Daedalus And Icarus Quotes

Then there were those famous wings. Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure?

The second reminder is this: while technological advancements can carry humankind to impossible heights, power must be exercised responsibly. After all, people tend to forget that Daedalus’s wings for his son did work; it was Icarus who used them incorrectly.

What if it were possible or even entertaining, to recreate and transform one of the old myths and infuse it with a different meaning?...Imagine being guided by your mythology that it is better to thrive and prosper, than just to survive.

I'm looking for the labyrinth. The form that Dedalus gave me to the most disturbing question: How much of us is thought, reason, intellect... and how much delirium, hallucination, madness... and how much is a monster. The failure of every plan. A path with no way out.

He (Daedalus) would follow that bearing, the sun on his shoulders and the past slipping away.

Daedalus’s blood ran cold. “No?” he shook off his son’s arm. “For once you have tasted flight …” His voice was desperate now. “…you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.

The air is not empty space to them, it is as solid as the earth to us, or water to a fish. It holds them up and it will hold us up.

I had not fooled myself with false hope. I was a goddess, and he a mortal, and both of us were imprisoned. But I pressed his face into my mind, as seals are pressed in wax, so I could carry it with me.

Daedalus took comfort in the baby Icarus, and I loved to see him walking about with the infant dandled in his arms, showing the oblivious child the flowers and the birds and the many wonders of the palace.

In almost all human history, figures descending from the sky would have been angels or gods or demons -- or Icarus hurtling down, his father, Daedalus, following too slowly to catch the vainglorious boy. What must it have felt like to inhabit a commonality of human experience -- all eyes to the sky, watching for some mythic to land?

Daedalus said you shouldn’t fly too low. If you do, the water will fatally weigh down your wings and you will surely perish. Don’t fly too high either. The sun will melt the wax holding your wings together, and you will plunge to your death. So, moderation in all things. Always follow the middle course. How dull. Set your sights higher. Go as high as you can, all the way to the top. We are the people of the peaks, not the middle of the road.

Indeed, equal amounts of research support both assertions: that mentorship works and that it doesn’t. Mentoring programs break down in the workplace so often that scholarly research contradicts itself about the value of mentoring at all, and prompts Harvard Business Review articles with titles such as “Why Mentoring Doesn’t Work.” The mentorship slip is illustrated well by family businesses: 70 percent of them fail when passed to the second generation. A business-owner parent is in a perfect spot to mentor his or her child to run a company. And yet, sometime between mentorship and the business handoff, something critical doesn’t stick. One of the most tantalizing ideas about training with a master is that the master can help her protégé skip several steps up the ladder. Sometimes this ends up producing Aristotle. But sometimes it produces Icarus, to whom his father and master craftsman Daedalus of Greek mythology gave wings; Icarus then flew too high too fast and died. Jimmy Fallon’s mentor, one of the best-connected managers Jimmy could have for his SNL dream, served him up on a platter to SNL auditions in a fraction of the expected time it should take a new comedian to get there. But Jimmy didn’t cut it—yet. There was still one more ingredient, the one that makes the difference between rapid-rising protégés who soar and those who melt their wings and crash. III.

Ancient Ways The Greek Isles are divided into several major chains lying in the Aegean, the Mediterranean, and the Ionian seas. The Cyclades chain alone includes more than two hundred islands clustered in the southern Aegean. In the southeastern Aegean, between Crete and Asia Minor, there are 163 islands known as the Dodecanese chain. Only 26 of these are inhabited; the largest of them is Rhodes, where the world-famous Colossus once stood. The Ionian chain of western Greece (named for the eponymous sea) includes the large island of Corfu. Cyprus lies in the eastern Mediterranean, south of Turkey. Today, Cyprus stands politically divided, with Turkish rule in the north, and a government in the south that remains independent from Greece. However, the island has always been linked culturally and linguistically to Greece, and it shares traditions and ways of life with the smaller islands scattered to its south and west. In the Greek Isles, history blends myth and fact. Historians glean information about the early days of the Greek Isles from the countless ancient stories and legends set there. According to Homer, battleships sailed from the harbors of Kos and Rhodes during the Trojan War. A well-known legend holds that the Argonauts sought refuge from a storm on the island of Anafi in the southeastern Cyclades. The lovely island of Lésvos is mentioned throughout the Homeric epics and in many ancient Greek tales. Tradition has it that the god Helios witnessed the island of Rhodes rising mystically from the sea, and chose it for his home. The ill-fated Daedalus and his son, Icarus, attempted to soar through the skies over the magical island of Crete, where the great god Zeus was born in a mountaintop cave. Villagers still recount how Aphrodite emerged from the sea on a breathtaking stretch of beach near the village of Paphos on Cyprus. Visitors must actually lay eyes on a Greek island to gain a full appreciation for these ancient stories. Just setting foot on one of these islands makes you feel as if you’ve stepped into one of the timeless tales from ancient Greek mythology.

Icarus did not survive his fall. We can only hope Daedalus fares better.

I am like Icarus without wings. But the desire to fly was very strong in me. I think I was always looking for a Daedalus.

The fact that we did not understand each other, Icarus and I, is due to my being a most ordered man, or ultimately a most insensitive one. It is not simple. There is a kind of stupidity buried in intelligence.

It was not I who had cast Icarus into shadow, making his shadow monstrous. I had merely stepped between him and the sun for a moment – the moment that separated him from childhood and the achievement of death.

In ancient days two aviators procured to themselves wings. Daedalus flew safely through the middle air across the sea, and was duly honored on his landing. Young Icarus soared upwards towards the sun till the wax melted which bound his wings, and his flight ended in fiasco. In weighing their achievements perhaps there is something to be said for Icarus. The classic authorities tell us that he was only "doing a stunt," but I prefer to think of him as the man who certainly brought to light a constructional defect in the flying machines of his day. So too in science. Cautious Daedalus will apply his theories where he feels most confident they will safely go; but by his excess of caution their hidden weaknesses can not be brought to light. Icarus will strain his theories to the breaking-point till the weak joints gape. For a spectacular stunt? Perhaps partly; he is often very human. But if he is not yet destined to reach the sun and solve for all time the riddle of its constitution, yet he may hope to learn from his journey some hints to build a better machine

She knew a poisoned chalice when she saw it. She could feel it out there somewhere, crouched in some remote grove or chapel like a silver spider in its web, a hidden thing that drew knights to it, and retreated from them as they came. One by one they burned up as they approached it, as stars did falling to earth, a whole flock of Icaruses—Icari?—descending in a cloud of feathers. And one Daedalus to mourn them all.