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Tantalus   /tˈæntələs/   Listen
Tantalus

noun
1.
(Greek mythology) a wicked king and son of Zeus; condemned in Hades to stand in water that receded when he tried to drink and beneath fruit that receded when he reached for it.





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"Tantalus" Quotes from Famous Books



... their titles and sizes and numbers and their authors' names? Here you have a science that turns a philosopher into a librarian. This is not feeding the soul with wisdom: it is the crushing it under a weight of riches or torturing it in the waters of Tantalus. ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
 
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... that it was for passionate admirers the torment of Tantalus to see Chopin going about a whole evening in a salon and not to hear him. The mistress of the house took pity on us; she was indiscreet, and Chopin played, sang his most delicious songs; we set to these joyous or sad airs the words which came into our heads; we followed with our thoughts his ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
 
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... Staneholme, or to take the fee for the dowager lands of Eweford, and dwell in state in the centre of the stone and lime, and reek, and lords and ladies of Edinburgh; in part because I can hold out no longer, nor bide another day in Tantalus, which is the book name for an ill place of fruitless longing and blighted hope. I'll no be near you in your danger, because when other wives cry for the strong, grieved faces of their gudemen, you will ban the day your een first fell upon me. Nelly Carnegie, ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
 
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... still he was insatiate and unappeased. Her husband's suspicions meanwhile had been aroused. She spent so much money in occult ways that he had been impelled to ask her father what he thought L—— was doing with so much money. Fettered thus, with the torments both of Prometheus and Tantalus—the vulture gnawing at her vitals, and the lost joys mocking her out of reach—she had at last in sheer desperation been driven to request her father to procure her the assistance of a ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
 
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... day—their wants made them sensible of their infatuation, for their water was all expended, and they had taken no thought how they should be supplied till either the ship came or the boat returned, which was not likely to be under five or six days. Here, like Tantalus, they almost famished in sight of the fresh streams and lakes, being drove to such extremity at last that they were forced to tear up the floor of the cabin and patch up a sort of tub or tray with rope-yarns ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
 
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... any fool who does not suffer under some one of these diseases. Therefore there is no fool who is not miserable. Besides these things there is death, which is always hanging over us as his rock is over Tantalus; and superstition, a feeling which prevents any one who is imbued with it from ever enjoying tranquillity. Besides, such men as they do not recollect their past good fortune, do not enjoy what is present, but do nothing but expect what is to come; and ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
 
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... word. Like Tantalus, the tempting fruit had been within reach, and his evil destiny had come in to dash it from his lips. Was it wonderful if he felt disposed to give it up and in sheer ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
 
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... meal in the story of the juniper tree reminds us of the Tantalus story and the meal of Thyestes. Demeter (or Thetes) ate a shoulder of the dismembered Pelops, who was set before the gods by his father Tantalus, and the shoulder, after he was brought to life again, was replaced by an ivory ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
 
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... only through a surrounding glory. She would have shown herself without hesitation to a satyr or a eunuch. She had the self-possession of a goddess. To have made her nudity a torment, ever eluding a pursuing Tantalus, would have been an ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
 
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... forgetful moment, he might ask her to leave. Not that he believed she would leave them. He had lived long enough to know that an interest by a woman in a man—especially a man beyond the beaten track of her observation—did not necessarily mean that she might marry him if he asked her. And yet—oh, Tantalus! here she was beside him, for one afternoon again his very own, their two souls ringing with the harmony of whirling worlds in sunlit space. He sought refuge in thin thought; he strove, in oblivion, to drain the cup of the hour of its nectar, even ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
 
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... will not appear in history, published a book, entitled "True Civilization an Immediate Necessity." Surely enough true civilization is and always has been an immediate necessity: a necessity like the feast of Tantalus: but how is it to be realized? The purest saints and noblest statesmen have struggled and died in despair in the attempt to elevate humanity a single inch above the condition in ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
 
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... spirit tantalus and cigar-box with his wonted deliberation; and on reaching the drawing-room found her absorbed in contemplation of Dick's portrait, hands clasped behind her, the unbroken lines of her grey-green dress lending height and dignity to her natural ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
 
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... could drag a syllable from you. As regards myself I should do myself an injury by being silent, for my heart is like an overloaded beast of burden and talking will relieve it. Ah! Publius, my fate to-day is that of the helpless Tantalus, who sees juicy pears bobbing about under his nose and tempting his hungry stomach, and yet they never let him catch hold of them, only look-in there dwells Irene, the pear, the peach, the pomegranate, and my thirsting heart is consumed with longing for her. You may laugh—but ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
 
