"Grail" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... exhausted the wealth of Christianity; For to the potency of the Christian idea is added the magic of an incomparable embodiment in human life. The story of Jesus bears the idea which it enshrines eternally through the world. It is to the idea as the vessel of the Grail. ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... girl keenly, to know how the picture touched her. Was, then, she thought, this grand, dead Past so shallow to him? These knights, pure, unstained, searching until death for the Holy Grail, could he understand the life-long agony, the triumph of their conflict over Self? These women, content to live in solitude forever because they once had loved, could any man understand that? Or the dead ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... and unreasonable quickness of city men, they soon arrived at Mrs. Grail's. The good lady was sitting at one of her front windows, sewing. As she looked into the street, her face was seen to have a sad and thoughtful expression. She came to the door in response to a sharp ring by Wesley Tiffles, who was tentative of bellpulls. Mrs. Crull kept two servants, ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... romanceros, previous to the Golden Age of their literature (1550-1700), drawing their subjects from the history or legends of France and Spain, and treating mainly of questions of chivalry and love. Arthur, the Round Table, and the Quest for the Holy Grail, were their stock subjects, previous to the appearance of Amadis de Gaule, a work of original fiction remodelled and extended in the fifteenth century by Garcia Ordonez de Montalvo. During the Golden Age, Spain boasts more than two hundred artificial ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... literary revolutions of the twelfth century. The French epics are full of omens of the coming victory of romance, though they have not yet given way. They still retain, in spite of their anticipations of the Kingdom of the Grail, an alliance in spirit with the older Teutonic poetry, and with those Icelandic histories that are the highest literary expression of the Northern spirit in its independence ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... Perhaps to-night he may realise it; certainly in the morning it will be much nearer; and as for the third day, it will be realised in some great festival of delight. There is, too, a subtle selfishness in this quest after the ideal—the Holy Grail of the imagination. The artist keeps the secret from his brother artists until he can startle them with some gracious surprise. He almost pities them, as he thinks of the revelation that is about to dawn upon unsuspecting and slumberous ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... think imperishable. He fitted so precisely into a certain pigeonhole of human kind.—What we had not counted on was the fierceness of the stimulus—like the taste of blood to a carnivore or, to the true knight, a glimpse of the veritable Grail. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... has been a Copper Coinage in Ireland, and so has been Roast Sucking-pig, and so has been Holy Dying, and so has been Mr Pepys's somewhat unholy living, and so have been Ecclesiastical Polity, The Grail, Angling for Chub, The Wealth of Nations, The Sublime and the Beautiful, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Prize-Fights, Grecian Urns, Modern Painters, Intimations of Immortality in early Childhood, Travels ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... struck her that this was the very situation with which that 'Romance of the Middle Ages' film ended. You know the one I mean. Sir Percival Ye Something (which has slipped my memory for the moment) goes out after the Holy Grail; meets damsel in distress; overcomes her persecutors; rescues her; gets wounded, and is nursed back to life in her arms. Sally had seen it a dozen times. And every time she had reflected that the days of romance are dead, and that that sort ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... that I had climbed there one day. "I dream a painting!" he said, "The Quest of the Grail. Now I see it running over the four walls of a church, and now I see it all packed into one man who rides. Then again it has seemed to me truer to have it in a man and woman who walk, or perhaps even are seated. ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... summer day To fight the boastful Hun, In khaki clad, as fine a lad As ever carried gun, No braver knight e'er went to fight, In shining coat of mail, In days of old, for love or gold, Or for the Holy Grail. ...
— War Rhymes • Abner Cosens
... seen that the Idea of Infinity is a necessary result of our finite senses, that the only Reality is the Spiritual, the Here and the Now; that the Riddle of the Universe is not to be solved by the Intellect but by that method which is employed by those who are earnestly following the "Quest of the Grail"—namely, by realising that our True Personality or Transcendental Ego is an emanation from the Absolute; that we are one-with Him, and that it is by following the old Hellenic command "[Greek: Gnothi seauton]" (Know thyself)—namely, ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... whom every manifestation of human energy was a thrilling spectacle and who felt for ever the desire to resolve his experience of life into a literary form. On that high head of the passion for form the attempt at perfection, the quest for which was to his mind the real search for the holy grail—he said the most interesting, the most inspiring things. He mixed with them a thousand illustrations from his own life, from other lives he had known, from history and fiction, and above all from the annals of the time that was dear ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... it scientifically, had now crunched his last leaf of salad. Wiping his lips with his napkin, he joined our tete-a-tete. 'Gracious madam, I agree with you. He who seeks from music more than music gives, is on the quest—how shall I put it?—of the Holy Grail.' 'And what,' I struck in, 'is this minimum or maximum that music gives?' 'Dear young friend,' replied the professor, 'music gives melodies, harmonies, the many beautiful forms to which sound shall be fashioned. Just as in the case of shells and ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... drama was familiar to New Yorkers from many concert performances. Once, indeed, there was a "Parsifal" festival in Brooklyn, under the direction of Mr. Seidl, in which all the music was sung by the best singers of the Metropolitan Opera House on a stage set to suggest the Temple of the Grail. Only the action and the pictures were new to the city's music lovers. Nevertheless the interest on the part of the public was stupendous. The first five representations were over on January 21st, but before then Mr. Conried had already announced ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... too long, though I should like to tell of the three-leaved Herb of Life by which Sigmund made Sinfioti alive again. For this is the very soma-plant of India, the holy grail of King Arthur, ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... allowed, however, that Titurel the Chief had grown extremely aged, but it was not allowed that he could die in the presence of the Sangrail. He seemed to have been laid in a kind of trance, resting in an open tomb beneath the altar of the Grail; and whenever the cup was uncovered his voice might be heard joining in the celebration. Meanwhile, Amfortas, his ...
— Parsifal - Story and Analysis of Wagner's Great Opera • H. R. Haweis
... the arena of Tannhaeuser's mind; the cosmic glories of the Ring with the resplendent figures of Siegfried and Brunhilde; the self-dedication of Parsifal, the Sir Percival of our Arthurian legends, whom "The sweet vision of the Holy Grail drew from all vain-glories, rivalries and earthly heats." Into the glowing music of Wagner my son read lessons in renunciation, the sordidness of the lust for gold, the sublimity of pure human ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones |
