had made up his mind to attempt the dreaded straits of that name, and dare the dangers of the noted whirlpools of Scylla and Charybdis. Every one cheerfully assured him that the attempt would result in death, for beside the dangers of the whirlpools, the straits were infested ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton

... approached new dangers, for on one side of them seethed and foamed the whirlpool of Charybdis, whilst on the other towered the mighty rock whence the monster Scylla swooped down upon unfortunate mariners; but here the goddess Hera came to their assistance, and sent to them the sea-nymph Thetis, who guided them safely ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens

... round the jutting points, the dashing of the waters, and the cries of one of the most timid of our followers, who to save himself from wet feet had mounted an overladen pony, and was now in imminent danger both of Scylla and Charybdis, added to the interest of the picture; but, occasionally, the reverberation caused by the fragments of rock, which, detaching themselves from the upper regions, came tumbling down, not far from where we stood, warned us not to dwell upon the spot. We took the hint, and hastily ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem

... conflicting motions of the water. Whirling and boiling eddies burst as if from some subaqueous explosion; down currents are on one side of the canoe, and an up current on the other; now a cross stream at the bows and a diagonal one at the stern, with a foaming Scylla on your right and a whirling Charybdis on the left. But our nervousness gave way to admiration as our popero, or pilot, the sedate governor, gave the canoe a sheer with the swoop of his long paddle, turning it gracefully around the corner of ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton

... unimaginable touch of disease, the unrest of madness, made Caligula the genius of insatiable appetite; and his martyrdom was the torment of lust and ennui and everlasting agitation. The accident of empire tantalised him with vain hopes of satisfying the Charybdis of his soul's sick cravings. From point to point he passed of empty pleasure and unsatisfying cruelty, for ever hungry; until the malady of his spirit, unrestrained by any limitations, and with the right medium for its ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds

... them good-bye, jumped overboard, and continued his voyage. The end of this poor man was very sad. The king, being seized with an insane desire to know something about the depths of the terrible gulf of Charybdis, offered Nicholas a golden cup if he would dive down and explore them. He dived accordingly, remained below nearly an hour, and brought back a glowing account of the wonders and horrors of the seething whirlpool. The king, far from ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne

... gloom And plunged the world in darkness, so that men Despaired of day — like as he veiled his light From that fell banquet which Mycenae saw (21). The jaws of Etna were agape with flame That rose not heavenwards, but headlong fell In smoking stream upon the Italian flank. Then black Charybdis, from her boundless depth, Threw up a gory sea. In piteous tones Howled the wild dogs; the Vestal fire was snatched From off the altar; and the flame that crowned The Latin festival was split in twain, As on the Theban pyre (22), in ancient days; Earth tottered on its base: the mighty Alps From ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan

... England in its true light before the world, and I with many another one am very grateful for it. Among all Lord Russell's many titles to fame and to public gratitude, the manner in which he has steered the vessel of the State through the Scylla and Charybdis of the American War will, I think, always stand conspicuous.... Now I am going to ask a great favour. I saw at Minto a copy of verses written for the summer-house at Pembroke Lodge, of which I formed ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell

... what,—and the affair was voted highly successful. The next day, the 28th, we were creeping towards our harbor through one of those dense fogs which are more dangerous than the old rocks of the sirens, or Scylla and Charybdis, or the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... their scenes?—the hard-fought engagements—the defeats, plans, failures—the gloomy hours, days, when our Nationality seem'd hung in pall of doubt, perhaps death—the Mephistophelean sneers of foreign lands and attaches—the dreaded Scylla of European interference, and the Charybdis of the tremendously dangerous latent strata of secession sympathizers throughout the free States, (far more numerous than is supposed)—the long marches in summer—the hot sweat, and many a sunstroke, as on the rush to Gettysburg ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... es et ad hunc ordinem tua te perduxit industria.' Ibid. 31, 9, 'Quo modo, inquis, isto pervenitur? Non per Poeninum Graiumve montem, nec per deserta Candaviae, nec Syrtes tibi nec Scylla aut Charybdis adeundae sunt, quae tamen ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton

... this change; for Scylla and Charybdis to an Englishman, are as familiar as Whittington and his cat. For the first two days Acme continued unwell; and George, who already appeared improved by the sea air, never left ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman

... tips from Jacinthe," ruminated Garnet. "She was Captain the last year she was at school, so she ought to know. You see, we've to steer between Scylla and Charybdis. We mustn't push ourselves forward too violently, or they'll call us cheeky, but on the other hand, if we're content to take a back seat, we may stay there for the rest of the term. Comprenez vous? It's a matter of seizing one's chance. I've an idea floating about in my mind. Do you happen ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil

... a Division or a Collectorate or something administrative in a particularly unpleasant part of Bengal—full of Babus who edited newspapers proving that "Young" Gayerson was a "Nero" and a "Scylla" and a "Charybdis"; and, in addition to the Babus, there was a good deal of dysentery and cholera abroad for nine months of the year. "Young" Gayerson—he was about five and forty—rather liked Babus, they amused him, but he objects to dysentery, and when he could get away, ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... the fear of death, and not the desire of life, that makes the foolish person to hang to the body, clinging to it, as Odysseus did to the fig-tree from fear of Charybdis that lay below, ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch

... Do you believe that we do not think about you, that we do not heed our duty, that we only eat to live, and live to rule? Would that it were so! But we, like you, follow the cadence, finding ourselves between Scylla and Charybdis: either you reject us or the government rejects us. The government commands, and he who commands, commands,—and must ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal

... rock of Scylla and whirlpool of Charybdis, known to the ancients as two sea-monsters, near the Straits of Messina, next claimed his attention. Let us see how ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge

... time at Heavitree. It should not perhaps be asserted broadly that he had made up his mind that marriage would be good for him; but he had made up his mind, at least, to this, that it was no longer to be postponed without a balance of disadvantage. The Charybdis in the Close drove him helpless into the whirlpool of the Heavitree Scylla. He had no longer an escape from the perils of the latter shore. He had been so mauled by the opposite waves, that he had neither spirit nor skill left to him to keep in the middle track. He was almost daily ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope

... have helped him in the contest, and how I saved them when they passed between the Wandering rocks, [1405] where roar terrible storms of fire and the waves foam round the rugged reefs. And now past the mighty rock of Scylla and Charybdis horribly belching, a course awaits them. But thee indeed from thy infancy did I tend with my own hands and love beyond all others that dwell in the salt sea because thou didst refuse to share the couch of Zeus, ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius

... the Guidance of his Associate, and stumbles upon the French Camp, where he finishes his Military Career XX He prepares a Stratagem, but finds himself countermined— Proceeds on his Journey, and is overtaken by a terrible Tempest XXI He falls upon Scylla, seeking to avoid Charybdis. XXII He arrives at Paris, and is pleased with his Reception XXIII Acquits himself with Address in a Nocturnal Riot XXIV He overlooks the Advances of his Friends, and smarts severely for his Neglect XXV He bears his Fate like a Philosopher; and contracts acquaintance with a very remarkable ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett

... a preposterous number of fish of immense size. The water was so clear, that we could see the fish rush and seize the bait as fast as it was thrown in. Sometimes a huge shark would bite the fish in two, so that the poor finny creature was between Scylla and Charybdis. These fish are called cherne and pargo, and at dinner were pronounced good. At length a shark, in its wholesale greediness, seized the bait, and feeling the hook in his horrid jaw, tugged most fiercely to release himself, but in vain. Twelve sailors hauled him in, when, with distended jaws, ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca

... volcanoes, and of burning edifices, rain, wind, and thunder, accompanied the movements of the earth: all the forces of nature were in activity, and it seemed as if all its laws were suspended, and the last hour of created things at hand. In the meantime, the sea between Scylla, Charybdis, and the coasts of Reggio and Messina, was raised many fathoms above its usual level; overflowing its banks, and then, in its return to its channel, carrying away men and beasts. By these means, two thousand persons lost their lives on Scylla alone, who were ...
— The Book of Enterprise and Adventure - Being an Excitement to Reading. For Young People. A New and Condensed Edition. • Anonymous

... with wax, bidding them to tie him to the mast of his ship and to row hard past the temptresses in spite of his strugglings. They then entered the dangerous strait, on one side of which was Scylla, a dreadful monster who lived in a cave near by, on the other was the deadly whirlpool of Charybdis. Scylla carried off six of his men who called in vain to Odysseus to save them, stretching out their hands to him in their last agony. From the strait they passed to the island of Trinacria, where they found grazing the cattle of the Sun. Odysseus ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb

... development and regeneration soon brought into being. In 1895 he writes:—"The too simple mechanistic conception on the one hand, and the metaphysical conception on the other represent the Scylla and Charybdis, between which to sail is indeed difficult, and so far by few satisfactorily accomplished; it cannot be denied that with the increase of knowledge the seduction of the second has lately notably increased" ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell

... strait; you will have the raging Scylla on one hand as you go. His natural reply will be, Well, I will keep as far away from it as possible; I will keep close by the other side. But the rejoinder must be, No, you will be quite as ill off there; you will be in equal peril on the other side: there is Charybdis. What you have to do is to keep at a safe distance from each. In avoiding the one, do not run into ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd

... benefit to us if in steering away from the Scylla of monopoly, we be wrecked on the Charybdis of wasteful competition. We have been trying for a score of years now to defeat monopolies by creating competition; but in spite of a universal public sentiment in favor of the reform, and notwithstanding the millions of wealth which ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker

... himself in translating. Is he to adhere rigidly to a literal rendering of the original text, or is paraphrase permissible, and, if permissible, within what limits may it be adopted? In deciding which of these courses to pursue, the translator stands between Scylla and Charybdis. If he departs too widely from the precise words of the text, he incurs the blame of the purist, who will accuse him of foisting language on the original author which the latter never employed, with the possible result that even the ideas or sentiments which it had been ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring

... who were nearer akin to them than Christians and allied to them, at least, by the bond of common enmity to Spain and common suffering at the hands of Spaniards. The two heretics stood in stolid apathy, realizing that with them it was but a case of passing from Charybdis to Scylla, and that they had as little to hope for from heathen as from Christian. One of these was a sturdy bowlegged fellow, whose garments were little better than rags; his weather-beaten face was of the colour of mahogany and his eyes of a dark blue under tufted eyebrows that once had ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini

... fatality which induced the Lairds of Ellangowan to interfere with politics, he had yet the prudence, ere he went out with Lord Kenmore in 1715, to convey his estate to trustees, in order to parry pains and penalties in case the Earl of Mar could not put down the Protestant succession. But Scylla and Charybdis—a word to the wise—he only saved his estate at expense of a lawsuit, which again subdivided the family property. He was, however, a man of resolution. He sold part of the lands, evacuated the old cattle, where the family lived in ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... dashed over the rocks with a tremendous spray, like breakers on a lee-shore, threatening destruction to whatever approached it. You would have thought, by the confusion it caused in the river and the whirlpools it made, that Scylla and Charybdis, and their whole progeny, had left the Mediterranean and come and settled here. The channel was barely twelve feet wide, and the torrent in rushing down formed traverse furrows which showed how near the ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton

... stirred, no fin, no oar; Like beauty newly dead, so calm, so still, So lovely, thou, beneath the light that fell From angel-chariots sentinelled on high, Reposed, and listened, and saw thy living change, Thy dead arise. Charybdis listened, and Scylla; And savage Euxine on the Thracian beach Lay motionless: and every battle ship Stood still; and every ship of merchandise, And all that sailed, of every name, stood still." ROBERT POLLOK: Course of Time, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... under one of these lived a monster called Scylla, with twelve limbs and six long necks, with a dog's head to each, ready each to seize a man out of every ship that passed; but it was safer to keep on her side than to go to the other cliff, for there a water-witch named Charybdis lived in a whirlpool, and was sure to suck the whole ship in, and swallow it up. However, for her husband Peleus' sake, Thetis and her sister Nereids came and guided the ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Charybdis of fiction-writing may both be avoided. The realists gain nothing by hooting at the abuses of romance; and the romantics gain as little by yawning over realism at its worst. "The conditions"—to use a phase of Emerson's—"are hard but equal": and at their best, the realist, ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton

... undue stress on outward forms, and fanaticism, which gives credit to preternatural impulses, and professes a particular kind of inspiration differing not at all from infallibility, are the Scylla and Charybdis, through which, over stormy waters or serene, we have to make our steady way. Both are equally intolerant, and both are condemned by the genius of Protestantism, the constitution of the Church, and the spirit ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull

... enter with dire chilling blasts, Portending agues. Thus a well-fraught ship, Long sailed secure, or through the Aegean deep, Or the Ionian, till cruising near The Lilybean shore, with hideous crush On Scylla, or Charybdis (dangerous rocks!) She strikes rebounding; whence the shattered oak, So fierce a shock unable to withstand, Admits the sea; in at the gaping side The crowding waves gush with impetuous rage, Resistless, overwhelming; horrors ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... who performed special services to the greater gods, like the Horae; and monsters, offspring of gods, like the gorgons, chimera, the dragon of the Hesperides, the Lernaean hydra, the Nemean lion, Scylla and Charybdis, the ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord

... dismay, And blacke Laestrigones, a people stout; Then greedie Scilla, under whom there bay Manie great bandogs, which her gird about; 540 Then doo the AEtnean Cyclops him affray, And deep Charybdis gulphing in and out; Lastly the squalid lakes of Tartarie, And griesly feends of hell ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser

... the narrows where Skylla and Charybdis dwell. On each side of the narrows is a steep cliff, one of which is so high that its sharp top reaches the sky. It is so slippery that no one is able to climb up or down its sides, nor could he if he had twenty hands and feet. Not even a bird can safely ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer

... return to Babbiano, or to abandon all hope of his crown, of which the people will send the offer then to you at Aquila, where you are believed to be. So now, my dear lord, you have the tyrant at your mercy, tossed between Scylla and Charybdis. Yours it is to resolve how you will act; but I rejoice in being the one to send you word that your presence at Roccaleone and your stubborn defence of the fortress has not been vain, and that presently you are to reap the well-earned reward of it. The people have been stirred ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini

... mind already that if he should be freed of the murder charge, he would only have escaped Scylla to go to wreck on Charybdis. For it was a twenty to one bet that Jerry would go to Whitford with the story of his attempt to hire the gang leader to ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine

... who would ignore the lessons of history and launch boldly out upon the tempestuous sea of experimentalism—is one dangerous extreme, we must remember that it is not the only one. In avoiding Scylla we must not forget Charybdis. If we are to look ever to the past, to make no experiments, to become the bondslaves of precedent, then progress is at an end and society must petrify, retrograde or consume itself ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... and, on arriving, finds to his consternation that a great deal more work is expected of him than he is prepared to do. What course, then, Reverend Jones or Brown, does he take? He proceeds to do as much work as will steer him safely between the, ah—I may say, the Scylla of punishment and the Charybdis of being considered what my, er—fellow-pupils euphoniously term a swot. That, I think, is all this morning. Good day. Pray do not trouble to rise. I will find my way out.' I should then have made for the door, locked it, if possible, on the outside, ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse

... circulation, roll; circumrotation[obs3], circumvolution, circumgyration[obs3]; volutation[obs3], circination|, turbination[obs3], pirouette, convolution. verticity|, whir, whirl, eddy, vortex, whirlpool, gurge[obs3]; countercurrent; Maelstrom, Charybdis; Ixion. [rotating air] cyclone; tornado, whirlwind; dust devil. [rotation of an automobile] spin-out. axis, axis of rotation, swivel, pivot, pivot point; axle, spindle, pin, hinge, pole, arbor, bobbin, mandrel; axle shaft; gymbal; hub, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... thee, aneath what rock's desolation? What wild sea did bear, what billows foamy regorged thee? 155 Seething sand, or Scylla the snare, or lonely Charybdis? If for a life's dear joy comes back ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus

... thyself,—then spur amain: So shall Charybdis wear a grace, Grim Aetna laugh, the Libyan plain Take roses to her shrivell'd face. This orb—this round Of sight and sound— Count it the lists that God hath built For haughty hearts to ...
— Green Bays. Verses and Parodies • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... and, being thus hedged and hemmed about, sought safety by nominating Mr. Shepard. There need be no mistake; Mr. Shepard was not a candidate, he was a refuge. And such a refuge as is Scylla when one is threatened of Charybdis. ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various

... Campanian main behind, cut the blue billows of the Tyrrhenian Sea; all that day and night, and more sail and oar swept them on. They flew past the beaches of Magna Graecia, then, betwixt Scylla and Charybdis, and Sicilia and its smoke-beclouded cone of AEtna faded out of view, and the long, dark swells of the Ionian Sea caught them. No feeble merchantman, hugging coasts and headlands, was Demetrius. He pushed his three barques boldly forward toward ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis

... to fall upon Charybdis. As she hurries along through the familiar streets, her plans are laid. She will go to Lucian Davlin's rooms; nobody will be there to dispute her possession for a day or two to come, and she has possessed ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch

... in such quantities, that the Nile, at the height of its inundations, or the great Yellow River of China, could not be more loaded with mud than the sea was in the whirlpool of Kee-too point. The current, in the Strait of Faro, setting directly upon the rocks of Scylla, and the whirlpool of Charybdis, those celebrated objects of dread to ancient navigators, could not possibly have been more awfully terrific, though perhaps more dangerous, than the currents and the eddies that boiled tumultuously round this promontory of the Chinese ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow

... the certainty of the reign of the Pretender. If the landed man spoke for the Church, the Whig speculator raised the shout of "No Popery!" The war had transformed parties into factions, and the ministry stood between a Scylla of a peace-at-any-price, on the one side, and a Charybdis of a war-at-any-price on the other; or, if not a war, then a peace so one-sided that it would be almost ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift

... the fact of my not having said a word about it would be directly damning to me, if in the end it did not incriminate us both. It made me quite faint to feel that we might escape the Scylla of our present peril and yet split on the Charybdis of circumstantial evidence. Yet I could see no middle course of conceivable safety, if I held my tongue another moment. So I spoke up desperately, with the rash resolution which was the novel feature of my whole ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung

... narrow and dangerous channel, avoiding Hobbism on the one side and tender consciences on the other. Each generation of State Churchmen has the same task. The channel remains to-day just as it ever did, with Scylla and Charybdis presiding over their rocks as of old. Hobbes's Leviathan appeared in 1651, and in 1670 both his philosophy and his statecraft were fashionable doctrine. All really pious people called Hobbes an Atheist. Technically he was nothing of the sort, but it matters little what he was technically, ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell

... 150 Quam tibi fallaci supremo in tempore dessem. Pro quo dilaceranda feris dabor alitibusque Praeda, neque iniecta tumulabor mortua terra. Quaenam te genuit sola sub rupe leaena? Quod mare conceptum spumantibus expuit undis? 155 Quae Syrtis, quae Scylla rapax, quae vasta Charybdis? Talia qui reddis pro dulci praemia vita. Si tibi non cordi fuerant conubia nostra, Saeva quod horrebas prisci praecepta parentis, At tamen in vostras potuisti ducere sedes, 160 Quae tibi iocundo famularer serva labore, ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus

... isn't it, to be living in a world darkened on one side by the servant question and on the other by the appendix, like Scylla and Charybdis?" ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter

... you have the choice of a cross-road to Messina, (twenty-four miles;) but who would abridge distance and miss the celebrated straits towards which we are rapidly approaching, or lose one hour on land and miss the novelties of volcanic islands, and the first view of Scylla and Charybdis? It is but eight o'clock, but the awning has been stretched over our heads an hour ago. As to breakfast—the meal which is associated with that particular hour of the four-and-twenty to all well regulated minds and stomachs—it consists here of thin veneers of old mahogany-coloured ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various

... all the woe Hems in of all the universe. Ah me! Almighty Justice! in what store thou heap'st New pains, new troubles, as I here beheld! Wherefore doth fault of ours bring us to this? E'en as a billow, on Charybdis rising, Against encounter'd billow dashing breaks; Such is the dance this wretched race must lead, Whom more than elsewhere numerous here I found, From one side and the other, with loud voice, Both roll'd on weights by main ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante

... those to whom the church stands first. Here is one of the difficulties of this complex case. Yet here, too, there may be some trace of compensation. If the reader has been drawn into the whirlpools of the political Charybdis, he might not even in far worthier hands than mine have escaped the rocky headlands of the ecclesiastic Scylla. For churches ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... censured by the Convocation of the University of Oxford. On the other hand, Dr. Wallis, Professor of Geometry, and the famous Dr. South, published treatises against Dr. Sherlock, which, while avoiding the Scylla of Tritheism, ran dangerously near to the Charybdis of Sabellianism. Like all his writings, South's treatise was racy, but violently abusive, and such irritation and acrimony were engendered, that the Royal authority was at last exercised in restraining each party from introducing novel ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... you see that honor was what kept me from her? Such honor as a man feels when he knows that he is poised between a Scylla and a Charybdis of desperate fatality?" ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts

... had Ivan felt himself a thing of evil. But under those terrible eyes, that had searched hearts as others searched printed texts for interlinear meanings, he began to feel himself drawn into the wild waters between a Scylla of shame and a Charybdis of terror. Alas! Would this man believe his wretched tale of the trickery of others; of wanton, stubborn stupidity on the ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter

... for this stage was something less bad, our driver was not a Tolly; in avoiding some Charybdis or other, he let his leaders slip down a bank about eight feet deep, whither, but for the good temper and steady backing of the wheel-horses, we should have followed: as it was, we managed to pick out our cattle, and got off with a couple of broken traces. These being duly cobbled, away ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power

... fountain from which that of the Son and Spirit was derived. This was fixed as Orthodox at the Council of Nice, A.D. 325, and was the beginning of Orthodoxy in the Church. It was a middle course between Scylla and Charybdis, which were represented on the one side by Arius, who maintained that the Son was created out of nothing; and by Sabellius on the other hand, who maintained that the Son was only a mode, manifestation, or name of God; God being called the Father, as Creator of the world; called Son, as Redeemer ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke

... Their captain rules their courage, guides their heat, Their forwardness he stayed with gentle rein; And yet more easy, haply, were the feat To stop the current near Charybdis main, Or calm the blustering winds on mountains great, Than fierce desires of warlike hearts restrain; He rules them yet, and ranks them in their haste, For well he knows disordered speed ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso

... mystery and 'shippe-swallowing' propensities, the word 'monster' is peculiarly appropriate to this great quicksand, which still craves more victims, and still with claws and feelers outstretched—Scylla and Charybdis combining their terrors in the Goodwins—lies in ambush for the goodly ships that so bravely wing their flight to and fro beyond its reach. But it is only in the storm blast and the midnight that its most dreadful features are unveiled, and even then the ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor

... lament my failure, because they will consider me poaching on their manor. If I chronicle a big beet, they will bring forward one twice as large. If I mourn a deceased squash, they will mutter, "Woman's farming!" Shunning Scylla, I shall perforce fall into Charybdis. (Vide Classical Dictionary. I have lent mine, but I know one was a rock and the other a whirlpool, though I cannot state, with any definiteness, which was which.) I may be as humble and deprecating as I choose, but it will not avail me. A very agony of self-abasement ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various

... policy. In time, when passion shall have yielded to sober reason, the current may possibly turn; but, in the mean while, this government, in relation to France and England, may be compared to a ship between Scylla and Charybdis. If the treaty is ratified, the partisans of the French (or rather of war and confusion) will excite them to hostile measures, or at least to unfriendly sentiments;—if it is not, there is no foreseeing all the consequences that may follow as it respects ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall

... hold, and we shot ahead, scudding rapidly along the dark shores, to the sound of the wild Maltese songs. At length, the promontory was gained, and the restless current, rolling down from Scylla and Charybdis, tossed our little bark from wave to wave with a recklessness that would have made any one nervous but an ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor

... woe-begone faces of the starving scouts and bed-makers, a stranger might have imagined some ruthless plague had swept away, "at one fell swoop," two-thirds of the population of Rhedycina. It was at this dull period of time, that a poor student, having passed successfully the Scylla and Charybdis of an Oxonian's fears, the great go and little go, and exhausted by long and persevering efforts to obtain his degree, had just succeeded in adding the important academical letters to his name, when he received a kind invitation from an old brother ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... demeanour so unpropitious, that in the previous year more than once the dawn had found her trying to decide between the Scylla of the thankless post of lady companion to some wealthy parvenu on the Riviera, and the Charybdis of raising money enough to allow her to harbour paying guests in the ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest

... out the golden hair which grew on the top of his head, and on which which his life and kingdom depended. Minos won the city, but rejected her love in horror. The other Scylla, from whom the rock opposite Charybdis was named, was a beautiful maiden, beloved by the sea-god Glaucus, but changed into a monster through the jealousy and enchantments of Circe. The mother of Romulus: Silvia, daughter and only living child of Numitor, whom her uncle Amulius made ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer

... accompanying the copy of his Propositions which Eck sent to the Emperor, he refers to Luther as the domestic enemy of the Church (hostis ecclesiae domesticus), who has fallen into every Scylla and Charybdis of iniquity; who speaks of the Pope as the Antichrist and of the Church as the harlot; who has praise for none but heretics and schismatics; whom the Church has to thank for the Iconoclasts, Sacramentarians, New Hussites, Anabaptists, New Epicureans, who teach that the ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente

... We may suppose we are in danger because the stone tables of the Decalogue have gone to dust, but it is more dangerous to attempt to control men by fictions. Better no chart whatever than one which shows no actually existing perils, but warns us against Scylla, Charybdis, and the Cyclops. If we are perfectly honest with ourselves we shall not find it difficult to settle whether we ought to do this or that particular thing, and we may be content. The new legislation will come naturally at the appointed time, and it is not ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford

... was to escape the attentions of a far less dangerous detrimental, and a far less ineligible one, that she had brought her daughter with her all the way to Riffrath—"from Charybdis to Scylla," as we used to say at Brossard's, putting the cart ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier

... flashing the war news from the stern of our boat to the bridge of the next astern, the Virginian. The news is flashed at night by the lamps—short and long flashes. The news is picked up by wireless on the flagship, the Charybdis, at the head of our line and signaled ...
— "Crumps", The Plain Story of a Canadian Who Went • Louis Keene

... villain, who has spread confusion amongst the ranks of the Knights, this public robber, this yawning gulf of plunder, this devouring Charybdis,[31] this villain, this villain, this villain! I cannot say the word too often, for he is a villain a thousand times a day. Come, strike, drive, hurl him over and crush him to pieces; hate him as we ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al

... the contrary, the waters are cramped by the continental littoral and the shores of the numerous islands. The same happens in the strait of Sicily where a current exists which Your Holiness well knows, formed by the rocks of Charybdis and Scylla, at a place, where the Ionian, Libyan, and Tyrrhenian seas come together within ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt

... Peter was an effective study, avoiding Scylla of the commonplace and Charybdis of the mawkish—no mean feat. A young man with a future, I dare hazard; with a gift of clear utterance, and sensibility ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 18th, 1920 • Various

... fish (sailors) and the women (Highlanders), as they styled us, who, they said, were too much for them, combined I think with the Ladysmith sweet shop, which proved their Scylla with Colenso as their Charybdis. ...
— With the Naval Brigade in Natal (1899-1900) - Journal of Active Service • Charles Richard Newdigate Burne

... expanse, and through the shock Of fighting elements, on all sides round Environed, wins his way; harder beset And more endangered than when Argo passed Through Bosporus betwixt the justling rocks, Or when Ulysses on the larboard shunned Charybdis, and by th' other whirlpool steered. So he with difficulty and labour hard Moved on, with difficulty and labour he; But, he once passed, soon after, when Man fell, Strange alteration! Sin and Death amain, Following his track (such was the will of Heaven) ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton

... turn out to be one of your social superiors, and not care to know you; in which case, of course, you would only be letting yourself in for a needless snubbing. In fact, in this modern England of ours, this fatherland of snobdom, one passes one's life in a see-saw of doubt, between the Scylla and Charybdis of those two antithetical social dangers. You are always afraid you may get to know somebody you yourself do not want to know, or may try to know somebody who does not want to ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen

... is usually offered in any except our very largest hotels. This is especially to be desired at breakfast. Without going to the American extreme of fifty or a hundred dishes to choose from, some intermediate point short of the Scylla of sole and the Charybdis of ham and eggs might surely be found. There is probably more pig-headed conservatism than justified fear of expense in the reluctance to follow this most excellent "American lead." The British tourist in the United States takes ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... figures of the women and men working about the farm houses five miles away. The British warships in the basin were obsolete small cruisers of slow speed, the "Diana," the "Eclipse," the "Talbot" and the "Charybdis." The latter was the flagship of the Admiral. We looked upon these ships with a good deal of apprehension. The "Dresden" or "Karlsruhe," the German ships in the Atlantic, would only have a mouthful in any one of them, in fact in the whole four. They all anchored ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie

... Rhegium in Italy and Messina in Sicily being so near each other that it would be impossible for the Athenians to cruise against them and command the strait. The strait in question consists of the sea between Rhegium and Messina, at the point where Sicily approaches nearest to the continent, and is the Charybdis through which the story makes Ulysses sail; and the narrowness of the passage and the strength of the current that pours in from the vast Tyrrhenian and Sicilian mains, have rightly given it a ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides

... dreaded thirteenth tee, which, with the returning fourteenth, forms the malignant Scylla and Charybdis of the course. There is nothing to describe the thirteenth hole. It is not really a golf-hole; it is a long, narrow breathing spot, squeezed by the railroad tracks on one side and by the river on the other. Resolute and fearless golfers often cut ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson

... in one of these and float down the current of the stream into the sea; and then, keeping near land, I would coast the beauteous shores and sunny promontories of the blue Mediterranean, pass Naples, along Calabria, and would dare the twin perils of Scylla and Charybdis; then, with fearless aim, (for what had I to lose?) skim ocean's surface towards Malta and the further Cyclades. I would avoid Constantinople, the sight of whose well-known towers and inlets belonged to another state of existence from my ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley

... my youthful passion and my tragic disappointment, as you know: I had looked far enough into what Thackeray used to call the cryptic mysteries to save me from the Scylla of dissipation, and yet preserved enough of natural nature to keep me out of the Pharisaic Charybdis. My devotion to my legal studies had already brought me a mild distinction; the paternal legacy was a good nest-egg for the incubation of wealth—in short, I was a fair, respectable "party," desirable to the humbler mammas, and not to be despised by ...
— Who Was She? - From "The Atlantic Monthly" for September, 1874 • Bayard Taylor

... given; and from him that hath not, the little that he hath shall be taken away.' The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism. Such are the effects which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... store thou heap'st New pains, new troubles, as I here beheld, Wherefore doth fault of ours bring us to this? E'en as a billow, on Charybdis rising Against encountered billow dashing breaks; Such is the dance this wretched race must lead Whom more than elsewhere numerous here I ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery

... the flowery-kirtled Naiades, Culling their potent herbs and baleful drugs, Who, as they sung, would take the prisoned soul, And lap it in Elysium: Scylla wept, And chid her barking waves into attention, And fell Charybdis murmured soft applause. Yet they in pleasing slumber lulled the sense, 260 And in sweet madness robbed it of itself; But such a sacred and home-felt delight, Such sober certainty of waking bliss, I never heard till now. I'll speak to her, And she shall ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton

... prevents that monotony from being even felt. The stories are never tame; and, what is more remarkable, they seldom or never have the mere extravagance which in mediaeval, at least as often as in other, writing, plays Scylla to the Charybdis of tameness. Moreover, they have, as no other division of mediaeval romance has in anything like the same measure, the advantage of the presence of interesting characters of both sexes. Only the Arthurian story can approach them here, and that leaves still an element of ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury

... and death, and three Furies (Eumenides or Erinnyes) avenged crime, especially murder and unnatural crimes. The Gorgons were three sisters, with hair entwined with serpents. A single gaze upon them chilled the beholder to stone. Besides these there were Scylla and Charybdis, sea-monsters that made perilous the passage of the Sicilian Straits, the Centaurs, the Cyclops, Cerberus, the watch-dog of Hades, and a ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers

... were on the prisoner's brow,—"but you do not realize the temptation. Have you never yourself been betwixt Scylla and Charybdis? Have I not vowed every false step should be the last? I fought against Lycon. I fought against Mardonius. They were too strong. Athena knoweth I did not crave the tyranny of Athens! It was not that which ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis

... gun, wich thumb wuz also accidentally across the muzzle thereof, and I wuz no longer liable to military dooty and cood bid Provost Marshels defiance, I only steered clear uv Scylla to go bumpin onto Charybdis. I coodent let Dimocrisy alone, and the eggins—the ridin upon rails—the takin uv the oath—but why shood I harrow up the public buzzum? I stood it all till one nite I wuz pulled out uv bed, compelled to kneel onto my bare knees in the cold snow, the extremity uv my under garment, wich modesty ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby

... excepted, mainly of Talmudic disquisitions, written in the rabbinic dialect and in a euphuistic style. Besides the great Maimuni, there were few able or willing to write Hebrew "as she should be spoke." The early German Maskilim, in trying to escape the Scylla of Rabbinism, fell victims to the Charybdis of Germanism. They possessed originality neither of style nor of sentiment, neither of rhyme nor of reason. Hebrew poetry was an adaptation of current German poetry. The very best the period produced, the Mosaide of Wessely, was influenced ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin

... into the fourth hollow, taking more of the woeful bank that gathers in the evil of the whole universe. Ah, Justice of God! Who heapeth up so many new travails and penalties as I saw? And why doth our sin so waste us? As doth the wave, yonder upon Charybdis, which is broken on that which it encounters, so it behoves that here the ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri

... Grendall?' The senior understrapper knew that Melmotte would have asked for 'his Secretary,' and not for Mr Grendall, but for the rumours. It is so hard not to tumble into Scylla when you are avoiding Charybdis. Mr Grendall had not been there. Indeed, nobody had been there. 'In fact, there is nothing more to be done, I suppose?' said Mr Melmotte. The senior understrapper thought that there was nothing more to be done. He left word ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope

... leftward sits Charybdis fell, Who, yawning thrice, her lowest depths laid bare, Sucks the vast billows in her throat's dark hell, Then starward spouts the refluent surge in air. Here Scylla, gaping from her gloomy lair, The passing vessels on the rocks doth hale; A maiden to the waist, with bosom fair And human face; ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil

... the natural softness of beauty and severe grandeur of Norway, resembles most other things that bear, seductively, external comeliness, and carry an antidote unseen. The bay is a whirlpool. Our hyperboreal Palinurus was perfectly acquainted with this modern Charybdis, and used every stratagem of which he was master, to escape it; but the wind being light, left the cutter to the mercy of the current. Nearly three hours the yacht did nothing else but revolve, as if she were fixed ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross

... all recollect the classical story of Scylla and Charybdis, the former a maiden changed by Circe into a hideous sea-monster, who threw herself into the sea and became a rock, the latter changed by Jupiter into a foaming whirlpool. Vessels which avoided the rock of Scylla were oft-times ...
— Little Folks (December 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various

... you might break your arm," cried Delia Guest, who hadn't the slightest scruple about telling a falsehood if she were going to have something to laugh at by the means. Poor Joy was between Scylla and Charybdis. (If you don't know what that means, go and ask your big brothers; make them leave their chess and their newspapers on the spot, and read you what Mr. Virgil has to say about it.) If she hung on she would wrench ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

... the proverb relating to the frying-pan and the fire. To clear himself, he must mention his suspicions of Jimmy, and also his reasons for those suspicions. And to do that would mean revealing his past. It was Scylla and Charybdis. ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse

... object lesson was this for the keen-eyed young instructor! On the one hand was the Scylla of Mr. Brainerd and on the other was the Charybdis of Mr. Furbush. Lucky was he who could sail safely past the two; and he was a wise young instructor who determined to follow in ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis

... felt that, if in writing his man's biography he wrote down anything that could by possibility offend any man, he had written wrong.' The biographer, as Mr Froude found out for a commentary on all this, is placed between a Scylla and Charybdis, between what is due to the subject, and what is expected by the public. If something is left out of the portrait, the likeness will be imperfect; if the anxiety or the inquisitiveness of readers to know ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask

... cause detention, Ran like a goblin through her mansion. Thus often, when one thinks To clear himself from ill, His effort only sinks Him in the deeper still. The beldam, acting for the cock, Was Scylla for Charybdis' rock. ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine

... the tempestuous sea bellow so loud, when the Northern blast dashes it, with its foaming waves between Scylla and Charybdis; nor Stromboli, nor Mount Etna, when their sulphurous flames, having been forcibly confined, rend, and burst open the mountain, fulminating stones and earth through the air together with the flames they ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci

... writing-table, and chiffonniere, my search was fruitless—the Flying Dutchman had evidently vanished to join the Phantom Ship. I felt very uneasy, fearing he might fall a prey to my two cats, who would no doubt find cold squirrel a very tempting entremet; or if he escaped this Scylla, the Charybdis of death by starvation lay before him. The hours passed, and Fliegende Hollaender did not appear. Senta was cheerful, and reigned mistress of the revolving wheel—always the bone of contention between ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland

... glad in his heart that the young men of the house were out of the way; he did not want his little Molly to be passing from Scylla to Charybdis; and, as he afterwards scoffed at himself for thinking, he had got an idea that all young men were wolves in chase ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell



Words linked to "Charybdis" :   whirlpool, maelstrom



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