"Minotaur" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I stopped in during the story hour to visit a room in the school of my neighborhood. The teacher told the story of Pandora and the tale of Theseus and the Minotaur. A small friend of mine is a member of the "grade" which occupies that room. At the end of the session she ...
— The American Child • Elizabeth McCracken
... strong masses and flowing lines, simply grouped and charged with emotion—the yearning love of Diana for Endymion, the patient resignation of Ariadne, the passionate regret of Orpheus, the cruel bestiality of the Minotaur. Some will find a deeper interest, a grander style, in the designs which he made for the story of our first parents in the Book of Genesis. Remorse has rarely been expressed so powerfully as in the averted figure of Eve after the Fall, or of Cain bowed under the ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... the efforts of Prometheus in bringing down fire for man and his heroic endurance of vengeful tyranny as a result. The work of Hercules in slaying the many-headed serpent or in cleansing the Augean stables, the adventures of Theseus culminating in the labyrinth of the horrible Minotaur, the beautiful hospitality of Baucis and Philemon, the equally beautiful sadness of the death of Balder—all these simply hint the riches of the myth as story. This story interest is the one that appeals to all human beings as human beings and is ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... BELL—Rachel Pringle is no more! My heart flutters as I write the fatal words. This morning, at nine o'clock precisely, she was conducted in bridal array to the new church of Mary-le-bone; and there, with ring and book, sacrificed to the Minotaur, Matrimony, who devours so many of our bravest ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... a-seawards Reacht the Gortynian roofs where dwelt th' injurious Monarch. 75 For 'twas told of yore how forced by pestilence cruel, Eke as a blood rite due for th' Androgeonian murthur, Many a chosen youth and the bloom of damsels unmarried Food for the Minotaur, Cecropia was wont to befurnish. Seeing his narrow walls in such wise vexed with evils, 80 Theseus of freest will for dear-loved Athens his body Offered a victim so that no more to Crete be deported Lives by Cecropia doomed to burials burying nowise; ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... plots, one within the other. The story of Peleus's marriage is made the occasion for describing the scene embroidered on the coverlet or cushion of the marriage bed. This contains the loves of Theseus and Ariadne, the Minotaur, the Labyrinth, the return of Theseus, his desertion of Ariadne, and her reception into the stars by Iacchus. The poem is unequal in execution; the finest passages are the lament of Ariadne, which Virgil has imitated in that of ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... but his education as well—that is to say, not only what he really is by nature, but what he has appropriated from the common wealth of mankind; three-fourths of what he says does not belong to him, but has been acquired from without; so that we are often surprised to hear such a minotaur speak so humanly. And on a still further acquaintance, the brutality of which his face gave promise, will reveal itself in all its glory. Therefore a man who is gifted with a keen sense of physiognomy should pay careful attention to those verdicts prior to a further acquaintance, and therefore ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... your Minotaur, nor your Centaur, nor your satyr, nor your hyaena, nor your babion, but your mere traveller, ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... insect which I have observed for so long among the pines is the Bolboceras. Its burrows, scattered here and there, higgledy-piggledy with those of the Minotaur, are easy to recognise. The burrow of the Phalangist is surmounted by a voluminous rubbish-dump, the materials of which are piled in the form of a cylinder as long as the finger. Each of these dumps is a load of refuse and rubbish pushed outward ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... paving-stone at a step, or to fell an ox at a blow. The nails of his fingers were of a hue which is made artificially fashionable in eastern countries, but which excites prejudice in western civilization from an undue display of real estate. A neck which the Minotaur might have justly envied surmounted the thickness and roundness of Mr. Ballymolloy's shoulders, and supported a head more remarkable for the immense cavity of the mouth, and for a quantity of highly pomaded sandy hair, than for any intellectuality ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... time in deep affliction, on account of the tribute which they were forced to pay to Minos, king of Crete. This tribute consisted of seven youths and seven maidens, who were sent every year to be devoured by the Minotaur, a monster with a bull's body and a human head. It was exceedingly strong and fierce, and was kept in a labyrinth constructed by Daedalus, so artfully contrived that whoever was enclosed in it could by no ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... cunning workman, the crafty past all praise, The man who chained the Minotaur, the man who built the Maze. His young son is beside him and the boy's face is a light, A light of dawn and wonder ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... rest from the miseries they labored under, they sent heralds, and with much supplication were at last reconciled, entering into an agreement to send to Crete every nine years a tribute of seven young men and as many virgins, as most writers agree in stating; and the most poetical story adds that the Minotaur destroyed them, or that, wandering in the Labyrinth, and finding no possible means of getting out, they miserably ended their lives there, and that this Minotaur was (as ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... example. The Athenians had been forced by the Cretan king Minos to deliver up to him every eight years seven boys and seven girls. These were thrown as food to a terrible monster, the Minotaur. When the mournful tribute was to be paid for the third time, the king's son Theseus accompanied it to Crete. On his arrival there, Ariadne, the daughter of Minos interested herself in him. The Minotaur dwelt in the labyrinth, a maze from which no one could extricate ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... wild-flowers shining in the sun, and the ozone of country breezes, a sudden entrance into the network of narrow streets was like being thrown, without a clue, into the Minotaur's ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... "Sacre Rappresentazioni" resulted from a blending of the Umbrian divozioni with the civic pageants of St. John's Day in Florence. Civic pageants were common and in them sacred and profane elements were curiously mingled. For example, "Perugia gratified Eugenius IV in 1444 with the story of the Minotaur, the tragedy of Iphigenia, the Nativity and ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... strong. Then Taormina struck her coins: Apollo with the laurel, with the lyre, with the grape; Dionysus with the ivy, and Zeus with the olive; for the gods and temples of the Naxians had become ours, and were religiously cherished; and with the rest was struck a coin with the Minotaur, our symbol. But of Andromachus, the founder of the well-built and fairly adorned Greek city that then rose, we hear no more—a hero, I think, one of the true breed of the founders of states. But alas for liberty! A new tyrant, Agathocles, was soon on the Syracusan throne, and he ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... and foot, by the rear cf Wilkersdorf, of Zorndorf,—Russian Minotaur scrutinizing him in that manner with dull bloodshot eyes, uncertain what he will do. It is eight in the morning, hot August; wind a mere lull, but southernly if any. Small Hussar pickets ride to right of the main Army March; to keep the Cossacks in check: who are roving about, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... fixed her blue eyes with an expression of profound contempt on the repulsive figure. "You must die—ay, die!" she said, gravely. "Bonaparte, I will deliver the world from you, for you are as insatiable as the Minotaur, that required every day a human victim for breakfast. You devour men and countries, and the wails of whole nations are music to your ears. You must die, also, because you look so horrible! God has marked you, and given you a monstrous body, because your soul is ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... the full value of the work when completed. He also gave him a workshop in the Venetian Palace, to which no one had access, where he could be entirely free and undisturbed. The subject chosen for the group was Theseus vanquishing the Minotaur, and the size was to be colossal. Canova now worked with untiring devotion; he was often seen before the statues on Monte Cavallo, with sketch-book in hand, as soon as it was light enough for him to see, and he studied ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... of Hercules is the history of Pasiphae and the Minotaur; and this brings us again within the sphere of magic. Pasiphae was the wife of Minos, king of Crete, who conceived an unnatural passion for a beautiful white bull, which Neptune had presented to the king. Having found the means of gratifying ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... history of the human race! How thankful we, who live in these latter days, should be that the female rape fiend has passed into the unreturning erstwhile with the horned unicorn and dreadful hippogriff, the minotaur and other monsters that once affrighted the fearful souls of men—that sensuous sirens do not so assail us and rip our coat-tails off in a foul attempt to wreck our virtue and fill our lives with fierce regret. True, the Rev. Parkhurst doth protest that he was ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... little bay of Combe Martin, to lade with the silver and lead which can still be mined there, and which they may have carried to the old buried palaces of Knossos, to be fashioned into amulets and trinkets by those Cretans who built the dancing-floor of Ariadne and the maze of the Minotaur? That is a question that we cannot answer; all the busy speech of all those peoples is silent; only the old mine-workings remain, and the sacked and buried palaces of Crete, and a Phoenician ingot-mould fished up in Plymouth Harbour, and fitting, ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... human. An outlandish delegate sustained against both these views, with such heat as almost carried conviction, the theory of copulation between women and the males of brutes, his authority being his own avouchment in support of fables such as that of the Minotaur which the genius of the elegant Latin poet has handed down to us in the pages of his Metamorphoses. The impression made by his words was immediate but shortlived. It was effaced as easily as it had been evoked ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... in a perpetual struggle with want, exhibited year after year these studies of animals—admirable groups which reveal him as inspired by a spirit of true romance and a feeling for the beauty of the antique, as in "Theseus and the Minotaur" (1847), "Lapitha and Centaur" (1848), and numerous minor works now very highly valued. Barye was no less successful in sculpture on a small scale, and excelled in representing animals in their ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... early Mycenaean palace of Knossos, near Candia in Crete. It is impossible to enter here into all the arguments by which it has been proved that the Knossian palace is the veritable labyrinth of the Minotaur legend, nor would it be strictly germane to our subject were we to do so; but it may suffice to say ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... way out.' Here and there flowery thickets were presented to his view, but in the midst of a multitude of alleys, which crossed and recrossed his path and bore the appearance of a uniform passage, among the briars, rocks and thorns, the patient found himself in combat with an animal called the Minotaur. ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... the bull to earth, or itself, in turn, overthrown by mastiffs. Then comes those groups into which man enters—the African horseman surprised by a great serpent whose formidable folds already enclose his struggling body; the Arabs killing a lion; and the "Theseus overcoming the Minotaur," wherein the calmly irresistible hero is about to bury his keen, short sword in the bull-neck of the gross monster. The success with which Barye has combined the human and bestial characteristics of the minotaur is most remarkable and a similar triumph is won in the hippogriff—the ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... the old minotaur was in deep trouble. But his paralyzed tongue would not serve him, and his menial ignorance had not provided him with the means of telling his desire by writing. Titus was unable to understand from his signs anything further than that he wished to get into the city. The young general in one of ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... obscurity. I could meet any fate for myself, or for them, rather than sacrifice my child to such a beast as Angus Anglesea! But—but—I cannot see Abel's noble head bowed in grief and shame! I cannot! I cannot! So if the Minotaur persists in demanding the maiden, she must be thrown to him. There ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... the last plate vigorously and set it down. "The Minotaur," she said, in the tone of a schoolmistress delivering a lecture, "was a monster, half-bull, half-man, who lived in a place like the Spear Point Caves, and devoured young men and maidens. You live nearer to the Caves than any one else, ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell |
