"Avatar" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the eyes of the conservative, or the worldly-minded, or of the plain people who could not understand the enigmatic utterances of the reformers, the dangerous or ludicrous sides of transcendentalism were naturally uppermost. Nevertheless the movement was but a new avatar of the old Puritan spirit; its moral earnestness, its spirituality, its tenderness for the individual conscience. Puritanism, too, in its day had run into grotesque extremes. Emerson bore about the same relation to the absurder outcroppings of transcendentalism that Milton ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... whenever he thought of the death of Lucien de Rubempre. Lucien should have been allowed at least one more "avatar." That is one of the things that pleases me so much in that old ten-penny paper edition published by the great Paris house. We have a list of the characters in the index, with all their other appearances on the stage; just exactly as if it were real life! It was all ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... came into being. No wonder then, that in some sort our noble profession of whaling should have been there shadowed forth. The Hindoo whale referred to, occurs in a separate department of the wall, depicting the incarnation of Vishnu in the form of leviathan, learnedly known as the Matse Avatar. But though this sculpture is half man and half whale, so as only to give the tail of the latter, yet that small section of him is all wrong. It looks more like the tapering tail of an anaconda, than the broad palms of the true ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... believe this was the first occasion in the history of the world when the idea of the Avatar found its place in religion. Western scholars are never tired of insisting that Buddhism is of the nature of a moral code, coldly leading to the path of extinction. They forget that it was held to be a religion that roused in its devotees an inextinguishable fire of enthusiasm ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... rather a quack. Possibly he meant to convey the idea that he was Moses, and that he had dwelt in the palaces of the Ramessids. The grave of the prophet was never known, and Saint-Germain may have insinuated that he began a new avatar in a cleft of Mount Pisgah; ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... darling wish of Mother Barringer's heart to see her daughter married and settled with "a stiddy young man that you knowed all about, and his folks before him." She had observed with great disquietude the brilliant avatar of Mr. Bertie Leon and the evident pride of her daughter in the bright-plumaged captive she had brought to Chaney Creek, the spoil of her maiden snare. "I don't more'n half like that little feller." (It is a Western habit to call a well-dressed ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... idea is to turn the tables on all this. I myself am impeccable in a real court of equity. My avatar as David Williams was by way of being a superb adventure. I only retired from the harmless imposture lest I might compromise you, and you are so far gone in politics now that the revelation—if it came about—that you were deceived ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... confesses), and altogether wants any controlling purpose. But to whatever extent Christianity had insinuated itself into and colored European literature, it was mainly as mythology. The Christian idea had never yet incorporated itself. It was to make its avatar in Dante. To understand fully what he accomplished we must form some conception of what is meant by the Christian idea. To bring it into fuller relief, let us contrast it with the Greek idea as it appears in poetry; for we are not dealing with a question of theology so ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... Pridian or Hu." "Ceridwen consults them before she prepares the mysterious caldron which shadows out the awful catastrophe of the Deluge." (Faber's "Pagan Idolatry," vol. ii., pp. 150, 151.) In the first Avatar of Vishnu we are told that "the divine ordinances were stolen by the demon Haya-Griva. Vishnu became a fish; and after the Deluge, when the waters had subsided, he recovered the holy books from the bottom of ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... ravenous on this Earth, a well-known phasis of human nature; and now thou art and remainest the most remarkable Attorney that ever lived and hunted in the Upper Air! For, in this terrestrial Course of Time, there was to be an Avatar of Attorneyism; the Heavens had said, Let there be an Incarnation, not divine, of the venatory Attorney-spirit which keeps its eye on the bond only;—and lo, this was it; and they have attorneyed it in its turn. Vanish, then, thou rat-eyed ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... avatar of the God of Etiquette, personified in Mr. Richard Nash, descended somewhere about the year 1705, for the purpose of regenerating the barbarians. He alighted just at the moment that one of the doctors ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... with which they had welcomed the downfall of the Bastille. Burke's Reflections, the work of a great thinker in a state of irritation bordering upon frenzy, had sounded the note of alarm. The revolution, as Burke maintained, was in fact the avatar of a diabolic power. It meant an attack upon the very organic principles of society. It therefore implied a complete breach of historical continuity, and a war against the reverence for 'prescription' and tradition ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... Vishnu, a nature god of some sort, described in the early documents as traversing the universe in three strides. Relatively insignificant in the earlier period and in the Upanishads, he appears in the epic, and afterwards, as the greatest of the gods, and, in the form of his avatar Krishna, becomes the head of a religion which has often been compared with Christianity in the purity of its moral conceptions. By his side in this later time stands his rival Civa, the chief figure in a sect or system which shared with Vishnuism the devotion ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... scholar's library, but a book for the winter evening school-room when the tasks are over and the hour for bed draws near; and honest Alan, who was a grim old fire-eater in his day has in this new avatar no more desperate purpose than to steal some young gentleman's attention from his Ovid, carry him awhile into the Highlands and the last century, and pack him to bed with some engaging images to mingle ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... idea of principle, Obedience; conforming to a Father's righteous laws, acquiescing in his just will, and returning love for love: such a phase could not be better shadowed out to creatures than by an Eternal Son; the dutiful yet supreme, the subordinate yet coeequal, the amiable yet exalted Avatar of our God. This was probable to have been the second impersonation of Deity. And ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... political freedom that the Eternal Illusion now incarnates itself. Let man be free, let man throughout the earth attain the unfettered use of all his faculties, and heaven's light will once more fill all the dark places of the world! This is the new avatar, this the glad tidings which announce the French Revolution and the Third Age. Of this ideal, the faith in which the French Girondins die is the most perfect expression. What is this faith for which Condorcet and his party perish, some by poison, some by the sword, some by the guillotine, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... and how much was patent rouge and Bloom of Ninon. He doubted whether Simpson, Sir Charles's valet, was not Colonel Clay in plain clothes; and he had half an idea that Cesarine herself was our saucy White Heather in an alternative avatar. We pointed out to him in vain that Simpson had often been present in the very same room with David Granton, and that Cesarine had dressed Mrs. Brabazon's hair at Lucerne: this partially satisfied him, but only partially. He remarked that Simpson might double both parts with somebody else unknown; ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... every day by my colonel as a shining light to the regiment. But of course you must remember that a few months ago I was practically a yob at the game, and now of the fame (and the extreme shyness that seems to come with it) of my later avatar. ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... Gautier and Prosper Merimee, told in English by Myndart Verelst and delayed with a proem by Edgar Saltus."[10] Translation again. The stories are "Avatar" and "The Venus of Ille." The essay at the beginning is a very charming performance. This book is dedicated to E. ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... even in the West it was attempted to limit Christianity have in Eastern Asia been in reality the only effects of Buddhism. Indeed, the idea of freedom took different forms in the minds of the founders—taking one form in the Indian Avatar which, notwithstanding all his sublimity, bore the mark of his nationality; and taking another form in the Messiah of Judah who saw the light of the world in the midst of a people fired with a never-subdued yearning for freedom. Buddha could conceive of freedom only ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... dust these three hundred years, what star do you now inhabit? or does your avatar live somewhere here in this world? At the thought of your unselfish loyalty and precious fibbing, an army of valiant, ghostly knights will arise from their graves, and rusty swords leap from their scabbards if aught but ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard |
