"Charybdis" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... you will have the raging Scylla on one hand as you go. His natural reply will be, Well, I will keep as far away from it as possible; I will keep close by the other side. But the rejoinder must be, No, you will be quite as ill off there; you will be in equal peril on the other side: there is Charybdis. What you have to do is to keep at a safe distance from each. In avoiding the one, do not run ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... ladies, and displayed themselves in their actions towards the Europeans, who not being disposed to return their amorous advances, often made a precipitate retreat out of the hut, not being aware at the time that by avoiding Sylla, they ran a great risk of failing into Charybdis. The widow Laddie, although huge, fat, and deaf, was by no means of a cold, phlegmatic or saturnine disposition—many a wistful look she cast towards Lander, but he either would not or could not comprehend their meaning, and to punish him for ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... not required to talk, Kenneth had time to be curiously observant of many things in passing. Each camp was the fellow of its neighbor; a chaotic collection of hastily built bunk shanties, a mess tent for those who, shunning the pay-devouring Scylla of the contractors' "commissary," fell into the Charybdis of the common table, and always, Kenneth remarked, the camp groggery, with its slab-built bar, its array of ready-filled pocket bottles, and its ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... and want. They have exemplified the saying, "To him that hath, more shall be given; and from him that hath not, the little that he hath shall be taken away". The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism. Such are the effects which must ever flow from an unmitigated ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... but to the outer sense not always. Virtues are often harsh to the ear—errors very sweet-voiced. The sirens did not sing out of tune. Better to stop one's ears than glide on Scylla or be merged into Charybdis." ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... first impulse was to run him through, and I drew my sword half from its scabbard with that purpose. But he was not the sort of a man upon whom I could use my blade. He was hardly more than a boy—a wild, half-crazed fanatic, whose reason, if he had ever possessed any, had been lost in the Charybdis of his zeal. He honestly thought it was his duty to insult persons who apparently disagreed with him. Such a method of proselyting is really a powerful means of persuasion among certain classes, and it has always been used by men who have successfully founded ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... You have taught us how to climb some mountains, but here we have to construct our ladders, for anyone less sure of foot than the chamois or the mountain sheep must stay at the bottom of the falls. Scylla and Charybdis are stationary now, and the gaping chasm has swallowed us upward, where we reach an opening into a wide park, a veritable fairyland. On the top of one of those ponderous laminations tilted edgewise is the king of ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... undismayed, Like heretics in flaming vest arrayed Each angry Don lifts high his injured head, Or 'stands between the living and the dead.' Still from St. Mary's pulpit echoes wide Primo, beware of truth, whate'er betide; Deinde, from deep Charybdis while you steer Lest damned Socinus charm you with his sneer, Watch above all, so not Saint Thomas spake, Lest upon Calvin, Scylla's ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... from Scylla to Charybdis! I was so intent on securing the disappearance of a single epithet that I accepted the rest of the advertisement and all that it involved without discussion. So it befell that the words "well-known connoisseur" were deleted; but that H. Loudon Dodd became manager and honorary steward of Pinkerton's ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Jane! it was to escape the attentions of a far less dangerous detrimental, and a far less ineligible one, that she had brought her daughter with her all the way to Riffrath—"from Charybdis to Scylla," as we used to say at Brossard's, putting the cart ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... induced the Lairds of Ellangowan to interfere with politics, he had yet the prudence, ere he went out with Lord Kenmore in 1715, to convey his estate to trustees, in order to parry pains and penalties in case the Earl of Mar could not put down the Protestant succession. But Scylla and Charybdis—a word to the wise—he only saved his estate at expense of a lawsuit, which again subdivided the family property. He was, however, a man of resolution. He sold part of the lands, evacuated the old cattle, where the family lived in their decadence as a mouse (said ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... a week without ceasing (reassuring solid nature now and then by a gulp of live fish), but also could expand his chest so considerably that it held enough air for a day's consumption. Fortified thus, he explored Charybdis and all the Liparic whirlpools, and could have found Cadman's gun anywhere, if it had only been there. But at last the sea had its revenge upon him, through the ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... asked Richling. "If you mix them, you avoid both necessities. You sail triumphantly between Scylla and Charybdis without so much as skinning ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... not familiar with the inside of palaces; if I revealed some of the secrets I learnt, they might prove of interest to the statesmen of Europe. I intend to do neither of these things. I should be between the Scylla of dullness and the Charybdis of indiscretion, and I feel that I had far better confine myself strictly to the underground drama which was being played beneath the surface of Ruritanian politics. I need only say that the secret of my imposture defied detection. I made mistakes. I had bad minutes: it needed all the tact ...
— The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... National Debt, with the certainty of the reign of the Pretender. If the landed man spoke for the Church, the Whig speculator raised the shout of "No Popery!" The war had transformed parties into factions, and the ministry stood between a Scylla of a peace-at-any-price, on the one side, and a Charybdis of a war-at-any-price on the other; or, if not a war, then a peace so one-sided that it would be almost impossible to ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... yoke, as the saying goes. I have had a difficult time with her, sir; a difficult time. It is and has been a matter of steering a narrow course between the Scylla of breaking her spirit with too much discipline and the Charybdis of allowing her to ruin her life by letting her go hog wild. She is seventeen now, and the time has come to send her to a school where she will receive an education suitable to her potentialities and abilities, and discipline which will ...
— A Spaceship Named McGuire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... have done so except for the fish (sailors) and the women (Highlanders), as they styled us, who, they said, were too much for them, combined I think with the Ladysmith sweet shop, which proved their Scylla with Colenso as their Charybdis. ...
— With the Naval Brigade in Natal (1899-1900) - Journal of Active Service • Charles Richard Newdigate Burne
... few tips from Jacinthe," ruminated Garnet. "She was Captain the last year she was at school, so she ought to know. You see, we've to steer between Scylla and Charybdis. We mustn't push ourselves forward too violently, or they'll call us cheeky, but on the other hand, if we're content to take a back seat, we may stay there for the rest of the term. Comprenez vous? It's a matter of seizing ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... or imaginary old lady who had got the metaphor of Scylla and Charybdis a little confused. Wishing to describe a ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... of an Anthology made the following remarks in his preface: "In making a selection of this kind one sails between Scylla and Charybdis—the hackneyed and the strange. I have done my best to steer clear of both these rocks.'' A leader-writer in a morning paper a few months ago made the same blunder when he wrote: "As a matter of fact, Mr. Gladstone was bound to bump against either ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... the Scylla of local neglect and the Charybdis of centralized jobbery. At first the settler was burdened with the task of clearing roughly the road in front of his own land, but the existence of vast tracts of Clergy Reserves, or other grants exempt from clearing duties, made this an ineffective ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... sea bellow so loud, when the Northern blast dashes it, with its foaming waves between Scylla and Charybdis; nor Stromboli, nor Mount Etna, when their sulphurous flames, having been forcibly confined, rend, and burst open the mountain, fulminating stones and earth through the air together with ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... the classical story of Scylla and Charybdis, the former a maiden changed by Circe into a hideous sea-monster, who threw herself into the sea and became a rock, the latter changed by Jupiter into a foaming whirlpool. Vessels which avoided the rock ...
— Little Folks (December 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... Having executed one or two throws, there comes me a voracious fish, and makes a startling dash at 'Meg with the muckle mouth.'[10] Sharply did I strike the caitiff; whereat he rolled round disdainful, making a whirl in the water of prodigious circumference; it was not exactly Charybdis, or the Maelstrom, but rather more like the wave occasioned by the sudden turning of a man-of-war's boat. Being hooked, and having by this time set his nose peremptorily down the stream, he flashed and whizzed away like a rocket. My situation partook of the nature ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... Hubmaier, and Denk, and was charged with every conceivable heresy. In a letter of March 14, accompanying the copy of his Propositions which Eck sent to the Emperor, he refers to Luther as the domestic enemy of the Church (hostis ecclesiae domesticus), who has fallen into every Scylla and Charybdis of iniquity; who speaks of the Pope as the Antichrist and of the Church as the harlot; who has praise for none but heretics and schismatics; whom the Church has to thank for the Iconoclasts, Sacramentarians, New Hussites, Anabaptists, New Epicureans, ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... state of the atmosphere the counterbalancing advantage of storm and tempest to drive them onward through the narrow waters of the Sinclair, and enable them, by anticipating the pursuit of their enemies, to shun the Scylla and Charybdis that awaited their more leisure advance. The wind increased not; and the disappointed seamen remarked, with dismay, that their craft scarcely made more progress than at the moment when she ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... to return to Babbiano, or to abandon all hope of his crown, of which the people will send the offer then to you at Aquila, where you are believed to be. So now, my dear lord, you have the tyrant at your mercy, tossed between Scylla and Charybdis. Yours it is to resolve how you will act; but I rejoice in being the one to send you word that your presence at Roccaleone and your stubborn defence of the fortress has not been vain, and that presently you are to reap the well-earned reward of it. The people have been stirred to this ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... led by my evil destiny to Charybdis, who never neglected an opportunity of seizing a new prey when it came within her reach. I thought myself quickly made happy by permission to attend her to publick places; and pleased my own vanity with ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... is even now known as Tuesday or Tiu's day. Like Ares, Tyr was noisy and courageous; he delighted in the din of battle, and was fearless at all times. He alone dared to brave the Fenris wolf; and the Southern proverb concerning Scylla and Charybdis has its counterpart in the Northern adage, "to get loose out of Laeding and to dash out of Droma." The Fenris wolf, also a personification of subterranean fire, is bound, like his prototypes ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... Stephen or Sebastian. As it is, the unimaginable touch of disease, the unrest of madness, made Caligula the genius of insatiable appetite; and his martyrdom was the torment of lust and ennui and everlasting agitation. The accident of empire tantalised him with vain hopes of satisfying the Charybdis of his soul's sick cravings. From point to point he passed of empty pleasure and unsatisfying cruelty, for ever hungry; until the malady of his spirit, unrestrained by any limitations, and with the right medium for its development, became unique—the tragic type of pathological ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... enough between the two, but after Dolf's arrival the kitchen department grew very hot and uncomfortable, and even the wary Dolf himself, skilled as he was in Lotharian practices, frequently had great difficulty in steering clear of both Scylla and Charybdis. ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... Weguelin St. Michael and contained an invitation to me for the next afternoon, I thought of those pilots whose dangers have come down to us from distant times through the songs of ancient poets. The narrow and tempestuous channel between Scylla and Charybdis bristled unquestionably with violent problems, but with none, I should suppose, that called for a nicer hand upon the wheel, or an eye more alert, than this steering of your little trireme to a successful ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... very pretty sum was realized for some charity,—I forget what,—and the affair was voted highly successful. The next day, the 28th, we were creeping towards our harbor through one of those dense fogs which are more dangerous than the old rocks of the sirens, or Scylla and Charybdis, or ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... and ardour of an adherent, in the heart of those to whom the church stands first. Here is one of the difficulties of this complex case. Yet here, too, there may be some trace of compensation. If the reader has been drawn into the whirlpools of the political Charybdis, he might not even in far worthier hands than mine have escaped the rocky headlands of the ecclesiastic Scylla. For ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... being largely based on two inherited blunders, which a truly progressive philosophy would have to begin by avoiding, thus leaving Kant on one side, and weathering his philosophy, as one might Scylla or Charybdis. The one blunder was that of the English malicious psychology which had maintained since the time of Locke that the ideas in the mind are the only objects of knowledge, instead of being the knowledge ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... Just now coming up Great Russell Street I loitered outside a print shop. There they were as usual—Hogarth's Idle and Virtuous Apprentices. The idle apprentice is certainly Scylla, but is not the virtuous apprentice just as much Charybdis? Is he so greatly preferable? Is not the right thing somewhere between the two? And does not the art of good living consist mainly in a fine perception of when to edge towards the idle and ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... Justice! in what store thou heap'st New pains, new troubles, as I here beheld, Wherefore doth fault of ours bring us to this? E'en as a billow, on Charybdis rising Against encountered billow dashing breaks; Such is the dance this wretched race must lead Whom more than elsewhere numerous here I ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... Leopold, gayly, "what a miserable lot you have chosen for yourself. You have fallen from Scylla into Charybdis, my poor youth." ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... being even felt. The stories are never tame; and, what is more remarkable, they seldom or never have the mere extravagance which in mediaeval, at least as often as in other, writing, plays Scylla to the Charybdis of tameness. Moreover, they have, as no other division of mediaeval romance has in anything like the same measure, the advantage of the presence of interesting characters of both sexes. Only the Arthurian story can approach them here, ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... deep laden with oblivion, rides O'er boisterous waves, through winter's midnight gloom, 'Twixt Scylla and Charybdis, while, in room Of pilot, Love, mine enemy, presides; At every oar a guilty fancy bides, Holding at nought the tempest and the tomb; A moist eternal wind the sails consume, Of sighs, of hopes, and of desire besides. A shower of tears, a fog of chill disdain ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... Elysian Fields, the Sunken Cities and the spot where Ulysses landed. 1 from Herculaneum and Vesuvius. 1 from Pompeii. 1 from the Island of Ischia. 1 concerning the Volcano of Stromboli, the city and Straits of Messina, the land of Sicily, Scylla and Charybdis etc. 1 about the Grecian Archipelago. 1 about a midnight visit to Athens, the Piraeus and the ruins of the Acropolis. 1 about the Hellespont, the site of ancient Troy, the Sea of Marmara, etc. 2 about Constantinople, the Golden Horn and the beauties of the Bosphorus. 1 from Odessa and Sebastopol ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... possessions; but the deliverance of the island, so vainly undertaken by the forces of the Eastern empire, was achieved by a small and private band of adventurers. [53] In the first attempt, Roger braved, in an open boat, the real and fabulous dangers of Scylla and Charybdis; landed with only sixty soldiers on a hostile shore; drove the Saracens to the gates of Messina and safely returned with the spoils of the adjacent country. In the fortress of Trani, his active and patient courage were equally conspicuous. In his old age he related ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... come to the narrows where Skylla and Charybdis dwell. On each side of the narrows is a steep cliff, one of which is so high that its sharp top reaches the sky. It is so slippery that no one is able to climb up or down its sides, nor could he if he had ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... was happy. The mirror was hung so high that I had to make a pyramid of three boxes on which to stand while shaving. They were quite rickety, and I was between the Scylla of cutting my throat with the razor and the Charybdis of breaking my bones by a fall on the ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... as absurd a demand as if I had asked for the nose off his respectable face. He referred me to the Governor at the State House, and I backed out, leaving him no doubt to regret that such mild maniacs were left at large. Here was a Scylla and Charybdis business: as if a President wasn't trying enough, without the Governor of Massachusetts and the hub of the hub piled on top of that. "I never can do it," thought I. "Tom will hoot at you if you don't," ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... allied to them, at least, by the bond of common enmity to Spain and common suffering at the hands of Spaniards. The two heretics stood in stolid apathy, realizing that with them it was but a case of passing from Charybdis to Scylla, and that they had as little to hope for from heathen as from Christian. One of these was a sturdy bowlegged fellow, whose garments were little better than rags; his weather-beaten face was of the colour of mahogany and his eyes of ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... himself a thing of evil. But under those terrible eyes, that had searched hearts as others searched printed texts for interlinear meanings, he began to feel himself drawn into the wild waters between a Scylla of shame and a Charybdis of terror. Alas! Would this man believe his wretched tale of the trickery of others; of wanton, stubborn stupidity on ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... ledge, Gain'd on the dismal shore, that all the woe Hems in of all the universe. Ah me! Almighty Justice! in what store thou heap'st New pains, new troubles, as I here beheld! Wherefore doth fault of ours bring us to this? E'en as a billow, on Charybdis rising, Against encounter'd billow dashing breaks; Such is the dance this wretched race must lead, Whom more than elsewhere numerous here I found, From one side and the other, with loud voice, Both roll'd on weights by main forge ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... coasted round the south of Sicily, instead of trying to pass the strait between the dreadful Scylla and Charybdis, and just below Mount Etna an unfortunate man came running down to the beach begging to be taken in. He was a Greek, who had been left behind when Ulysses escaped from Polyphemus' cave, and had made his way to the forests, where he had lived ever since. They had just taken him ...
— Young Folks' History of Rome • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... generation. You have done much for it in word and in deed. You have adhered to a lofty ideal and yet have been absolutely practical and, therefore, efficient, so that you are a perpetual example to young men how to avoid alike the Scylla of indifference and the Charybdis of efficiency for ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... turn out to be one of your social superiors, and not care to know you; in which case, of course, you would only be letting yourself in for a needless snubbing. In fact, in this modern England of ours, this fatherland of snobdom, one passes one's life in a see-saw of doubt, between the Scylla and Charybdis of those two antithetical social dangers. You are always afraid you may get to know somebody you yourself do not want to know, or may try to know somebody who does ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... the dreaded thirteenth tee, which, with the returning fourteenth, forms the malignant Scylla and Charybdis of the course. There is nothing to describe the thirteenth hole. It is not really a golf-hole; it is a long, narrow breathing spot, squeezed by the railroad tracks on one side and by the river on the other. Resolute and fearless golfers often cut them out entirely, ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... on his return trip from Messina to Naples he wrote at the sight of Scylla and Charybdis: "These two natural curiosities, standing so far apart in reality and placed so close together by the poet, have furnished men with an opportunity to abuse the fables of the bards, not remembering that the human imaginative faculty when it would represent ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... limbs and six long necks, with a dog's head to each, ready each to seize a man out of every ship that passed; but it was safer to keep on her side than to go to the other cliff, for there a water-witch named Charybdis lived in a whirlpool, and was sure to suck the whole ship in, and swallow it up. However, for her husband Peleus' sake, Thetis and her sister Nereids came and guided ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... lays undue stress on outward forms, and fanaticism, which gives credit to preternatural impulses, and professes a particular kind of inspiration differing not at all from infallibility, are the Scylla and Charybdis, through which, over stormy waters or serene, we have to make our steady way. Both are equally intolerant, and both are condemned by the genius of Protestantism, the constitution of the Church, and ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... bank manager's demeanour so unpropitious, that in the previous year more than once the dawn had found her trying to decide between the Scylla of the thankless post of lady companion to some wealthy parvenu on the Riviera, and the Charybdis of raising money enough to allow her to harbour paying guests in ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... the war news from the stern of our boat to the bridge of the next astern, the Virginian. The news is flashed at night by the lamps—short and long flashes. The news is picked up by wireless on the flagship, the Charybdis, at the head of our line and signaled ...
— "Crumps", The Plain Story of a Canadian Who Went • Louis Keene
... (twenty-four miles;) but who would abridge distance and miss the celebrated straits towards which we are rapidly approaching, or lose one hour on land and miss the novelties of volcanic islands, and the first view of Scylla and Charybdis? It is but eight o'clock, but the awning has been stretched over our heads an hour ago. As to breakfast—the meal which is associated with that particular hour of the four-and-twenty to all well regulated minds and stomachs—it consists here of thin veneers of old mahogany-coloured ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... of the metaphor, taken from the vexed Sicilian Seas, of Scylla and Charybdis. The twin whirlpools threatened the affrightened mariner on either side. To avoid one he too hastily cast the ship to destruction in the other. Such is precisely the position that has been reached at the present crisis in the course of human progress. When we view the shortcomings of the present ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... very glad in his heart that the young men of the house were out of the way; he did not want his little Molly to be passing from Scylla to Charybdis; and, as he afterwards scoffed at himself for thinking, he had got an idea that all young men were wolves in chase of his ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Athenians to cruise against them and command the strait. The strait in question consists of the sea between Rhegium and Messina, at the point where Sicily approaches nearest to the continent, and is the Charybdis through which the story makes Ulysses sail; and the narrowness of the passage and the strength of the current that pours in from the vast Tyrrhenian and Sicilian mains, have rightly given ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... three-cornered island, under which Enceladus the giant lies groaning day and night, and when he turns the earth quakes, and his breath bursts out in roaring flames from the highest cone of AEtna, above the chestnut woods. And there Charybdis caught them in its fearful coils of wave, and rolled mast-high about them, and spun them round and round; and they could go neither back nor forward, while ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... indigestion. Mrs. Flint was tall, thin and severe, and a great helper at St. Matthew's, the church round the corner. She gave up all her time to church work and the care of the poor, and it wasn't her fault that the poor hated her. Between the Scylla of politics and the Charybdis of religion there was very little left for poor Barbara; she faded away under the care of an elderly governess who suffered from a perfect cascade of ill-fated love affairs; it seemed that gentlemen were always "playing ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... government was really in the power of one among them, and thus of one man, the head of it, Maso degli Albizzi. Brilliant, clever, and fascinating, Maso ruled with a certain strength and generosity; but Florence was a city of merchants, and between the Scylla of oligarchy and the Charybdis of despotism, was really driven into the latter by her economic position. The Duke Gian Galeazzo of Milan closed the trade routes, and Florence was compelled to fight for her life. Pisa, too, had to be overcome, again for economic