"Protagonist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... characteristic of their author. Dr. Matthews is a national figure. Pastor of the Presbyterian Church having the largest membership in the world, he is a fearless protagonist of Fundamentalist doctrine and greatly in demand at ...
— God's Plan with Men • T. T. (Thomas Theodore) Martin
... distant acquaintances, whom he criticizes ab extra; we do not recognize at first sight that he is criticizing himself. The character of the Eleatic stranger is colourless; he is to a certain extent the reflection of his father and master, Parmenides, who is the protagonist in the dialogue which is called by his name. Theaetetus himself is not distinguished by the remarkable traits which are attributed to him in the preceding dialogue. He is no longer under the spell of Socrates, or subject to the operation of his midwifery, though the fiction ...
— Sophist • Plato
... for his pictures. There was one, a Sargent, a portrait of the protagonist in this little drama of success, that hung in a recess of the hall at the foot of the stairs. R. Gordon Carson, as the great psychologist had seen him, was a striking person, an embodiment of modern ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... "'And the protagonist, Monsieur? Surely you don't mean to revive the allegorical personages in the mysteries of the ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... it was, that phrase, as food for thought, was distinctly worth hearing. We left the river three days afterwards and I never returned to Sambir; but whatever happened to the protagonist of my Willems nobody can deny that I have recorded for him a ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... the name of the American Disease was given to it. Various theories about the effects of climate, sunlight per square inch and unit of time, oxygen content of the air, and so on, were offered up upon the altar of scientific explanation. Sir Arbuthnot Lane, famous protagonist of Lane's intestinal kink, said that all Americans were neurasthenic. Neurasthenia became one of the most popular of diagnoses, and ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... a prosaic personage and is much too tall in proportion to the spry little dandy Lieutenant at his side. Invested with some strange attribute by the genius of the painter, this Dutchman becomes the protagonist in a soundless symphony of light and shadow. The waves that emanate from the canvas suffuse your senses but do not soothe or satisfy. The modern nervous intensity, missing absolutely in Hals and his substantial humans, is present in Rembrandt. We say "modern" as a sop to ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... Pantycelyn was born in 1717, at Cefncoed Farm, near Llandovery. Three years younger than Harris, (an Oxford graduate,) and educated only at a village school and an academy at Llwynllwyd, he was the song protagonist of the holy campaign as the other was its champion preacher. From first to last Williams wrote nine hundred and sixteen hymns, some of which are still heard throughout the church militant, and others survive in local use and affection. He died Jan. 11, 1791, at ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... were its salient features. Defeated at the polls in 1880 he resigned, and died next year. A master of epigram and a brilliant debater, he really led his party. He was the opposite in all respects of his protagonist, Mr. Gladstone. Lacking in zeal, he was yet loyal to England, and a warm personal friend ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... American life who epitomized more finely Roosevelt's philosophy that in the public arena one must to the uttermost spend and be spent. It was a magnificent and enduring trail that Dr. Shaw blazed. Everywhere her endeavors had the impersonal and unselfish touch that marks the great protagonist of new ideals. She was a gallant and stirring figure in the history of this country and leaves the government of the United States distinctly in ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... sought in any exceptionally opulent citizen of that world. He would have, if nothing else, the distinction of his unmeasured millions, which would form a poetry, however sordid; the note of the world we mean is indistinction, and the protagonist of the fiction seeking to portray its fads and characters must not have more than two or three millions at the most. He, or better she, were better perhaps with only a million, or a million and ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... may be morally certain, however, it is no mock self-disparagement (!) that moves me to humbly acknowledge (!) my inferiority to this immortal mind. I have availed myself of the only alternative left, when I recognized the impossibility of rivalling this protagonist among the dramatis personae of the great Drama of English Fiction, and have done something of which he speaks very tenderly and delicately somewhere in his prolific writings, one's "best." He says, "one ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... curious to see America, the United States, looking on herself, first, as a sort of natural peacemaker, then as a moral protagonist in this terrible time. No nation is less fitted for this role. For two or more centuries America has marched proudly in the van of human hatred,—making bonfires of human flesh and laughing at them hideously, and making the insulting of millions more than a matter of dislike,—rather ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... New South, here briefly indicated, and in order to appreciate what Lanier really accomplished, two types of Southerners must be clearly distinguished. After the war the conservative Southerner — ranging all the way from the fiery Bourbon to the strong and worthy protagonist of the old order — failed to understand the meaning of defeat. He interpreted the conflict as the triumph of brute force, — sheer material prosperity, — and comforted himself with the thought that many of the noblest causes had ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... world too young, his precocity as poet and master of fantastic prose has yet not the complexion of a Chatterton or a Keats. In his literary remains, slender enough as to quantity, there is little to suggest a fuller development if he had lived. Like his protagonist Arthur Rimbaud—surely the most extraordinary poetic apparition of the nineteenth century—Jules Laforgue accomplished his destiny during the period when most poets are moulding their wings preparatory to flight. He flew in youth, flew ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... the Rocks" the protagonist expresses his belief that oratory is a weapon of war, and that it should be unsheathed, so to speak, in all its brilliancy only with the definite view of rousing people to action. Surely no man ever ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... a race supplies that impressiveness with which a heroic or royal origin invests the protagonist of a tragedy, an Agamemnon or a Theseus. Hence, though traceable in all, the operation of this law, analogous to the law of Tragedy, displays itself in the history of imperial cities or nations in grander and more imposing dimensions. Nowhere, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... triumph of Protestantism, appear to have, in some degree, rather diminished the prominence of Knox. He would never make Mary weep again. He had lost the protagonist against whom, for a while, he had stood almost alone, and soon we find him complaining of neglect. He appeared at the General Assembly of June 25, 1567—a scanty gathering. George Buchanan, a layman, was Moderator: the Assembly was adjourned to July 21, and the ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... to such a design the narrative must be one of personal experience, so conceived as to be a type of the universal experience of man. The poem was to be an allegory, and in making himself its protagonist Dante assumed a double part. He represents both the individual Dante, the actual man, and that man as the symbol of man in general. His description of his journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise has a literal veracity; and under the letter is the allegory of the conduct and consequences ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... to me that music is wrong before a play or during intermissions. But it is necessary until our dramatists provide some other prelude. That prelude must be a beautiful setting of silence for a few moments showing the protagonist under the light of eternity. In the beginning all words contained a spiritual "import,"—were angels. At Babel many fell. Now all our spiritual words are material words grown out of their meanings. When expression becomes passion, it is the passion of creation, clothing itself in images as God ...
— The Forgotten Threshold • Arthur Middleton
... protagonist, the Indian chief, had no doubt at all about his own intentions and was stating them with a clearness that could not be mistaken. Captain Kenyon continued to switch his boot uneasily and to take a nervous ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... all stories, is that the Fairy Prince lifts Cinderella above her cruel sisters and stepmother, and so enables her to lord it over them. The same idea underlies practically all other folk-stories: the essence of each of them is to be found in the ultimate triumph and exaltation of its protagonist. And of the real men and women of history, the most venerated and envied are those whose early humiliations were but preludes to terminal glories; for example, Lincoln, Whittington, Franklin, Columbus, Demosthenes, Frederick the Great, Catherine, ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... the syndicate formed at Washington. On the contrary, we may expect that, when Asia has thoroughly assimilated our economic system, the Marxian class-war will break out in the form of a war between Asia and the West, with America as the protagonist of capitalism, and Russia as the champion of Asia and Socialism. In such a war, Asia would be fighting for freedom, but probably too late to preserve the distinctive civilizations which now make Asia valuable to the human family. Indeed, the war would probably be so devastating that no civilization ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... hardly just that Cranmer should be judged on the basis of the impression created by his last month of life. That the protagonist in a great Cause should recant in the face of death seems to argue an almost incredible degree of pusillanimity, and suggests that pusillanimity and subservience are the key to his career. Nevertheless, but for that short hour of abasement nobly ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes |
