"Plutarch" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... merit, because his father has prefixed it to the second edition of his Sylva. In Mr. Nicoll's Collection of Poems, are some by him. There are two poems of his in Dryden's Miscellany. He translated Plutarch's Life of Alexander from the Greek; and the History of Two Grand Viziers, from the French. When only nineteen, he translated from the Latin, Rapin on Gardens. He died in 1698. The Quarterly Review, in its review of Mr. Bray's ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... account. History is apt to forsake you in the scene of it and come lagging hack afterward; and you cannot hope always to have an archaeologist at your elbow to remind you of things you have forgotten or possibly have not known. Suetonius, Plutarch, De Quincey, Gibbon, these are no bad preparations for a visit to the Palatine, but it is better to have read them yesterday than the day before if you wish to draw suddenly upon them for associations with any ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... than the political interests involved. (As so much of a race depends on how it faces death, and how it stands personal anguish and sickness. As, in the glints of emotions under emergencies, and the indirect traits and asides in Plutarch, we get far profounder clues to the antique world than all its more ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... remember later: "If an ox gore a man or a woman, that they die: then the ox shall be surely stoned, and his flesh shall not be eaten; but the owner of the ox shall be quit." When we turn from the Jews to the Greeks, we find the principle of the passage just quoted erected into a system. Plutarch, in his Solon, tells us that a dog that had bitten a man was to be delivered up bound to a log four cubits long. Plato made elaborate provisions in his Laws for many such cases. If a slave killed a man, he was to be given up to the relatives of the deceased. /2/ If he wounded a man, ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... the blind to lead the blind. It was this circumstance which induced Bayle to declare, that some works cannot be written in the country, and that the metropolis only can supply the wants of the literary man. Plutarch has made a similar confession; and the elder Pliny, who had not so many volumes to turn over as a modern, was sensible to the want of books, for he acknowledges that there was no book so bad by ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... girls think they will do when they get out of school! How many books they think they will read!—histories of Greece and of Rome, Grote and Curtius, of Plutarch and Gibbon; histories of France, Germany, and England, Guizot, Ranke, Green and Freeman; biographies of Caesar, Leo, Lorenzo, Frederick, Elizabeth, and Napoleon! How they will feed on the literature of modern ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... originated in Egypt; and the honour of the invention has been unanimously conferred on Hermes Trismegistus. He is by some supposed to be the same person with Chanaan, the son of Ham, whose son Mizraim first occupied and peopled Egypt. Plutarch informs us that Egypt was sometimes called Chemia: this name is supposed to be derived from Chanaan. Hence it was inferred that Chanaan was the inventor of chemistry, to which he affixed his own name. Whether the Hermes of the Greeks was Chanaan, or his son Mizraim, it is ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 211, November 12, 1853 • Various
... disposition, had lived for some time inactive at Paris. He there became acquainted with the famous Cardinal de Retz, and that penetrating judge celebrates him in his memoirs as one of those heroes, of whom there are no longer any remains in the world, and who are only to be met with in Plutarch. Desirous of improving his martial genius, he took a journey to Germany, was caressed by the emperor, received the rank of mareschal, and proposed to levy a regiment for the imperial service. While employed for that purpose in the Low Countries, he heard of the tragical death ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... "small Latin" (as Jonson called it) enabled him to read in the works of the Roman clerks; to read sufficient for his uses. As a fact, he made use of English translations, and also of Latin texts. Scholars like Bacon do not use bad translations of easy Latin authors. If Bacon wanted Plutarch, he went to Plutarch in Greek, not to an English translation of a French translation ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... too, what was at that time the most fashionable of all sciences, rhetoric. He must have made, therefore, by each course of lectures, a thousand minae, or 3335:6:8. A thousand minae, accordingly, is said by Plutarch, in another place, to have been his didactron, or usual price of teaching. Many other eminent teachers in those times appear to have acquired great fortunes. Georgias made a present to the temple of Delphi of his own ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... special mental or moral stress. History, philosophy (with sustained chains of reasoning) and biographies (best, autobiographies) of active and strenuous lives, should be resorted to by those temporarily doomed to spells of suspense and involuntary inaction. Invalids should be encouraged to read Plutarch's Lives rather than the Memorials ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... their ships had been carrying forth the intellectual fame of Athens to the Western world. Then commenced what may be called her university existence. Pericles, who succeeded Cimon, both in the government and in the patronage of art, is said by Plutarch to have entertained the idea of making Athens the capital of federated Greece; in this he failed; but his encouragement of such men as Phidias and Anaxagoras led the way to her acquiring a far more lasting sovereignty over a far wider empire. Little understanding ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... several passages of the fragmentary works of Philolaus (Stob., 'Eclog.', p. 360 and 460, Heeren), p. 62, 90, in Bockh's German edition. I do not, according to the example of Nake, cite Timof Locris, since his authenticity is doubtful. Plutarch ('De plac. Phil.', ii., I) says, in the most express manner, that Pythatoras gave the name of Cosmos to the universe on account of the order which reigned throughout it; so likewise does Galen ('Hist. Phil.', p. 429). This word, together with its novel signification, passed from the schools of ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... makes extracts from the books which are such strange companions for her years. We seem to see the grave little face as it lights with emotion over the inspiring pages of Fenelon or the chivalrous heroes of Tasso, and sympathize with the fascination that leads the child of nine years to carry her Plutarch to mass instead of her prayer book. She portrays for us her convent life with its dreams, its exaltations, its romantic friendships, and its ardent enthusiasms. We have vivid pictures of the calm and sympathetic Sophie Cannet, to whom she unburdens ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... hand, how useful is such a faculty, if well exercised! To it we owe all those interesting apophthegms and memorabilia of the ancients, which Plutarch, Xenophon, and Valerius Maximus, have transmitted to us. To it we owe all those instructive and entertaining collections which the French have made under the title of Ana, affixed to some celebrated name. To it we owe ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... judicious in the choice of topics, the most orderly in the arrangement, and the most rich in the coloring, without employing the smallest degree of exaggeration, of any state-paper that has ever yet appeared. An ancient writer (Plutarch, I think it is) quotes some verses on the eloquence of Pericles, who is called "the only orator that left stings in the minds of his hearers." Like his, the eloquence of the Declaration, not contradicting, but enforcing, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... self-conscious elegance. Scarcely a fault is his other Elizabethan habit of seldom, perhaps never, inventing the whole of his stories, but drawing the outlines of them from previous works—English chronicles, poems, or plays, Italian 'novels,' or the biographies of Plutarch. But in the majority of cases these sources provided him only with bare or even crude sketches, and perhaps nothing furnishes clearer proof of his genius than the way in which he has seen the human significance in stories baldly and wretchedly ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... proposed to be an author, ought first to be a student. He obtained, whatever was the reason, no fellowship in the college. Why he was excluded cannot now be known, and it is vain to guess; had he thought himself injured, he knew how to complain. In the life of Plutarch he mentions his education in the college with gratitude; but, in a prologue at Oxford, he ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... name is given as Sextilius by Plutarch (Life of Lucullus, chapter 25) and Appian ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... of York, afterwards JamesII., by Arabella Churchill, sister of the great Duke of Marlborough, was born at Moulins on the 21st of August 1670, and died 12th June 1734. Montesquieu said of him: "In the works of PlutarchI have seen at a distance what great men were; in Marshal BerwickI have seen what they are." By the side of the Paris road, under a tree at the northern entrance into Moulins, the forlorn Maria, with her lute and her dog Sylvie, used to sit. Thwarted ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... Plutarch placed great faith in ghosts and visions. In his Life of Dion[28] he notes the singular fact that both Dion and Brutus were warned of their approaching deaths by a frightful spectre. "It has been maintained," ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... writer; his civil administration, replete with scenes which have called into action so many and such various passions of the human heart, and which has given to native sagacity so many victories over practised politicians, will require the profound, luminous, and philosophical conceptions of a Livy, a Plutarch, or a Sallust. This history is not to be written in our day. The contemporaries of such events are not the hands to describe them. Time must first do its office—must silence the passions, remove ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... tomb of Themistocles, "a rock-hewn grave on the very margin of the sea generally covered with water," adjoins the lighthouse, which stands on the westernmost promontory of the Piraeus, some three quarters of a mile from the entrance to the harbour. Plutarch, in his Themistocles (cap. xxxii.), is at pains to describe the exact site of the "altar-like tomb," and quotes the passage from Plato (the comic poet, B.C. 428-389) which Cumberland paraphrases. Byron and Hobhouse "made the complete circuit of the peninsula of Munychia," ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... Plutarch tells us that Flora, the mistress of Cn. Pompey, used to say in commendation of her lover, that she could never quit his arms without giving ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... regular history, except school abridgments and the last two or three volumes of a translation of Rollin's Ancient History, beginning with Philip of Macedon. But I read with great delight Langhorne's translation of Plutarch. In English history, beyond the time at which Hume leaves off, I remember reading Burnet's History of his Own Time, though I cared little for anything in it except the wars and battles; and the historical part of the ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... teaching consist? Coming from a cultivated home a boy of 10 may be expected to have learned the rudiments of Latin, and at least one modern language, preferably French, colloquially, arithmetic, outlines of geography, tales from Plutarch and from other histories. Going to a preparatory school he will read easy Latin texts with translations and notes; French books, geography including the elements of astronomy, beginning also algebra and geometry. ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... father, though the most humane of men, was intensely fond of stories of war, and in a layman's way understood a good deal about strategy. For example, he knew not only, like Sir Thomas Browne, all the battles in Plutarch, but also all the big Indian battles and those of the Peninsula. He was a special student of Waterloo, for he had talked with plenty of men and officers who had ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... Corneille and a part of Racine. Of the English dramatists, he seems at this time to have tried only Massinger; "Inchbald's Theatre" also occurs. The local American histories took his attention pretty often, and he perused a variety of biography,—"Lives of the Philosophers," "Plutarch's Lives," biographies of Mohammed, Pitt, Jefferson, Goldsmith, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats, Baxter, Heber, Sir William Temple, and others. Brewster's "Natural Magic" and Sir Walter Scott's essay on "Demonology and Witchcraft" are books ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... Plutarch somewhere says that he finds no such great difference between beast and beast as between man and man. He speaks of the mind and internal qualities. I could find in my heart to say there is more difference between one man and another than between such ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... and which the people have adopted without knowing the cause, or being able to assign a reason. Carmelli tells us that it still prevailed in Italy in 1750.[2] It was evidently of long standing in Ovid's time as it had passed then into a proverb among the people; nearly two centuries afterwards Plutarch (Quaest. Rom. 86.) puts the question: [Greek: Dia ti toi Maiou menos ouk agontai gunaikas], which he makes a vain endeavour to answer satisfactorily. He assigns three reasons: first, because May being between April and June, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 34, June 22, 1850 • Various
... so doth Hierome, Origen, Tertullian, Lactantius, and many eminent fathers of the Church; that in their fall their bodies were changed into a more aerial and gross substance.' The Platonists and some rabbis, Porphyrius, Plutarch, Zosimus, &c., hold this opinion, which is scornfully denied by some others, who assert that they only deceive the eyes of men, effecting no real change. Cardan believes 'they feed on men's souls, and so [a worthy origin] belike that we have so many battles fought in all ages, countries, is to make ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... Department of South Kensington sent a selection of catalogues, chromo-lithographs, books of etchings, photographs, &c. Dr. F.A. Leo, of Berlin, sent a splendid copy of his valuable fac-simile of "Four Chapters of North's Plutarch," illustrating Shakespeare's Roman plays, to replace his former gift-volume lost in the calamitous fire. The volume is one of twenty-four copies, and the learned Professor added a printed dedication as a record of the fire and the loss. Dr. Delius, of Bonn, Herr Wilhelm Oechelhaueser, ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... turned them into his own melodious verse; yet, while adhering to the substance of each tale, he has in minor matters taken such liberties as have been allowed to poets since the earliest times. Shakespeare, in his "Julius Caesar," makes a like use of Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch; the speech of Mark Antony over the body of Caesar, to cite the most striking instance among many, is almost a literal transcription of North's version, but subjected to ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... Ancient History; Russel's Egypt; Russel's Palestine; Plutarch's Lives, to be kept on hand, and consulted as the names appear in history; Wharton's Histories; Beloe's Herodotus; Travels of Anacharsis; Mitford's Greece; Ferguson's History of the Roman Republic; Baker's Livy; Middleton's Life of Cicero; Murphy's Tacitus; Sismondi's Decline ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... pursuit was transcendent, regardless of expense; the cry for legal vengeance very great (on the part of Albert's daughters chiefly), though in vain, or nearly so, in this world. [Kohler, p. 272. Hormayr, OEsterreichischer Plutarch, oder Leben und Bild nisse, &c. (12 Bandchen; Wien, 1807,—a superior Book), ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... city in the air," said Plutarch, "than cause a State to subsist without religion." Some have contested in modern times this opinion of ancient wisdom. The philosophy of the last century, as we have said already, wished to separate duty from the idea of God. It pretended to give as the only foundation ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... that to be delivered from their calamities, they must give satisfaction to Minos. They immediately sent ambassadors to him, humbly suing for peace, which he granted them, on condition that each year, according to Apollodorus and Diodorus Siculus, or every nine years, according to Plutarch and Ovid, they should send him seven young men and as many virgins. The severity of these conditions provoked the Athenians to render Minos as odious as possible; whereupon, they promulgated the story, that he destined the youths that were sent to him, to fight in the Labyrinth ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... put together, and the rank was even more significant than the number, for among them were included Aristotle, Plato, Thucydides, Herodotus, Aristophanes, Sophocles, Euripides, Pindar and Demosthenes. The Plutarch was printed from MSS. still preserved in the ...
— Catalogue of the William Loring Andrews Collection of Early Books in the Library of Yale University • Anonymous
... Some picked troop chosen for the especial purpose of keeping watch. Heyne compares S, 504: [Greek: ieros kuklos]; 681: [Greek: lathon ierous pulaorous]. Compare, also, the [Greek: ieros lochos] of the Thebans, Plutarch, in Pelop. t. i. p. 285; E. Athen. ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... alliance with the Boeotians, and did not return until 287 (or 286). In 280 he induced the Athenians to erect a public monument in honour of his uncle with a suitable inscription. After his death (some five years later) the son of Demochares proposed and obtained a decree (Plutarch, Vitae decem oratorum, p. 851) that a statue should be erected in his honour, containing a record of his public services, which seem to have consisted in a reduction of public expenses, a more prudent management of the state finances (after his return in 287) and successful begging ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... de philotimoi physeis en tais politeiais to agan me phylaxamenai, toi agathou meizon to kakon echousi. PLUTARCH. IN AGESILAO. ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... Plutarch, in his "Life of Alexander," gives us many proofs of that great general's credulity. The historian says:—"Upon his (Alexander's) approach to the walls (of Babylon) he saw a great number of crows fighting, some of which fell down dead at his feet." This was a bad sign. But I will ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... all Knowledge, because, among all other channels of thought, it alone was the exponent of absolute and undeniable truth. He tells us that "Geometry rightly treated is the Knowledge of the Eternal"; and Plutarch gives us yet another instance of Plato's teaching concerning this subject, in which he looks upon God as the Great Architect, when he says, "Plato says that God is always geometrising." Holding, therefore, as ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... Ages. We have from Greece and Rome but few literary examples of 'Psychical Research,' few collections of books on 'Bogles' as Scott called them. We possess Palaephatus, the life of Apollonius of Tyana, jests in Lucian, argument and exposition from Pliny, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Plutarch, hints from Plato, Plautus, Lucretius, from St. Augustine and other fathers. Suetonius chronicles noises and hauntings after the death of Caligula, but, naturally, the historian does not record similar disturbances ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... a sublime fact in Plutarch, or an unselfish deed in a line of poetry, or thrill beneath some heroic legend, it is no longer fairyland—I have ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... not appear to have retained any hold on the later language of Greece. Like several experiments in language of the writers of the Elizabethan age, they were afterwards lost; and though occasionally found in Plutarch and imitators of Plato, they have not been accepted by Aristotle or passed into ...
— Laws • Plato
... calculate the returns of eclipses six hundred years before the birth of Christ; of course, he was well acquainted with the causes by which they were produced; yet his countrymen were always filled with superstition and terror on the event of an eclipse. Plutarch has observed that Pericles learned from Anaxagoras to overcome the terrors which the various phenomena of the heavens inspired into those who knew not their causes; and he mentions a striking proof which he gave of this knowledge, on his expedition against Peloponnesus, when there happened ...
— 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
... in June, 1585, he was exchanged, on extremely rigorous terms, for Egmont. During his captivity in this vile dungeon, he composed not only his famous political and military discourses, but several other works, among the rest; Annotations upon Plutarch and upon the Histories ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Plutarch tells us that the finest culture comes from the study of men in their best moods. But always life's best moods come through these heavenly visions. George Eliot makes the destiny of each hero or heroine to turn upon the use of those critical hours when some ideal fronts the ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... is very remarkable, that the old writer, from whom Plutarch had his account, described the cloud, from which this stone was said to fall, in a manner (if we only make some allowance for a little exaggeration in barbarous ages,) very similar to Soldani's account ...
— Remarks Concerning Stones Said to Have Fallen from the Clouds, Both in These Days, and in Antient Times • Edward King
... suggestions he followed as an oracle, is known to us from the Theages of Plato. But of the nature of this genius, spirit, or voice, we have no certain indications from the ancients, though the subject has been much investigated in numerous writings, beginning with the monographs of Apulejus and Plutarch. The first (Apulejus), De Deo Socratis, makes the strange assertion, that it was a common thing with the Pythagoreans to have such a spirit; so much so, that if any among them declared he had not one, it ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... time, doubting Thomases or careless Gallios with regard to religious subjects, but passionate worshippers of freedom. Heated by the study of ancient literature, they set up their country as their idol, and proposed to themselves the heroes of Plutarch as their examples. They seem to have borne some resemblance to the Brissotines of the French Revolution. But it is not very easy to draw the line of distinction between them and their devout associates, whose tone and manner they sometimes ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Mississip', Plato, Plutarch, Thoreau, the Bible, Shelley, Byron, and I, all together, dropping down," she chuckled, catching her breath. "I'm tripping down in that company. And there's Terabon. He's a good sport, too, and he'll be better when I've—when ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... having to narrate events and the action of causes, he regarded Christianity more as an organism employing sacramental powers than as a body of speculative ideas. To cast up the total of moral and religious knowledge attained by Seneca, Epictetus, and Plutarch, to measure the line and rate of progress since Socrates, to compare the point reached by Hermas and Justin, is an inquiry of the highest interest for writers yet to come. But the quantitative difference of acquired precept between the ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... understood to indicate that the kings of Sparta had disobeyed the gods, and their authority was, in consequence, suspended till they had been purified by an oracle from Delphi or Olympia. [W. H. S.] This statement rests on the authority of Plutarch, Agis, 11. ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... Plutarch twits Chrysippus with inconsistency, because in the face of this declaration as to the order of treatment, he nevertheless says that morals rest upon physics. But to this charge it may fairly be replied that the order of exposition need not coincide with the order of existence. Metaphysically ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... Plutarch, in his life of Numa, describes the reflectors used by the Romans for kindling the sacred fire, as concave instruments of brass, though not spherical like the Peruvian, but of ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... mythical theory of the Greeks and Romans. The Egyptians, again, worshipped Osiris, Isis, and the rest as ancestors, and there are even modern scholars, like Mr. Loftie in his 'Essay of Scarabs,' who hold Osiris to have been originally a real historical person. But the Egyptian priests who showed Plutarch the grave of Osiris, showed him, too, the stars into which Osiris, Isis, and Horus had been metamorphosed. Here, then, we have Greeks, Egyptians, and Eskimo, all agreed about the origin of the heavenly lights, all of opinion that 'they have formerly ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... decay. It will take the credit of all creations of the brain; the harm that it does is done anonymously. We, for instance—I, Claude Vignon; you, Blondet; you, Lousteau; and you, Finot—we are all Platos, Aristides, and Catos, Plutarch's men, in short; we are all immaculate; we may wash our hands of all iniquity. Napoleon's sublime aphorism, suggested by his study of the Convention, 'No one individual is responsible for a crime committed collectively,' sums up the whole significance of a phenomenon, moral ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... reading the royal privilege, that the present title of the book is different from what it was to have had. To these extracts from the Greek poets translated into Latin verse, Grotius annexed two pieces, one of Plutarch, the other of St. Basil, on the use of the poets; giving the Greek text ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... mysteriously penetrates through both, and communicates itself with the speed of an arrow.' [Lodestone was probably known in China before the Christian era.] Other electrical effects were also observed by the ancients. Classical writers, as Homer, Caesar, and Plutarch, speak of flames on the points of javelins and the tips of masts. They regarded them as manifestations of the Deity, as did the soldiers of the Mahdi lately in the Soudan. It is recorded of Servius Tullus, the sixth king of Rome, that his hair emitted sparks ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... this religious sanction of ancestor-worship affect the social "mores" that, as is shown so clearly in Spartan history, no man could shirk his duty of marriage and of parenthood without social opprobrium. The well-known anecdote related by Plutarch of the youth who, educated rigorously to show respect to the aged fathers, is praised for flouting a grey-haired bachelor and refusing to rise and give him a seat in the open square because, as the youth scornfully says, "No children of yours will ever make sacrifice for ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... This advice to sell the worn out oxen and the sick slaves justly excited Plutarch's generous scorn, and has been made the text of a sweeping denunciation by Mommsen of the practice of husbandry by men of affairs in Cato's time. "The whole system," says Mommsen, "was pervaded by the utterly unscrupulous ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... which had belonged to an itinerant minister who preached occasionally in the neighborhood, and who, having died rather suddenly at Mr. Hunt's house, left the volumes in his saddle-bags, which were never claimed by his family, residing in a distant State. Those books were Plutarch's Lives and a worn school copy of Anthon's Classical Dictionary; and to Edna they proved a literary Ophir of inestimable value and exhaustless interest. Plutarch especially was a Pisgah of letters, whence the vast domain of learning, the Canaan of human wisdom, stretched alluringly ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... This was in effect a declaration of war; and Curio, after a last attempt at resistance, left the city, and betook himself to Caesar. (See the close of Book IV.) (12) Marcus Marcellus, Consul in B.C. 51. (13) Plutarch, "Pomp.", 49. The harbours and places of trade were placed under his control in order that he might find a remedy for the scarcity of grain. But his enemies said that he had caused the scarcity in order to get the power. (14) Milo was brought to ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... Opens his Plutarch, puts him in the place Of Roman, Grecian; draws the patched gown close, Dreams, 'Thus should I fight, save or rule the world!'— Then smilingly, contentedly, awakes To the ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... which, though they were not probable, yet carried no seeming impossibility in the picturing." By the time Flamsteed was fifteen years old he had embarked in still more serious work, for he had read Plutarch's "Lives," Tacitus' "Roman History," and many other books of a similar description. In 1661 he became ill with some serious rheumatic affection, which obliged him to be withdrawn from school. It was then for the first time that he received the rudiments of a scientific education. ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... always a great reader. In his style and his quotations he shows his predilection for the classics, especially for Plutarch's "Lives." He also read much of the literature of the French Revolution. He was a very impressive orator; his addresses and proclamations show much emphasis, and the rhetorical artifice is apparent, as it is in all literature of this kind. In his letters he uses a ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... circle on the contrary was enraptured by this enthusiasm and spoke of it as Plutarch speaks of the deeds of the ancients. Prince Vasili, who still occupied his former important posts, formed a connecting link between these two circles. He visited his "good friend Anna Pavlovna" as well as his daughter's "diplomatic salon," ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... complicated passage of human life, with its cross streams of action, its moving world of persons, its intricate motives and passions—whether it surround Julius Caesar in ancient Rome or Othello in Cyprus or one of his kings of English history—whether he find it recorded in Holinshed, or in Plutarch, or in some novel of Italy—and, with the swift intuition of the master craftsman, he grasps the essentials, arranges and links them, and renders them organic and compact. With sure judgment of effect he adds to his ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... solemn thing than I ever regarded it before. It seems to me as if a new and more arduous duty were added to those for which I was prepared,—a duty, Helen, to become worthy of you! Will you smile? No, you will not smile if I say I have had my brief moments of ambition. Sometimes as a boy, with Plutarch in my hand, stretched idly under the old cedar-trees at Laughton; sometimes as a sailor, when, becalmed on the Atlantic, and my ears freshly filled with tales of Collingwood and Nelson, I stole from my comrades and leaned musingly over the boundless sea. ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sanctuary for Buonaparte? or for Nero? or for Marius, Sylla, Otho, Galba, Charles of Burgundy, or Ferdinand of Spain? How many patriots are commemorated in the Lives of Plutarch? Expunge from the History of England the great scoundrels who disgraced their diadems, on the plea of sepulchral sanctuary, and how many kings will remain to grace their pages with the splendor of their virtues? The same question may be asked in reference to all histories, and the same answers ...
— Nuts for Future Historians to Crack • Various
... was not religious, for he never "went forward," and only went to church because he had to, and read "Plutarch's Lives" with much more relish than he did "Saints' Rest." But he had great curiosity and asked questions until his mother would say, ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... Egyptian, with Ptolemy on Babylonian, chronology. No independent writer confirms him on any important point. His Oriental history is quite incompatible with the narrative of Scripture. On every ground, the judgment of Aristotle, of Plutarch, of Arrian, of Scaliger, and of almost all the best critics of modern times, with respect to the credibility of Ctesias, is to be maintained, and his authority is to be regarded as of the very slightest value ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... Antony, wishing to surprise Cleopatra with his success in angling, employed a diver to fix fishes on his hook. Cleopatra found him out, and, in turn, employed a diver of her own to put waggishly a salt (sea) fish on his hook." The story is in Plutarch, and the popularity of the anecdote may be seen by the use Shakspeare ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... the English in India." But his imagination was kindled from other sources. Boys of pronounced character have always owed far more to their private reading than to their set studies; and the young Buonaparte, while grudgingly learning Latin and French grammar, was feeding his mind on Plutarch's "Lives"—in a French translation. The artful intermingling of the actual and the romantic, the historic and the personal, in those vivid sketches of ancient worthies and heroes, has endeared them to many minds. Rousseau derived unceasing profit ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... her good uncle a trifle dull for a compagnon de voyage. Her tastes were catholic. She read Astree with delight, loved Petrarch, Ariosto, and Montaigne; Rabelais made her "die of laughter," she found Plutarch admirable, enjoyed Tacitus as keenly as did Mme. Roland a century later, read Josephus and Lucian, dipped into the history of the crusades and of the iconoclasts, of the holy fathers and of the saints. She preferred the history of France to that of Rome ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... far lesser than these? Perhaps he was more practically useful than any one of these, or all of them together, but the soul is sensible of a sad difference somewhere. These also were citizens of a provincial capital; so were the greater part of Plutarch's heroes. Did they have a better chance than we moderns,—than we Americans? At any rate they have the start of us, and we ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... the Holy Ghost came to thaw their memories, that the words of Christ, like the voice in Plutarch that had become frozen, might at ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 71, March 8, 1851 • Various
... didn't seem to hear. A little later Mercer asked her, and he said she just looked at him for a moment and he froze. She is reading a volume of my Plutarch's 'Lives'—actually reading it. I know it by the way she ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... Deronda. Her person, her voice, her exquisite utterance, were one strong appeal to belief and tenderness. Yet what had been the history which had brought her to this desolation? He was going on a strange errand—to ask shelter for this waif. Then there occurred to him the beautiful story Plutarch somewhere tells of the Delphic women: how when the Maenads, outworn with their torch-lit wanderings, lay down to sleep in the market-place, the matrons came and stood silently round them to keep guard over their slumbers; then, when they waked, ministered ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... casually. "Father's and Miss Ross's and all the dif'rent school teachers', and all in the Sunday-school library. I've read The Lamplighter, and Scottish Chiefs, and Ivanhoe, and The Heir of Redclyffe, and Cora, the Doctor's Wife, and David Copperfield, and The Gold of Chickaree, and Plutarch's Lives, and Thaddeus of Warsaw, and Pilgrim's Progress, and lots ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of a brother who is not mentioned anywhere else in the play or in Plutarch? It struck me one day that Shakspeare might have written, "Upon my household hearth;" and on looking into North's Plutarch, I found that when Coriolanus went to the house of Aufidius, "he got him up straight to the chimney-hearth, and sate him downe." The poet who ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 191, June 25, 1853 • Various
... Egyptian Typho and the Grecian, and considers them both as "two outward forms of one internal idea, representing the destructive principle of matter opposed to the creative." I shall refer the reader to Plutarch's entertaining treatise on Isis and Osiris; but to quote authorities from Herodotus down to the Apologetic Fathers, would ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus
... the young is the consolation of the aged," murmured the professor sententiously, as if it were a quotation from Plutarch. "But let us hear what our friend Hardman has to say about the German language and the Germanic theory of education. It is ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... in Chaeronea, a city of Boeotia. To him we are indebted for so many of the lives of the philosophers, poets, orators and generals of antiquity. No book has been more generally sought after or read with greater avidity than "Plutarch's Lives." However ancient, either Greek or Latin, none has received such a universal popularity. But the character of Plutarch himself, not less than his method of writing biography, explains his universal ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... his hair whitened with the snow of age, learned to play on instruments of music. Cato, at fourscore, began his study of Greek, and the same age saw Plutarch beginning, with the enthusiasm of a boy, his first lessons in Latin. The Character of Man, Theophrastus' greatest work, was begun on his ninetieth birthday. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales was the work of the poet's declining years. Ronsard, the ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... could be used with telling effect, as the Romans learned from Archimedes in the siege of Syracuse (214-212 B.C.). As Plutarch relates, "Archimedes soon began to play his engines upon the Romans and their ships, and shot stones of such an enormous size and with so incredible a noise and velocity that nothing could stand before them. At length the Romans were so terrified that, if they saw ...
