Quotes about archer

A collection of quotes on the topic of archer, arrow, right, greatness.

Quotes about archer

“This feat of Tell, the archer, will be told
While yonder mountains stand upon their base.
By heaven! The apple's cleft right through the core.”

Friedrich Schiller William Tell

Act III, sc. iii
Wilhelm Tell (1803)

Mountain

“I think, therefore, that we ought to take great numbers of hoplites, both from Athens and from our allies, and not merely from our subjects, but also any we may be able to get for love or money in the Peloponnesus, and great numbers also of archers and slingers, to oppose the Sicilian horse.”

Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War

Book VI, 6.22-[1]
History of the Peloponnesian War, Book VI

Love, Money, Thinking, Horse

“Archer reddened to the temples but dared not move or speak: it was as if her words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might drive off on startled wings, but that might gather a flock if it were left undisturbed.”

Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence

Source: The Age of Innocence

“The Poet is a kinsman in the clouds
Who scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day;
But on the ground, among the hooting crowds,
He cannot walk, his wings are in the way.”

Charles Baudelaire book Les Fleurs du mal

Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l’archer ; Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées, Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher. "L’Albatros" [The Albatross] (translated by James McGowan, Oxford University Press, 1993) http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/L%E2%80%99Albatros Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857) Source: Les Fleurs Du Mal

Love, Way

“And he wishes, in the cold quiet of his archer's heart, that he himself could feel the intensity of their reconciliations as strongly as he feels that of their battles.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

Source: Girl With Curious Hair

Feeling, Heart

“An ordinary archer practices until he gets it right. A ranger practices until he never gets it wrong.”

John Flanagan (1873–1938) Irish-American hammer thrower

Source: The Kings of Clonmel

“An archer does not aim, he kills.”

Bernard Cornwell The Grail Quest

Thomas of Hookton, p. 18
The Grail Quest, The Archer's Tale/Harlequin (2000)

“The real reason for his attitude lay deeper. Essentially, Gloucester and the barons of his party were opposed to peace because they felt war to be their occupation. Behind them were the poorer knights and squires and archers of England, who, unconcerned with rights or wrongs, were “inclined to war such as had been their livelihood.””

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 490

War, Peace

“O! many a shaft at random sent
Finds mark the archer little meant!
And many a word, at random spoken,
May soothe or wound a heart that's broken!”

Walter Scott The Lord of the Isles

Canto V, stanza 18.
The Lord of the Isles (1815)

Heart

“What of all the will to do?
It has vanished long ago,
For a dream-shaft pierced it through
From the Unknown Archer's bow.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)

Dreams

“Fond archer, Hope! who tak'st thy aim so far,
That still or short, or wide thine arrows are!”

Abraham Cowley Against Hope

Against Hope.

Hope

“Your friend Will is a good man, too, but I fear he's no longer an archer." "It would have been better, I sometimes think-" "If he had died? Wish death on no man, Thomas, it comes soon enough without a wish."”

Bernard Cornwell The Grail Quest

Mordecai and Thomas of Hookton, p. 352
The Grail Quest, Vagabond (2002)

Death, Fear, Thinking

“Actor-oriented, dynamic systems theories. This family of theories -- inspired to a great extent by Buckley -- is largely non-functionalist. It includes Buckley’s (1967, 1998) “modern systems theory,” Archer’s (1995) “morphogenetic” theory, Burns’ “actor-system-dynamics” (also ASD; Burns et al. 1985; Burns and Flam 1987), and the “” of Geyer and van der Zouwen (1978). Complex, dynamic social systems are analysed in terms of stabilizing and destabilizing mechanisms, with human agents playing strategic roles in these processes. Institutions and cultural formations of society are carried by, transmitted, and reformed through individual and collective actions and interactions.”

Tom R. Burns (1937) American sociologist

Source: Systems theories (2006), p. 3.

Family

“A dumb halo of sorrow lurks in Shirin's cold gaze,
Reclining on the marble columns of the veranda,
A pregnant cat is sleeping on her lap
And slowly snores.

The Shirin's image north of the garden
Is hanging on an apple tree;
Khosrow, in love with another mistress, mockingly mutters;
How can the eye in this image
Show the trace of lover breathing eye of Shirin?…??
For a moment Khosrow beats at the bow and says:
Shirin's eye is a good target, I have ordained
That this new bow should be tried on it.

