"Sisyphus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and difficult one. If it had come in my time I might have tried it. But it would be uphill work, a sort of Sisyphus affair: you may get the stone to the top, but the chances are against it. And which party is one to join, when he sees nothing in either but selfish greed and stale traditions? Viewed as a missionary field, Bob, it's just like the ministry: you are weighed down with ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... "The beautiful distich upon Ajax puts me in mind of a description in Homer's 'Odyssey,' which none of the critics have taken notice of. It is where Sisyphus is represented lifting his stone up the hill which is no sooner carried to the top of it, but it immediately tumbles to the bottom. This double motion of the stone is admirably described in the numbers of these ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... that it is the effort itself which forms the measure of, and constitutes, our riches. Progression is the increase of the proportion of the effect to the result. Its ideal extreme may be represented by the eternal and fruitless efforts of Sisyphus.[A] ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... 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
... 'This is pleasant,' he said to himself when the morning had turned to afternoon and the afternoon to night, 'and it is certainly new. A stratus of tepid cloud a thousand miles long and a thousand miles deep, and a man in a dug-out paddling through! Sisyphus was nothing to this.' But he made himself comfortable in a philosophic way, and went to the only place left to ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... Appellat paetumm pater; et pullum, male parvus Si cui filius est; ut abortivus fuit olim Sisyphus: hunc varum, distortis cruribus; illum Balbutit scaurum, pravis fullum ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... of his hall by Boreas for the express purpose of looking black at one another. When they ask you, "how you do," you would think they were measuring the length of your coffin. They are ever, it is true, labouring to be agreeable; but they are like Sisyphus, the stone they roll up the hill with so much toil, runs down again, and hits you a thump on the legs. They are sometimes polite, but invariably uncivil; their warmth is always artificial—their cold never, they are stiff without dignity, and cringing without manners. ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... ever prevented by the matter they bear in them, that is to say, by their inner void, by the interval between what they are and what they ought to be. They are for ever on the point of recovering themselves, for ever occupied in losing themselves. An inflexible law condemns them, like the rock of Sisyphus, to fall back when they are almost touching the summit, and this law, which has projected them into space and time, is nothing other than the very constancy of their original insufficiency. The alternations of generation and decay, the ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... I know not what besides! What I really want is to die and to be born again, transformed myself, and in a different world. And I can neither stifle these aspirations nor deceive myself as to the possibility of satisfying them. I seem condemned to roll forever the rock of Sisyphus, and to feel that slow wearing away of the mind which befalls the man whose vocation and destiny are in perpetual conflict. "A Christian heart and a pagan head," like Jacobi; tenderness and pride; width of mind and feebleness of will; the two men of St. Paul; ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the people! Amid these heavy-hearted and dull-eyed loiterers, what a relief it would have been to have met the soiled jacket, the brawny arm, and the manly brow, of one of our own artizans! I felt there were worse things in the world than hard work. Better it were to roll the stone of Sisyphus all life-long, than spend it in such idleness as weighs upon the cities of Italy. Better the clang of the forge than the rattle of the sabre. The Milanese seemed looking into the future; and a dismal future it is, if ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... the admired of women—how Tommy had fought for it since first he drank of them in Pym's sparkling pages! To some it seems to be easy, but to him it was a labour of Sisyphus. Everything had been against him. But he concentrated. No labour was too Herculean; he was prepared, if necessary, to walk round the world to get to the other side of the wall across which some men can step. And he did take a roundabout ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... my woes still bemoaning; My eyes with tears against the fire striving, Whose scorching gleed my heart to cinders turneth; But with those drops the flame again reviving, Still more and more it to my torment burneth, With Sisyphus thus do I roll the stone, And turn the ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Idea, by Michael Drayton; Fidessa, by Bartholomew Griffin; Chloris, by William Smith • Michael Drayton, Bartholomew Griffin, and William Smith |