reasons, and in ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... Alas! said Panurge, Friar John damns himself here as black as buttermilk for the nonce. Oh, what a good friend I lose in him. Alas, alas! this is another gats-bout than last year's. We are falling out of Scylla into Charybdis. Oho! I drown. Confiteor; one poor word or two by way of testament, Friar John, my ghostly father; good Mr. Abstractor, my crony, my Achates, Xenomanes, my all. Alas! I drown; two words of ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... gently querulous they ask, "Who would with aching head and toiling arms Bear the full pitcher to the stream far off? Who would, of power intent on high emprise, Deem less the praise to fill the vacant gulf Then raise Charybdis upon Etna's brow?" Amid her darkest caverns most retired, Nature calls forth her filial elements To close around and cruel that monster VOID: Fire, springing fierce from his resplendent throne, And Water, dashing ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... flocks of them. No ship can pass her by unharmed, for with each head she carrieth off a man, snatching them from the ship's deck. Hard by, even a bow-shot off, is the other rock, lower by far, and with a great fig tree growing on the top. Beneath it Charybdis [Footnote: Cha-ryb'-dis] thrice a day sucketh in the water, and thrice a day spouteth it forth. If thou chance to be there when she sucks it in, not even Poseidon's help could save thee. See, therefore, ...
— The Story Of The Odyssey • The Rev. Alfred J. Church
... side there are some frightful rocks, over which the sea roars like thunder. They are called the rocks of Scylla, and if a ship gets on them she is dashed to pieces in a quarter less than no time. On the other side is the awful whirlpool of Charybdis, which draws ships from miles towards it, and sucks them under the water like straws; so I've heard say, but, as I've not seen it done, I can't vouch for the truth of the story. If you keep on one side you've a chance of being cast away ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... the wilderness, Owen Dugdale had probably never heard of the kindred terrors that used to lie in wait for the bold mariners of ancient Greece—the rock and the whirlpool known as Scylla and Charybdis—if they missed being impaled upon the one they were apt to be engulfed in the other—and yet here in the rapids of this furious Saskatchewan feeder he was brought face to face with a proposition exactly similar ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... Bay of Ta-ren'tum and down the coast until they came to the entrance of the strait now called Messina. This was a point of danger, for the loud roaring of the sea warned them that they were not far from the terrible Charybdis. Quickly Palinurus turned his ship to the left, and, all the others following, made straight for the Sicilian shore. Here they landed almost at the foot of AEtna, famous then as in our own times as a volcano or burning mountain. Under this mountain, according ...
— Story of Aeneas • Michael Clarke
... door that led to the veranda and the door that led to the music-room—between Charybdis and Scylla, as it were, for she knew he would follow her whichever way she went. She turned ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... If we do this we need not fear. We may suppose we are in danger because the stone tables of the Decalogue have gone to dust, but it is more dangerous to attempt to control men by fictions. Better no chart whatever than one which shows no actually existing perils, but warns us against Scylla, Charybdis, and the Cyclops. If we are perfectly honest with ourselves we shall not find it difficult to settle whether we ought to do this or that particular thing, and we may be content. The new legislation will come naturally at the appointed ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... discerning that the ship would sail of itself so much more easily! Which it will, if a peculiarly good seaboat, in certain kinds of sea,—for a time. Till the Sinbad "Magnetic Mountains" begin to be felt pulling, or the circles of Charybdis get you in their sweep; and then what an invention it was!—This, we say, is the new Sovereign Man, whom the English People, being in some perplexity about the Pope and other points, have called in from Hanover, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... same number of stone, and equally confident in the purity of her air as her neighbour, stood another female "Briton," with the come-into-my-parlour expression of countenance, regarding us as prey. Under the circumstances, exhausted nature gave in; though saved from Scylla, our destiny was Charybdis, and we accordingly surrendered ourselves to a wash, breakfast, and the Brahminee Bull. During the day, we had a visit from a friend and ex-brother officer, whom we had promised to stay with, at "Kussowlie," on our road up. Kalka was not HOT, but GRILLING, so that ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... Upper Gap Charybdis gives you another tremendous rolling in blowing weather, and the expanse of Lake Ontario is seen to the left, with the tortuous bay of Quinte again to the right; this arm of the lake being made for fifty or sixty miles more by the fertile district of Prince Edward, an ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... in his rough way, 'than risk Scylla and Charybdis; and so would you judge, were the bowels of my good ship stored with your wealth, as they are, it may be, with that of some of your friends. The Roman merchant likes not that narrow strait, fatal to so many, but prefers the open sea, though the voyage be longer. But with ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... of the respectable classes under his leadership. In 49, and again in 48, it escaped a similar disaster through the good sense of Caesar and his agents, who succeeded in steering between Scylla and Charybdis by saving the debtors without ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... "metaphysics" of the neo-vitalist school, which the experimental study of development and regeneration soon brought into being. In 1895 he writes:—"The too simple mechanistic conception on the one hand, and the metaphysical conception on the other represent the Scylla and Charybdis, between which to sail is indeed difficult, and so far by few satisfactorily accomplished; it cannot be denied that with the increase of knowledge the seduction of the second has lately notably increased" ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... little Puritan," cried the Judge, "would not object. But do not fancy that in avoiding Scylla I must run upon Charybdis. Be sure I would not imitate the trim moustaches and peaked chins of those old dandies, Winthrop and Endicott. I prefer the full flowing style of Wykliffe ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... that a great deal more work is expected of him than he is prepared to do. What course, then, Reverend Jones or Brown, does he take? He proceeds to do as much work as will steer him safely between the, ah—I may say, the Scylla of punishment and the Charybdis of being considered what my, er—fellow-pupils euphoniously term a swot. That, I think, is all this morning. Good day. Pray do not trouble to rise. I will find my way out.' I should then have made for the ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... heretofore the two lands, saith the tale, Had been but one, the sea rushed in and clave with mighty flood Hesperia's side from Italy, and field and city stood Drawn back on either shore, along a sundering sea-race strait. There Scylla on the right hand lurks, the left insatiate 420 Charybdis holds, who in her maw all whirling deep adown Sucketh the great flood tumbling in thrice daily, which out-thrown Thrice daily doth she spout on high, smiting the stars with brine. But Scylla doth the hidden hole of mirky cave confine; With face ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... we had just come, and now guarded by an officer; the other leading to the opposite platform, and there stood the custom-house officer receiving and inspecting the passports. It was indeed Scylla and Charybdis. If I attempted to pass the officer without a passport, I was undone; if I remained until all the other passengers had passed out, I was undone. For an instant I felt as if I had better give up the unequal contest. The forces of the enemy were too many for me. I saw that I ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... a third class, who shun the rock upon which these last fall, but wreck upon another; they run upon scylla though they have missed charybdis; they escape the liquid destruction, but split upon the solid. These are proficients in good eating; adepts in culling of delicacies, and the modes of dressing them. Matters of the whole art of cookery; each carries a kitchen in his head. Thus an excellent constitution may be ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... WE had more trouble keeping peace between them than we did between any of the rest of the Aiders," corrected Pollyanna, a little breathless from her efforts to steer between the Scylla of her father's past commands in regard to speaking of church quarrels, and the Charybdis of her aunt's present commands in regard ...
— Pollyanna • Eleanor H. Porter
... round the jutting points, the dashing of the waters, and the cries of one of the most timid of our followers, who to save himself from wet feet had mounted an overladen pony, and was now in imminent danger both of Scylla and Charybdis, added to the interest of the picture; but, occasionally, the reverberation caused by the fragments of rock, which, detaching themselves from the upper regions, came tumbling down, not far from where we stood, warned us not to dwell upon the spot. We took the hint, and hastily ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... baseness, altogether unworthy of his imitation, and best befitted with ineffable contempt. He neither dreads the contact of the baker—the Scylla of the metropolitan peripatetic, nor yet shuns the dire collision of the chimney-sweep—his Charybdis. Try to pass him as he walks leisurely on, making the solid earth ring with his bold tread, and you will experience more difficulties in the attempt than did that famous admiral, Bartholomew Diaz, when he first doubled the Cape of Storms. Or ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume X, No. 280, Saturday, October 27, 1827. • Various
... fatality which induced the Lairds of Ellangowan to interfere with politics, he had yet the prudence, ere he went out with Lord Kenmore In 1715, to convey his estate to trustees, in order to parry pains and penalties, in case the Earl of Mar could not put down the Protestant succession. But Scylla and Charybdis —a word to the wise—he only saved his estate at expense of a lawsuit, which again subdivided the family property. He was, however, a man of resolution. He sold part of the lands, evacuated the old castle, where the family lived ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... dived from the elevated railway station into the tatterdemalion life of Park Row, and when I raised my head above that ragged human maelstrom and climbed to the editorial room of The Record it seemed as though I lifted my body out of a little muddy stream and plunged my mind into a Charybdis which embraced the whole world. Its centre was the same desk which I had so often approached with trembling in the days when I was breaking spears with the ancient office-boy and Mr. Hanks. I was fixed now ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... germanum amittere crevi, 150 Quam tibi fallaci supremo in tempore dessem. Pro quo dilaceranda feris dabor alitibusque Praeda, neque iniecta tumulabor mortua terra. Quaenam te genuit sola sub rupe leaena? Quod mare conceptum spumantibus expuit undis? 155 Quae Syrtis, quae Scylla rapax, quae vasta Charybdis? Talia qui reddis pro dulci praemia vita. Si tibi non cordi fuerant conubia nostra, Saeva quod horrebas prisci praecepta parentis, At tamen in vostras potuisti ducere sedes, 160 Quae tibi iocundo famularer serva labore, Candida ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... of his time at Heavitree. It should not perhaps be asserted broadly that he had made up his mind that marriage would be good for him; but he had made up his mind, at least, to this, that it was no longer to be postponed without a balance of disadvantage. The Charybdis in the Close drove him helpless into the whirlpool of the Heavitree Scylla. He had no longer an escape from the perils of the latter shore. He had been so mauled by the opposite waves, that he had neither spirit nor skill left to him ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... joke into earnest and sue him for breach of promise after they got home. To be sure, she looked as innocent as an angel, but it is a notorious fact that women are just the most dangerous in that guise. In escaping Scylla he had plunged headlong into Charybdis. He got up with a painful sense of indecision, walked toward the window, and concluded, after a moment's thought, that he could not, as a man of honor, withdraw from a bargain which he had himself proposed. It would be wiser to abide by it, and to trust to ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... good-bye, jumped overboard, and continued his voyage. The end of this poor man was very sad. The king, being seized with an insane desire to know something about the depths of the terrible gulf of Charybdis, offered Nicholas a golden cup if he would dive down and explore them. He dived accordingly, remained below nearly an hour, and brought back a glowing account of the wonders and horrors of the seething whirlpool. The king, far from being satisfied, became ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... hard-fought engagements—the defeats, plans, failures—the gloomy hours, days, when our Nationality seem'd hung in pall of doubt, perhaps death—the Mephistophelean sneers of foreign lands and attaches—the dreaded Scylla of European interference, and the Charybdis of the tremendously dangerous latent strata of secession sympathizers throughout the free States, (far more numerous than is supposed)—the long marches in summer—the hot sweat, and many a sunstroke, as on the rush to Gettysburg in '63—the night battles in the woods, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... the Argonauts approached new dangers, for on one side of them seethed and foamed the whirlpool of Charybdis, whilst on the other towered the mighty rock whence the monster Scylla swooped down upon unfortunate mariners; but here the goddess Hera came to their assistance, and sent to them the sea-nymph Thetis, who guided them safely through these ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... my not having said a word about it would be directly damning to me, if in the end it did not incriminate us both. It made me quite faint to feel that we might escape the Scylla of our present peril and yet split on the Charybdis of circumstantial evidence. Yet I could see no middle course of conceivable safety, if I held my tongue another moment. So I spoke up desperately, with the rash resolution which was the novel feature of my whole conduct on this ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... urgent morality off the same card in another; but never, if the devil can help it, never both in one and the same pulpit; never both in one and the same sermon; and never both in one and the same minister. You have all heard of the difficulty the voyager had in steering between Scylla and Charybdis in the Latin adage. Well, the true preacher's difficulty is just like that. Indeed, it is beyond the wit of man, and it takes all the wit of God, aright to unite the doctrine of our utter inability with the companion doctrine of our strict responsibility; free grace with ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... hour we had conversed little in French. One is naturally diffident at first; for if one musters courage to commence a conversation with propriety, the problem is how to escape a Scylla in the second and a Charybdis in the third sentence. Said one of our fair entertainers, "When I first began I would think of some sentence till I could say it without stopping, and courageously deliver myself to some guest or acquaintance." But it was like pulling the string of a shower bath. Delighted at my ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... but, if she declined, he was resolved none the less to afford his succor to any true friend of the Church that chose to request it. Timid and irresolute Catharine, who desired to steer clear of the Scylla of Spanish intervention quite as much as of the Charybdis of Huguenot supremacy, trembled for the security of her unballasted bark. But the watchful old man who sat on St. Peter's reputed seat was thrown into a paroxysm of delight. When the Ambassador Vargas handed him a copy of the message his master had sent ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... Sirens three, Amidst the flowery-kirtled Naiades, Culling their potent herbs and baleful drugs, Who, as they sung, would take the prisoned soul, And lap it in Elysium: Scylla wept, And chid her barking waves into attention, And fell Charybdis murmured soft applause. Yet they in pleasing slumber lulled the sense, 260 And in sweet madness robbed it of itself; But such a sacred and home-felt delight, Such sober certainty of waking bliss, I never heard till now. ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... rid of its French garrison without a siege; it departed one night without beat of drum, and the Cossacks came in to breakfast, leaving the trembling inhabitants to doubt whether in escaping Scylla they were not approaching Charybdis. However, they behaved tolerably well. "Did they pillage?" said I to a Breda lady who travelled with us in the Diligence. "Oh non," she replied; "seulement quelque fois ils prenaient des choses sans payer." Thus a Cossack ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... (saith Ouid) Quasq; Scilla infestat, quasue Charybdis aquas. Let others tell you wonders of the winde, How ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... be frightened! We're all upon honour, you know, So out with your tale!—Gracious powers! Is it so? Poor fellow! Your lot has gone sadly amiss, When you fell into such a Charybdis as this! ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... few weeks since with such foolish hopes of victory. You ought to have listened in time to reason, and not to the siren voice of the queen, who, in a manner so disastrous to Prussia, inveigled all the young men to plunge into the Charybdis of war, and—" ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... French Camp, where he finishes his Military Career XX He prepares a Stratagem, but finds himself countermined— Proceeds on his Journey, and is overtaken by a terrible Tempest XXI He falls upon Scylla, seeking to avoid Charybdis. XXII He arrives at Paris, and is pleased with his Reception XXIII Acquits himself with Address in a Nocturnal Riot XXIV He overlooks the Advances of his Friends, and smarts severely for his Neglect XXV He bears his Fate ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... 2, 'Eques Romanus es et ad hunc ordinem tua te perduxit industria.' Ibid. 31, 9, 'Quo modo, inquis, isto pervenitur? Non per Poeninum Graiumve montem, nec per deserta Candaviae, nec Syrtes tibi nec Scylla aut Charybdis adeundae sunt, quae tamen omnia ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... out between dinner and afternoon school to pay her visit to the china shop. As she had said, it was a risky performance. If she were caught, she would be reported to Miss Roscoe, and the penalty would be severe. It seemed sailing 'twixt Scylla and Charybdis, but it was worth trying. The first difficulty was how to put on her outdoor things without anybody noticing. Girls kept strolling in and out of the dressing-room in the most tiresome manner and after waiting as long as she dared for the room to be empty, she was finally obliged to ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... from which many were lost. The Zunis set apart a day in each year which they spent among the graves of their dead, communing with their spirits, and bringing them presents—a kind of All-souls-day. (Dorman, "Prim. Superst.," p. 35.) The Stygian flood, and Scylla and Charybdis, are found among the legends of the Caribs. (Ibid., p. 37.) Even the boat of Charon reappears in the traditions ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... variety of dishes than is usually offered in any except our very largest hotels. This is especially to be desired at breakfast. Without going to the American extreme of fifty or a hundred dishes to choose from, some intermediate point short of the Scylla of sole and the Charybdis of ham and eggs might surely be found. There is probably more pig-headed conservatism than justified fear of expense in the reluctance to follow this most excellent "American lead." The British tourist in the United States ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... It was not Sir Wilfrid's intention to make the feud his own or even to agree to it being carried on by Sir Richard. He took for minister of finance, W. S. Fielding, who justified his choice by successfully steering the budget bark between Scylla and Charybdis for fourteen years in succession before the whirlpool finally sucked him down. Where Laurier went outside his following for colleagues he had ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... that have helped him in the contest, and how I saved them when they passed between the Wandering rocks, [1405] where roar terrible storms of fire and the waves foam round the rugged reefs. And now past the mighty rock of Scylla and Charybdis horribly belching, a course awaits them. But thee indeed from thy infancy did I tend with my own hands and love beyond all others that dwell in the salt sea because thou didst refuse to share the ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... party lest he should run on Scylla, he excited and provoked the jealousy and neglect of the other, who might have wrecked him on Charybdis. These were well-known dangers; but, as all navigable seas have their shoals often invisible; in order to avoid the effects of these jealousies, he selected from each party, men of experience to give him the soundings, and thus prevent him from wrecking his barque on rocks and quicksands; ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... right glad to avail herself of his arm, seeing that Mr. Slope was hovering nigh her. In striving to avoid that terrible Charybdis of a Slope she was in great danger of falling into an unseen Scylla on the other hand, that Scylla being Bertie Stanhope. Nothing could be more gracious than she was to Bertie. She almost jumped at his proffered arm. Charlotte perceived this ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... this would only have been a choice of evils, a progress from Scylla to Charybdis: not so to our Colonel. On coming up to the surface after his first dip, he found that swimming would not save him; so he quietly emptied out the water contained in the Umbrella, seated himself upon it, and sailed triumphantly into the harbour, like ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster
... Catholicism. It seems to me that John Bull is a spirit neither of heaven nor hell.... Has not the Christian Church, in its parts, surrendered itself to one or other of these simulations of the truth?... How are we to avoid Scylla and Charybdis and go straight on to the very image of Christ?" ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... to me was the fact of the ship having been carried so providentially through such a narrow opening, without coming to grief on the Scylla on the one hand, or being dashed to pieces against the Charybdis ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... an instant, or she will imagine that some dire calamity has befallen her knight, who, in hunting a siren, encountered Scylla or Charybdis. Good ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... the Rebellion; or, Scylla and Charybdis. Consisting of Observations upon the Causes, Course, and Consequences of the Late Civil War in the United States. By H. S. FOOTE. New ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... and instead of taking counsel from the Greeks, would hearken only to the commands of the priesthood. But in this, as you must see yourself, the prudent Egyptians had guessed wide of the mark in their choice of a ruler; they fell from Scylla into Charybdis. If Hophra was called the Greeks' friend, Amasis must be named our lover. The Egyptians, especially the priests and the army, breathe fire and flame, and would fain strangle us one and all, off hand, This feeling on the part of the soldiery does not disturb Amasis, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Charybdis fell, Who, yawning thrice, her lowest depths laid bare, Sucks the vast billows in her throat's dark hell, Then starward spouts the refluent surge in air. Here Scylla, gaping from her gloomy lair, The passing vessels on the rocks doth hale; A maiden to the waist, ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... rendition of persons held to labor in the slave States. Why is the language of the Constitution so guarded as not to have even the word 'slave' in it, and yet of such a character as not to interfere with local State legislation upon slavery? Simply to steer between the Charybdis of no union and the Scylla of the repudiation of the Declaration of Independence, teaching that all men are born free and equal, and that all have natural rights, such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And yet, in the slave States, the interpretation of the Constitution ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... been copiously decanted into English prose and poetry. Shakespeare could get Rhodope, not from Pliny, but from B. R.'s lively translation (1584) of the first two books of Herodotus. 'Even Launcelot Gobbo talks of Scylla and Charybdis,' says Judge Webb. Who did not? Had the Gobbos not known about Scylla and Charybdis, Shakespeare would not have lent ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... not as well be thirty? There is little choice between Scylla and Charybdis. Twenty-nine is the hour of reckoning for every ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed |