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... than to suffer; yet we every day see the progress of life retarded by the vis inertiae, the mere repugnance to motion, and find multitudes repining at the want of that which nothing but idleness hinders them from enjoying. The case of Tantalus, in the region of poetick punishment, was somewhat to be pitied, because the fruits that hung about him retired from his hand; but what tenderness can be claimed by those who, though perhaps they suffer the pains of Tantalus, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
 
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... reckon you'd like to see the boss? Well, he's comin' right on over. Just now he's eatin' a mess o' bacon and beans and cawfee, over to the camp. My Gawd, that's good cawfee, too. Like to have some, eh?" But Wade refused to play Tantalus to the lure of this temptation and kept silent. "Here ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
 
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... sea were a raging impatience to Paul, in which he learnt to understand all the torments of Tantalus. To know and feel her near, and yet not to be allowed to get to her! It ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
 
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... hours which belong to the public, in his own private gratification. The conscientious, the useful librarian, living amid the rich intellectual treasures of centuries, the vast majority of which he has never read, must be content daily to enact the part of Tantalus, in the presence of a tempting and appetizing banquet which is virtually beyond ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
 
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... pelas oron (he who sees what is near only), because in his eagerness to win Hippodamia, he was unconscious of the remoter consequences which the murder of Myrtilus would entail upon his race. The name Tantalus, if slightly changed, offers two etymologies; either apo tes tou lithou talanteias, or apo tou talantaton einai, signifying at once the hanging of the stone over his head in the world below, and the misery which he brought upon his country. And the ...
— Cratylus • Plato
 
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... conspires to- day to bring my home-life back again! and yet there is a fatal lack of something that is harder to endure than the absence of my own kindred and vanished youth. I doubt whether I can stay here long after all. Will not the mocking fable of Tantalus be repeated constantly, as I see others drinking daily at a fountain which though apparently so near is ever beyond ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
 
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... JOHN will be the person to present them with the then orthodox phonograph and appurtenances. But if he could foresee the future as distinctly as Mr. Punch's Seer has done in the following prophetic visions, he might substitute a biscuit-box, or a fish-slice and fork, a Tantalus spirit-case, or even a dumb-waiter, as likely, on the whole, to inspire a more ...
— Punch, Vol. 99., July 26, 1890. • Various
 
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... aunt is a very fair accountant. She has found out that the girl cannot eat figs and candies in a year to the amount of sixty thousand florins, so she is not over-willing to part with her at all. But I am not going to play the Tantalus for years, and run the risk of having the girl snatched from me by some jackanapes or ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
 
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... my chum's indifference to my sufferings, envying the while every morsel he swallowed, and wondering when my suspense would cease; and, although I had not then heard of the tortures of the classic Tantalus, my feelings must have much resembled those of that mythical person ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
 
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... To fray them thence; for he had sought to force 710 Latona, illustrious concubine of Jove, What time the Goddess journey'd o'er the rocks Of Pytho into pleasant Panopeus. Next, suff'ring grievous torments, I beheld Tantalus; in a pool he stood, his chin Wash'd by the wave; thirst-parch'd he seem'd, but found Nought to assuage his thirst; for when he bow'd His hoary head, ardent to quaff, the flood Vanish'd absorb'd, and, at his feet, adust The soil appear'd, dried, instant, by the Gods. 720 Tall ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
 
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... Cerberus, which guards those coasts With his loud barkings, overcome By the sweet notes, was now struck dumb. The Furies, us'd to rave and howl And prosecute each guilty soul, Had lost their rage, and in a deep Transport, did most profusely weep. Ixion's wheel stopp'd, and the curs'd Tantalus, almost kill'd with thirst, Though the streams now did make no haste, But wait'd for him, none would taste. That vulture, which fed still upon Tityus his liver, now was gone To feed on air, and would not stay, Though almost famish'd, with her prey. Won with these ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
 
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... with one small drop to lose In sweet forgetfulness all pain and woe, All in one moment, and so near the brink; But Fate withstands, and, to oppose th' attempt, Medusa with Gorgonian terror guards The ford, and of itself the water flies All taste of living wight, as once it fled The lip of Tantalus. Thus roving on In confused march forlorn, th' adventurous bands, With shuddering horror pale, and eyes aghast, Viewed first their lamentable lot, and found No rest. Through many a dark and dreary vale They passed, and many a region dolorous, O'er many a frozen, many ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
 
