III.
Prometheus (1816)
Context: Thy Godlike crime was to be kind,
To render with thy precepts less
The sum of human wretchedness,
And strengthen Man with his own mind;
But baffled as thou wert from high,
Still in thy patient energy,
In the endurance, and repulse
Of thine impenetrable Spirit,
Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse,
A mighty lesson we inherit:
Thou art a symbol and a sign
To Mortals of their fate and force;
Like thee, Man is in part divine,
A troubled stream from a pure source;
And Man in portions can foresee
His own funereal destiny;
His wretchedness, and his resistance,
And his sad unallied existence:
To which his Spirit may oppose
Itself — and equal to all woes,
And a firm will, and a deep sense,
Which even in torture can decry
Its own concenter'd recompense,
Triumphant where it dares defy,
And making Death a Victory.
“Achilles was the son of a goddess and of a mortal; in that, he is the image of the genius of war. The divine part is all that that is derived from moral considerations of character, talent, the interest of your adversary, of opinion, of the temper of the soldier, which is strong and victorious, or feeble and beaten, according as he believes this divine part to be. The mortal part is the arms, the fortifications, the order of battle — everything which arises out of material things.”
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
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Napoleon I of France 259
French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French 1769–1821Related quotes
“I say, then, that the universe and all its parts both received their first order from divine providence, and are at all times administered by it.”
Dico igitur providentia deorum mundum et omnes mundi partes et initio constitutas esse et omni tempore administrari.
Book II, section 30
De Natura Deorum – On the Nature of the Gods (45 BC)
Quote reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 365.
Source Book in Ancient Philosophy (1907), The Golden Sayings of Democritus
Source: The Esoteric Tradition (1935), Chapter 6
“Knowledge of divine things for the most part, as Heraclitus says, is lost to us by incredulity.”
Life of Coriolanus
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)