— Artillery Through the Ages - A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America • Albert Manucy
... dress and some books. I eagerly seized the prize and returned with it to my hovel. Fortunately the books were written in the language, the elements of which I had acquired at the cottage; they consisted of Paradise Lost, a volume of Plutarch's Lives, and the Sorrows of Werter. The possession of these treasures gave me extreme delight; I now continually studied and exercised my mind upon these histories, whilst my friends were employed in their ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... the wonder and stimulated the curiosity of mankind, giving rise to suppositions more or less crude and erroneous as to their actual nature and significance. It is true that Anaxagoras, five centuries before our era, and probably other philosophers preceding him, —certainly Plutarch at a much later date—taught that these delicate markings and differences of tint, obvious to every one with normal vision, point to the existence of hills and valleys on her surface; the latter maintaining that the irregularities of outline presented by the "terminator," or line of demarcation ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... quoted from [393] Plutarch on the Stoic doctrine of knowledge: "The Stoics maintain," he says, "that when a human being is born, he has the governing part of his soul like a sheet of paper ready prepared for the reception of writing, and on this the soul inscribes in succession its ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... enjoyed is of the kind that will last forever; yet it was rather the effect than the motive of his conduct. Some future Plutarch will search for a parallel to his character. Epaminondas is perhaps the brightest name of all antiquity. Our Washington resembled him in his purity and the ardor of his patriotism; and like him, he first exalted the ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... A.D. instead of 820 "B.C." (which does not mean British Columbia), the asylum for the insane at New Westminster would not have been strong enough to retain him. Lycurgus did one redeeming thing—he founded a Senate; "which, sharing,"—we are following Plutarch—"as Plato says, in the power of the kings, too imperious and unrestrained before, and having equal authority with them, was the means of keeping them within bounds of moderation, and highly contributed ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... and of eternity all the secret springs of states, and families, and individuals wonderous book! It made an uneducated artizan wiser than all the philosophers who have been contented with Plato, Aristotle, Pliny, Plutarch, and the most renowned of human writers. Not only is the real state of human nature revealed with unerring truth, as suffering under a cruel malady, strangely diverse in its operations, but all tending to the downward, dark, dreary road to misery temporal and eternal: ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... meantime, writes his "Institutes of the Christian Religion" in French as well as in Latin, showing once and for all, that in the right hands his vernacular tongue was as capable of gravity as many a writer before him had superfluously shown that it was capable of levity. Amyot, the translator of Plutarch, is a French writer of power, without whom the far greater Montaigne could hardly have been. The influence of Amyot on French literary history is wider in reach and longer in duration than we thus indicate; but ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... party, by the creation out of their ranks of the magistrates, termed Ephori, which threw an undue weight and preponderance into the hands of the people. By this breach in the constitution, faction and corruption were let in and fomented. Plutarch, indeed, denies this, but both Polybius and Aristotle are of a different opinion; the latter says, that the power of the Ephori was so great as to amount to a perfect tyranny; the kings themselves were necessitated to court their favour by such methods as greatly ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... a little Spinoza and Plutarch, I have read nothing since my return, as I am quite occupied by my present work. It is a task that will take me up to the end of July. I am in a hurry to be through with it, so as to abandon myself to the extravagances ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... Italian school, which a man who knew anything about art would have condemned at a glance. Fine examples of brown varnish, all of them. Thence to the library, lined with its carved-oak dwarf bookcases, containing books which nobody had opened for a generation—Livy, Gibbon, Hume, Burke, Smollett, Plutarch, Thomson. These sages, clad in shiny brown leather and gilding, made as good a lining for the walls as anything else, and gave an air of snugness to the room in which the family dined when there ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... love as strongly, as fervently, perhaps as ecstatically, as great people—nay, probably more so, for education has a greater chance of moderating the passion than increasing it; and so, notwithstanding of what Plutarch says of the awfully consuming love between Phrygius and Picrea, and also what Shakespeare has sung or said about a certain Romeo and a lady called Juliet, we are certain that the affection between these grand personages was not more genuine, tender, and true, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... himself from a high rock on which he was, keeping watch into the sea, which was afterwards called the Aegean. The Athenians honoured him with a statue and a shrine, and one of the Attic demes was named after him. Plutarch, Theseus; Pausanias i. 22; Hyginus, Fab. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... with brave deeds did Taormina begin, but, as a city should, with a great man. He was really great, this Andromachus. Do you not remember him out of Plutarch, and the noble words that have been his immortal memory among men? "This man was incomparably the best of all those that bore sway in Sicily at that time, governing his citizens according to law and justice, and openly ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... next half century will always be a subject for wonder. It is especially wonderful that works of art of the character produced at this time should have been the outcome of political maneuvering: for if Plutarch is to be credited the scheming of Pericles to obtain and hold possession of the government of Athens was the immediate cause of the erection of these marvellous monuments. In order to increase his influence with the common ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 08, August 1895 - Fragments of Greek Detail • Various
... to curse and to swear plainly in French, an Irish vagabond had attempted to swindle him out of that famous witticism which has since been as good as a life-annuity to the venerable knave's literary fame.] sometimes, for instance in Hierocles, sometimes in Diogenes Lrtius, in Plutarch, or in Athenus. Now the thing you know claimed by so many people, could not belong to all of them: all of them could not be the inventors. Logic and common sense unite in showing us that it must have belonged to the moderns, who ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... Dictionary under Art. Athe), and the modern French critics have for the most part followed his example. We may, however, find the foundation of all the erroneous opinions of the moderns on this subject, and the same prosaical mode of viewing it, in Plutarch's parallel between Aristophanes and Menander.], an idea which many, from the unbridled licentiousness of the old comic writers, have been led to entertain. On the contrary the former is the genuine poetic species; but ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... Which so obscure to heathens did appear? Not Plato these, nor Aristotle found: Nor he whose wisdom oracles renown'd. Hast thou a wit so deep, or so sublime, Or canst thou lower dive, or higher climb? Canst thou by reason more of Godhead know Than Plutarch, Seneca, or Cicero? Those giant wits, in happier ages born, 80 When arms and arts did Greece and Rome adorn, Knew no such system: no such piles could raise Of natural worship, built on prayer and praise, To one sole God. ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... founded on fact. It is related in Plutarch's Lives, that after the defeat of Nicias, all those of the captives who could recite something from Euripides were kindly ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... for her; that I was simply making her a friendly visit. Yes, madame, I remained half a day with her, and during the half day I never once betrayed myself. I convinced her that the mask was a face. Tell me, conscientiously, have you ever read of a more heroic act in Plutarch's ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... summary annihilation—Sir Thomas finally announces his grave conclusion in these words—'How far to rely on this tradition we refer unto consideration.' And yet he feels impelled to add a quaint reflection on the improbability of a statement made by Plutarch, that 'the brain of a phoenix is a pleasant bit, but that it causeth the headache.' Heliogabalus, he observes, could not have slain the phoenix, for it must of necessity be 'a vain design to destroy ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... was good, and so was Homer too, Our Shakespeare's life were rich to live again, What Plutarch read, that was not good nor true, Nor Shakespeare's books, ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... Plutarch tells us of one Silurus that had eighty sons, whom he calls to him as he lay upon his death-bed, and gave them a sheaf of arrows, thereby to signify, that if they lived in unity, they might do much, but if they divided, they would come to nothing. ...
— An Exhortation to Peace and Unity • Attributed (incorrectly) to John Bunyan
... their studies, to captivate and convince us by an accumulation of exact minutiae: in a word, to prove that truth is more interesting than fiction. So history should be written, and so they wrote it. First and last, whatever form they chose, they remained historians. Alleging the example set by Plutarch and Saint-Simon, they make their histories of the eighteenth century a mine of anecdote, a pageant of picturesque situations. State-papers, blue-books, ministerial despatches, are in their view the conventional means used for hoodwinking ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... master of the situation, in fearless application of "the modern spirit" of his day to every phase of life where it was applicable, who, at the expense of Attica, had given Athens a people, reluctant enough, in truth, as Plutarch suggests, to desert "their homes and religious usages and many good and gracious kings of their own" for this elect youth, who thus figures, passably, as a kind of mythic shorthand for civilisation, making roads and the like, facilitating travel, suppressing various forms ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... that prayer is natural to man, and necessary to man. Never yet has the traveller found a people on earth without prayer. Races of men have been found without houses, without raiment, without arts and sciences, but never without prayer any more than without speech. Plutarch wrote, eighteen centuries ago, If you go through all the world, you may find cities without walls, without letters, without rulers, without money, without theatres, but never without temples and gods, or without prayers, oaths, prophecies, and sacrifices, used to obtain blessings and benefits, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker |