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... place: the Frenchmen were deprived of their usual amusement of admiring the ladies, and being admired in return, not a boat having made its appearance. They often remarked, with the characteristic vivacity of their nation, that they were placed in the situation of Tantalus,—so many beauties in view, without the possibility ...
— The Surrender of Napoleon • Sir Frederick Lewis Maitland
 
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... a seven-leagued-boot-power of travel, could have anticipated the last great exploit of our generals, whose energies thus far, have been devoted to the achieving of a 'masterly inactivity.' The 'forward movement' has receded and receded, like the cup of Tantalus, but the backward movement came suddenly upon us, like a thief in ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
 
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... The pangs of Tantalus, of Prometheus, or of Sisyphus are but the types of what his shall be. Let him try to hang, drown, stab himself—his ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
 
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... say, I 2 How, in far Phrygia, Thebe's friend, Tantalus' child, had dreariest end On heights of Sipylus consumed away: O'er whom the rock like clinging ivy grows, And while with moistening dew Her cheek runs down, the eternal snows Weigh o'er her, and the tearful stream renew That from sad brows her stone-cold breast doth ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
 
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... Tantalus never longed for water more than we did. Those who have been so beset can alone tell of the watchfulness and headaching for water. Now to the mast-head with straining eyes,—then arguing and inferring, from the direction of wind and tide, that water must come. Others strolling ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
 
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... up this comedy of passion with wonderful energy. One day, when the royal barge, passing down to Gravesend, crossed below his window, he raved and stormed, swearing that his enemies had brought the Queen thither 'to break his gall in sunder with Tantalus' torment.' Another time he protested that he must disguise himself as a boatman, and just catch a sight of the Queen, or else his heart would break. He drew his dagger on his keeper, Sir George Carew, and broke the knuckles of Sir ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
 
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... that were too hard to be bitten into dust and have fallen out of the cliff, which is fifty feet high, as the sea eats it away. Some of these are sculptured into the likeness effaces and figures, solemn and grotesque. It is easy to find Pharaoh, Cleopatra, Tantalus, represented here. ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
 
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... him both a reproof and thanks for leaving you here alone for any wayfarer to approach—and for me to discover. I wish," gazing abroad over the broken horizon, "there were no well between here and Jerusalem, and that he were as thirsty as Tantalus." ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
 
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... I cannot wait and watch this Robin Hood Dangle the fruit of Tantalus before me, Then eat it in my sight! I have borne enough! He gave me like a fairing to my brother In Sherwood Forest; and I now must watch him, A happy bridegroom with the happy bride, Whose lips ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
 
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... drama belongs to that heroic house whose tragic history was among the most terrible and the most familiar to a Greek audience. Tantalus, the founder of the family, for some offence against the gods, was suffering in Hades the punishment which is christened by his name. His son Pelops was stained with the blood of Myrtilus. Of the two sons of the next generation, Thyestes ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
 
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... dusk, my phone bell rang, and my state of mind became agonizing. It was maddening to think that someone, a friend, was virtually within reach of me, yet actually as far removed as if an ocean divided us! I tasted the hellish torments of Tantalus. I cursed fate, heaven, everything; I prayed; I sank into bottomless depths of despair and rose to dizzy pinnacles of hope, when a footstep sounded on the landing and a thousand wild possibilities, vague possibilities of ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
 
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... themselves appear to have fluctuated in uncertainty, as may be collected from the sentiments of Socrates. The poets inculcated a belief in Tartarus and Elysium. They have drawn a picture of Tartarus in the most gloomy and horrific colors, where men, who had been remarkable for impiety to the gods, such as Tantalus, Tityus and Sisyphus, were tormented with a variety of misery ingeniously ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 11, November, 1880 • Various
 
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... am weary of this torment, which is that of Tantalus. This is my last night on earth. After one final effort, our Mother shall have her child again—the Adriatic will ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
 
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... five from April to October, instead of having, as you will most probably in the mountain, just one day's sport in the whole of your month's holiday. Deluded friend, who suffered in Scotland last year a month of Tantalus his torments, furnished by art and nature with rods, flies, whisky, scenery, keepers, salmon innumerable, and all that man can want, except water to fish in; and who returned, having hooked accidentally by the tail one salmon—which broke all and ween to sea—why did you not stay at home ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
 
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... "Pass the tantalus, Murray," the Tenant said, and the youngest of the four handed the corncob-corked bottle to the eldest. Tenant Jones filled his cup, and then sat staring at it, while Verner Hughes thrust his pipe into the toe of the moccasin and filled it. Finally, he drank about half ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
 
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... he asked, looking at her with the wistful eyes of Tantalus gazing at the luscious fruits which the wrathful winds wafted ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
 