Khosrow, the king of the world,
The master of archers,
Pulled out an arrow from his quiver.
This Parthian arrow, this nimble flying hawk,
Is familiar with the bow and the thumb.

A spark rose from Mount Bistoun,
Was it the lightening from Farhad's ax?
An angry flame is blazing in the image's eye,
The loud uproar,
The loud clamor of Farhad's heart,
Is robing sleep from the cat's eye.”

Farrokh Tamimi (1934–2003) Iranian poet and translator

Poet, Farhad

Love, World, Cats, Lovers

“They rode armed for war, curved swords at their side and the thick horn-and-sinew bows of mounted archers in cases at their knees.”

S.M. Stirling (1953) Canadian-American author, primarily of speculative fiction

The Scourge of God https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scourge_of_God_(novel)

War

“The day is past, and the moonbeams weep
O'er the many that rest in their last cold sleep;
Near to the gashed and the nerveless hand
Is the pointless spear and the broken brand;
The archer lies like an arrow spent,
His shafts all loose and his bow unbent;
Many a white plume torn and red,
Bright curls rent from the graceful head,
Helmet and breast-plate scattered around,
Lie a fearful show on the well-fought ground;
While the crow and the raven flock overhead
To feed on the hearts of the helpless dead,
Save when scared by the glaring eye
Of some wretch in his last death agony.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Warrior from The London Literary Gazette (25th October 1823) Sketch
The Improvisatrice (1824)

Death, Lie, Fear, Sleep

“The last time I was in Spain I got through six Jeffrey Archer novels. I must remember to take enough toilet paper next time.”

Bob Monkhouse (1928–2003) English entertainer

Independent on Sunday obituary http://web.archive.org/web/20100522031727/http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/bob-monkhouse-jokewriter-to-the-stars-and-the-longreigning-king-of-primetime-comedy-dies-at-75-578058.html

Time

“He had seen fire, but only when Ara, the lightning, had destroyed some great tree. That any creature of the jungle could produce the red-and-yellow fangs which devoured wood and left nothing but fine dust surprised Tarzan greatly, and why the black warrior had ruined his delicious repast by plunging it into the blighting heat was quite beyond him. Possibly Ara was a friend with whom the Archer was sharing his food.
But, be that as it may, Tarzan would not ruin good meat in any such foolish manner, so he gobbled down a great quantity of the raw flesh, burying the balance of the carcass beside the trail where he could find it upon his return.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 9 : Man and Man

Food, Tree

“How and among whom this Palladian taste became formed it will be our business presently to inquire. The first point to note is that it had nothing to do with Wren, Vanbrugh, Hawksmoor, or Archer except in so far as, by excluding the works of these architects from salvation, it was better able to distinguish its own particular sort of grace. The second point to note is that, once formulated, the Palladian taste became the taste of the second generation of the Whig aristocracy, the sons of that Whiggery which dated its accession to power from 1688 and to which, in Anne’s time, artistic and intellectual leadership, once centred at the Court, had passed. This second Whig generation had strong beliefs and strong dislikes, conspicuous among the latter being the Stuart dynasty, the Roman Church, and most things foreign. In architectural terms that meant the Court taste of the previous half-century, the works of Sir Christopher Wren in particular and anything in the nature of Baroque.”

John Summerson (1904–1992) British architectural historian

Architecture in Britain, 1530–1830

Business, Nature, Strong, Time

“There’s no forgiveness built into the system. I told Barbara so, dozens of times. She was always marching off to save the whales, save the trees, save some goddamn thing. It was endearing. But in the back of my head I always heard Dad’s voice: ‘This is only a holding action. Nothing is ever really saved.’ Barbara thought the greenhouse effect was like a virus, something you could stop if you came up with the right vaccine. I told her it was a cancer—the cancer of humanity on the vital organs of the earth. You can’t stop that by marching.”
“Isn’t that a little like giving up?”
“I think it’s called acceptance.”
Archer stood and walked to the door, where his silhouette obscured the motion of the trees.
“Very bleak attitude, Tom.”