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... hope at the bottom. The wretchedness of his fate is not a little increased by being a constant witness of the unbounded freedom enjoyed by others: the slave's labor must necessarily be like the labor of Sisiphus; and here the torments of Tantalus ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
 
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... this noble pair were the long lines of very pale and anxious faces (I really must except my own, for my face never looked anxious till I thought of marrying, or pale till I took to scribbling), the possessors of which were experiencing a little the torment of Tantalus. The palisades, those graves of sand, turned into a rich compost by the ever-recurring burial, were directly under the windows, and the land-breeze came over them, chill and dank, in palpable currents, through the jalousies, into the heated room; and, had one thrust his head ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
 
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... smolder in the eyes of those gazers. No shop window show should be so diabolically set forth as to arouse such sensations in the breast of the beholder. It is a work of art, that window; a breeder of anarchism, a destroyer of contentment, a second feast of Tantalus. It boasts peaches, dewy and golden, when peaches have no right to be; plethoric, purple bunches of English hothouse grapes are there to taunt the ten-dollar-a-week clerk whose sick wife should be in the hospital; strawberries glow therein when shortcake ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
 
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... attained the age of one thousand and twenty-five years. [180] He must by this account have been born about one hundred years after our Saviour. He professed to have visited the infernal regions, and there to have seen Tantalus seated on a throne of gold. He is also said by some to be the same person, whose life has been written by Philostratus under the name of Apollonius of Tyana. [181] He wrote a book on the philosopher's stone, which was published ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
 
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... silks and fine array" William Blake The Flight of Love Percy Bysshe Shelley "Farewell! If ever Fondest Prayer" George Gordon Byron Porphyria's Lover Robert Browning Modern Beauty Arthur Symons La Belle Dame Sans Merci John Keats Tantalus—Texas Joaquin Miller Enchainment Arthur O'Shaughnessy Auld Robin Gray Anne Barnard Lost Light Elizabeth Akers A Sigh Harriet Prescott Spofford Hereafter Harriet Prescott Spofford Endymion Oscar Wilde "Love is a Terrible Thing" Grace Fallow Norton The Ballad of the ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
 
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... key to the right interpretation of the power of sculpture in Greece. You remember that I told you, in my Sixth Introductory Lecture (Sec. 151), that the mythic accounts of Greek sculpture begin in the legends of the family of Tantalus; and especially in the most grotesque legend of them all, the inlaying of the ivory shoulder of Pelops. At that story Pindar pauses,—not, indeed, without admiration, nor alleging any impossibility in the circumstances themselves, but doubting the careless hunger of Demeter,—and ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
 
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... yesterday there were showers enough to supply us well with their beneficent outpouring. As to the new cistern, it seems to be bewitched; for, while the spout pours into it like a cataract, it still remains almost empty. I wonder where Mr. Hosmer got it; perhaps from Tantalus, under the eaves of whose palace it must formerly have stood; for, like his drinking-cup in Hades, it has the property of filling itself ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
 
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... I be one of their flattering panders, I would hang on their ears like a horseleech, till I were full, and then drop off. I pray, leave me. Who would rely upon these miserable dependencies, in expectation to be advanc'd to-morrow? What creature ever fed worse than hoping Tantalus? Nor ever died any man more fearfully than he that hoped for a pardon. There are rewards for hawks and dogs when they have done us service; but for a soldier that hazards his limbs in a battle, nothing but a kind of ...
— The Duchess of Malfi • John Webster
 
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... the western shores of the N'yanza, are so notoriously great that it is worthy of serious attention. My reluctance to return may be easier imagined than described. I felt as much tantalised as the unhappy Tantalus must have been when unsuccessful in his bobbings for cherries in the cherry-orchard, and as much grieved as any mother would be at losing her first-born, and resolved and planned forthwith to do everything that lay in my power to ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
 
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... TANTALUS.—The left foot and leg and left cheek are placed close against the wall. The right foot is then slightly lifted in an effort to touch the left knee. Having reached it, the position should be steadily maintained ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
 
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... waiting-room is full of wretched men, each an epistolary Tantalus, who, with eyes fixed on the wooden grating, implore the clerk for a post-marked deception. 'Tis a sad spectacle, and I am sure that there is a post-office in purgatory, where tortured souls go to inquire if their deliverance has been signed ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
 