Robert Charles Wilson book A Bridge of Years

“Experience bears it out.”
Source: A Bridge of Years (1991), Chapter 3 (pp. 52-53)

Forgiveness, Thinking, Tree, Time

“Insatiate archer! could not one suffice?
Thy shaft flew thrice, and thrice my peace was slain;
And thrice, ere thrice yon moon had filled her horn.”

Edward Young Night-Thoughts

Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night I, Line 212.

Peace

“Half the campus was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; Benton had been endowed with one to begin with, and had smiled and sweated and and spoken for the other. A visitor looked under black beams, through leaded casements (past apple boughs, past box, past chairs like bath-tubs on broomsticks) to a lawn ornamented with one of the statues of David Smith; in the months since the figure had been put in its place a shrike had deserted for it a neighboring thorn tree, and an archer had skinned her leg against its farthest spike. On the table in the President’s waiting-room there were copies of Town and Country, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and a small magazine—a little magazine—that had no name. One walked by a mahogany hat-rack, glanced at the coat of arms on an umbrella-stand, and brushed with one’s sleeve something that gave a ghostly tinkle—four or five black and orange ellipsoids, set on grey wires, trembled in the faint breeze of the air-conditioning unit: a mobile. A cloud passed over the sun, and there came trailing from the gymnasium, in maillots and blue jeans, a melancholy procession, four dancers helping to the infirmary a friend who had dislocated her shoulder in the final variation of The Eye of Anguish.”

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 1: “The President, Mrs., and Derek Robbins”, p. 3; opening paragraph of novel

Smile, History, Idea, Tree

“Happy are they who live in the dream of their own existence, and see all things in the light of their own minds; who walk by faith and hope; to whom the guiding star of their youth still shines from afar, and into whom the spirit of the world has not entered! They have not been "hurt by the archers", nor has the iron entered their souls. The world has no hand on them.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"Mind and Motive"
Winterslow: Essays and Characters (1850)

Youth, World, Faith, Dreams

“A thought is an arrow shot at the truth; it can hit a point, but not cover the whole target. But the archer is too well satisfied with his success to ask anything farther.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913), Jnana

Truth, Success

“Each time we love,
We turn a nearer and a broader mark
To that keen archer, Sorrow, and he strikes.”

Alexander Smith (1829–1867) Scottish poet and essayist

"A Boy’s Dream".
City Poems (1857)

Love, Time

“In a cupboard filled with books he came across one with brightly colored pictures — it was a child's illustrated alphabet — A is for Archer Who shoots with a bow. B is for Boy, His first name is Joe. The pictures interested him greatly.
There were many apes with faces similar to his own, and further over in the book he found, under "M," some little monkeys such as he saw daily flitting through the trees of his primeval forest. But nowhere was pictured any of his own people; in all the book was none that resembled Kerchak, or Tublat, or Kala.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 6 : Jungle Battles

People, Books, Color, Boy

“But taking note of these things, at the last
The mariner beneath the gateway passed.
And there a lovely cloistered court he found,
A fountain in the mist o'erthrown and dry,
And in the cloister briers twining round
The slender shafts; the wondrous imagery
Outworn by more than many years gone by;
Because the country people, in their fear
Of wizardry, had wrought destruction here,
And piteously these fair things had been maimed;
There stood great Jove, lacking his head of might;
Here was the archer, swift Apollo, lamed;
The shapely limbs of Venus hid from sight
By weeds and shards; Diana's ankles light
Bound with the cable of some coasting ship;
And rusty nails through Helen's maddening lip.”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

The Earthly Paradise (1868-70), The Lady of the Land

Love, People, Fear, Light

“William now directed his archers to shoot high into the air, so that the arrows would fall behind the shield-wall, and one of these pierced Harold in the right-eye, inflicting a mortal wound. He fell at the foot of the royal standard, unconquerable except by death, which does not count in honour. The hard-fought battle was now decided.”

Winston S. Churchill book A History of the English-Speaking Peoples

On the death of King Harold at the Battle of Hastings on October 14, 1066; Vol I; The Birth of Britain.
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956–58)

Death

“In archery we have something like the way of the superior man. When the archer misses the center of the target, he turns round and seeks for the cause of his failure in himself.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

Source: The Doctrine of the Mean

Way, Failure

“There is a road that turning always
Cuts off the country of Again.
Archers stand there on every side
And as it runs time's deer is slain
And lies where it has lain.”

Edwin Muir (1887–1959) British poet, novelist and translator

"The Road" http://www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/muire-journeysandplaces/muire-journeysandplaces-00-h.html#The_Road, Journeys and Places (1937)

Time, Country

“It was quite dark when he went by the towers of Tor, where archers shoot ivory arrows at strangers lest any foreigner should alter their laws, which are bad, but not to be altered by mere aliens.”

Lord Dunsany (1878–1957) Irish writer and dramatist

The Book of Wonder http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/8wond10.txt, Distressing Tale of Thangobrind the Jeweller

Law

“My theory stands as firm as a rock; every arrow directed against it will return quickly to its archer.”

Georg Cantor (1845–1918) mathematician, inventor of set theory

As quoted in Journey Through Genius (1990) by William Dunham
Context: My theory stands as firm as a rock; every arrow directed against it will return quickly to its archer. How do I know this? Because I have studied it from all sides for many years; because I have examined all objections which have ever been made against the infinite numbers; and above all because I have followed its roots, so to speak, to the first infallible cause of all created things.

“If there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake, clearly this must be the good. Will not knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what we should? If so, we must try, in outline at least, to determine what it is.”

Aristotle book Nicomachean Ethics

Book I, 1094a.18
Nicomachean Ethics

Life, Knowledge

“With Its Applications to the Steam-engine and to the Physical Properties of Bodies, Ed. T. Archer Hirst, F. R. S.”

Rudolf Clausius (1822–1888) German mathematical physicist

The Mechanical Theory of Heat (1867)

“It was just a bowl of peasant's clay, red brown in color, thickly made and rough to the touch, not perfectly round, with a small indentation on one side where the potter had damaged the unfired clay. It was worth pennies, perhaps nothing. Yet it was the greatest treasure of Christendom. And he kissed it once, and then he drew back his strong archer's right arm, ran down to the sucking sea's edge, and threw it as far and as hard as he could. He hurled it away and it span for an instant above the gray waves, seemed to fly a heartbeat longer as if it were reluctant to let go of mankind, and then the bowl was gone.”

Bernard Cornwell The Grail Quest

The Grail Quest, Heretic (2003)

Strong, Kiss, Color, Flying

“In physics we have outgrown archer and apple-pie definitions of the fundamental symbols. To a request to explain what an electron really is supposed to be we can only answer, "It is part of the A B C of physics."”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

The external world of physics has thus become a world of shadows. In removing our illusions we have removed the substance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the greatest of our illusions. Later perhaps we may inquire whether in our zeal to cut out all that is unreal we may not have used the knife too ruthlessly. Perhaps, indeed, reality is a child which cannot survive without its nurse illusion. But if so, that is of little concern to the scientist, who has good and sufficient reasons for pursuing his investigations in the world of shadows and is content to leave to the philosopher the determination of its exact status in regard to reality. In the world of physics we watch a shadowgraph performance of the drama of familiar life. The shadow of my elbow rests on the shadow table as the shadow ink flows over the shadow paper. It is all symbolic, and as a symbol the physicist leaves it. Then comes the alchemist Mind who transmutes the symbols. The sparsely spread nuclei of electric force become a tangible solid; their restless agitation becomes the warmth of summer; the octave of aethereal vibrations becomes a gorgeous rainbow. Nor does the alchemy stop here. In the transmuted world new significances arise which are scarcely to be traced in the world of symbols; so that it becomes a world of beauty and purpose — and, alas, suffering and evil.
The frank realisation that physical science is concerned with a world of shadows is one of the most significant of recent advances.

Introduction
The Nature of the Physical World (1928)

Parting

“And surely to know what this good is, is of great importance for the conduct of life, for in that case we shall be like archers shooting at a definite mark, and shall be more likely to do what is right. But, if this is the case, we must try to comprehend, in outline at least, what it is and to which of the sciences it belongs.”

Aristotle (-384–-321 BC) Classical Greek philosopher, student of Plato and founder of Western philosophy

Bk I, Ch I
The Ethics Of Aristotle (Vol. I)

Science, Life