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... next quest. It was just this fervour that was threatened as, raising himself on his elbow, he stared at the foot of his bed. That his eyes refused to rest there for more than the fraction of an instant, may be taken—was, even then, taken by Keith Tantalus—as a hint of his recollection that after all the phenomenon wasn't to be singular. Thus the exact repetition, at the foot of Eva's bed, of the shape pendulous at the foot of his was hardly enough to account for the fixity with which he envisaged it, and for which he was to find, some ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
 
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... disquisitions with indolence and indifference. At present they seem to be in a very lamentable condition, and such as the poets have given us but a faint notion of in their descriptions of the punishment of Sisyphus and Tantalus. For what can be imagined more tormenting, than to seek with eagerness, what for ever flies us; and seek for it in a place, where it is impossible it ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
 
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... on September fifteenth the name of Buonaparte was officially struck from the list of general officers on duty, "in view of his refusal to proceed to the post assigned him." It really appeared as if the name of Napoleon might almost have been substituted for that of Tantalus in the fable. But it was the irony of fate that on this very day the subcommittee on foreign affairs submitted to the full meeting a proposition to send the man who was now a disgraced culprit in great state and with a full suite to take ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
 
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... criminals whose history is a warning to us: the giants, with dragons' feet extended in the burning gulf for many a mile; Phlegyas, in perpetual terror of the stone suspended over him, which never falls; Ixion chained to his wheel; the daughters of Danaus still vainly trying to fill their sieve; Tantalus, immersed in water to his chin, yet tormented with unquenchable thirst; Sisyphus despairingly labouring at his ever-descending stone. Warned by such examples, we may learn not to contemn the gods. Beyond these sad scenes, extending far to the right, ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
 
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... untroubled stores produce; He who scorns these, and needs will drink at Nile, Must run the danger of the crocodile; And of the rapid stream itself which may, At unawares bear him perhaps away. In a full flood Tantalus stands, his skin Washed o'er in vain, for ever dry within; He catches at the stream with greedy lips, From his touched mouth the wanton torment slips. You laugh now, and expand your careful brow: 'Tis finely said, but what's all this to you? Change but the name, this fable is thy story, ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
 
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... European fashion. Very well. Ah Chun gave her a European mansion. Later, as his sons and daughters grew able to advise, he built a bungalow, a spacious, rambling affair, as unpretentious as it was magnificent. Also, as time went by, there arose a mountain house on Tantalus, to which the family could flee when the "sick wind" blew from the south. And at Waikiki he built a beach residence on an extensive site so well chosen that later on, when the United States government condemned it for fortification purposes, an immense sum accompanied the condemnation. In ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
 
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... will become quite fluent on the subject, for there is nothing that should cause a fat burgher, accustomed to good living, to open his heart more than a total lack of the victuals which he can see and smell. Did you ever hear the story of an ancient gentleman called Tantalus? These old fables have a wonderful way of adapting themselves to the needs and circumstances of us ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
 
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... grieved only for the innocent Orpheus who had lost Eurydice. Sisyphus, that fraudulent king (who is doomed to roll a monstrous boulder uphill forever), stopped to listen. The daughters of Danaus left off their task of drawing water in a sieve. Tantalus forgot hunger and thirst, though before his eyes hung magical fruits that were wont to vanish out of his grasp, and just beyond reach bubbled the water that was a torment to his ears; he did not hear it while ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
 
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... before the sacred cow Io, and Epaphus, Aphrodite, and the three Charites, which have been interpreted also as the three Seasons, and the Erinnyes or Furies. The eastern side marked (A), is supposed to represent Tantalus, bringing the golden dog stolen from Crete to Pandarus in Lycia: Neptune seated, with a man leaning on a crutch, and a boy offering a bird before him, and Amymone and Amphitrite behind him; and AEsculapius seated with Telesphorus in front, and two of the Graces ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
 
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... more—encounters with rattlesnakes—the discovery in a great open plain of the cause of a distant roaring sound like water, just at a time when it was once more wanted most. And there it was where they could look down, Tantalus-like, from the brink of a vast crack in the level plain and see a vast river foaming along half-a-mile below them, ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
 
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... together, the effect of the relation of which is melancholy in the extreme, but there is no approach to fun in the whole penny library. And yet it attracts, it is calculated, four millions of readers—a fact which makes my mouth water like that of Tantalus. ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
 
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... Hicks, Jr., a drop-kicker!" exploded the dazed Butch, who could not have been more astounded had Theophilus announced that the sunny youth possessed powers of black magic. "Theophilus Opperdyke, Tantalus himself was never so tantalized as I have been of late. Tell me the whole story, old man—hurry. Spill ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
 
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Words linked to "Tantalus" :   tantalise, tantalize, mythical being, Greek mythology



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