Pillars Of Hercules Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Pillars Of Hercules. Here they are! All 20 of them:

So…these Pillars of Hercules. Are they dangerous?” Annabeth stayed focused on the cliffs. “For Greeks, the pillars marked the end of the known world. The Romans said the pillars were inscribed with a Latin warning—” “Non plus ultra,” Percy said. Annabeth looked stunned. “Yeah. Nothing Further Beyond. How did you know?” Percy pointed. “Because I’m looking at it.
Rick Riordan (The Mark of Athena (The Heroes of Olympus, #3))
The ancients considered the Pillars of Hercules the head of navigation and the end of the world. The information the ancients didn't have was very voluminous.
Mark Twain (The Innocents Abroad)
Philosophers are divided on the question of whether the narrative therein unfolded [the Crossman Diaries] is grippingly boring or boringly gripping.
Clive James (At the Pillars of Hercules)
Said the lion to the lioness - "when you are amber dust - No more a raging fire like the heat of the sun (no liking but all lust) - Remember still the flowering of the amber blood and bone, the rippling of bright muscles like a sea, Remember the rose-prickles of bright paws Though we shall mate no more Till the fire of that sun and the moon - Cold bone are one" Said the skeleton lying upon the sands of time - "The great gold planet that is the mourning heat of the sun Is greater than all gold, more powerful Than the tawny body of a lion that fire consumes Like all that grows or leaps...so is the heart. More powerful than all dust. Once I was hercules Or Samson, strong as the pillars of the seas: But the flames of the heart Consumed me, and the mind Is but a foolish wind.
Edith Sitwell
Kimrean sighted purple caged dancers, mud wrestlers, tattooed devils, G-stringed Atlases erected like Pillars of Hercules out of a liquid crowd waving in worship of ancient twerk masters summoning cellulite tsunamis.
Edgar Cantero (This Body's Not Big Enough for Both of Us)
He descended and came to a small basin of sea enclosed by the cliffs. Troy's nature freshened within him; he thought he would rest and bathe here before going farther. He undressed and plunged in. Inside the cove the water was uninteresting to a swimmer, being smooth as a pond, and to get a little of the ocean swell, Troy presently swam between the two projecting spurs of rock which formed the pillars of Hercules to this miniature Mediterranean. Unfortunately for Troy a current unknown to him existed outside, which, unimportant to craft of any burden, was awkward for a swimmer who might be taken in it unawares. Troy found himself carried to the left and then round in a swoop out to sea.
Thomas Hardy (Far from the Madding Crowd)
All places, no matter where, no matter what, are worth visiting.
Paul Theroux (The Pillars of Hercules)
We all know that a vast proportion of travel is accumulated nuisance; but if boredom or awfulness is handled with skill and concrete detail, it is funnier and truer than the sunniest prose.
Paul Theroux (The Pillars of Hercules)
More than three centuries and a half ago, in the mid spring-time of 1492, we are sure that the angel of the dawn, as he travelled with broad slow wing from the Levant to the Pillars of Hercules, and from the summits of the Caucasus across all the snowy Alpine ridges to the dark nakedness of the Western isles, saw nearly the same outline of firm land and unstable sea
George Eliot (Romola (Palmera Publishing Illustrated))
Omens" Her eyelids were painted blue. When she closed her eyes the sea rolled in like ten thousand fiery chariots, leaving behind silence above & below a thousand years old. He stood beneath a high arched window, gazing out at fishing boats beyond the dikes, their nets unfurled, their offshore gestures a dance of living in bluish entourage. He was only the court’s chief jester. What he said & did made them laugh, but lately what he sometimes thought he knew could cost him his polished tongue & royal wig. He was the masked fool unmasking the emperor. Forget the revelation. Forget the briny sea. He had seen the ravishing empress naked in a forbidden pose. Her blue eye shadow. Aquamarine shells crusted with wormy mud. Anyway, if he said half of what was foretold, the great one would become a weeping boy slumped beneath the Pillars of Hercules. Poetry Apr 2012, Vol. 200 Issue 1, p15
Yusef Komunyakaa
Is it necessary to recall that the earth is not infinite, and that our civilization is close to having invaded all of it? The end of the world, this great terror of the Middle Ages, is destined to become a source of anguish again in another sense. It is no longer in time but in space that this terrestrial globe reveals itself as inextensible; and the deluge of civilized humanity already hurls itself at its limits, at its new Pillars of Hercules, these ones insurmountable. What are we going to do when soon we will no longer be able to count on external markets, Asian, African, to serve as a palliative or derivative for our discords, as outlets for our merchandise, for our instincts of cruelty, of pillage and of prey, for our criminality as well as for our overflowing birthrate? How will we manage to reestablish among ourselves a relative peace which has had as its condition for so long our conquering projection outside ourselves, far from ourselves?" -1902
Gabriel Tarde (Psychologie Économique, Vol. 1 (Classic Reprint))
Shortly after sunset on November 5, the convoy began to swing east, past the Pillars of Hercules. Soon the fleet would split apart, with 33,000 soldiers bound for Algiers and 39,000 for Oran.
Rick Atkinson (An Army at Dawn: The War in Africa, 1942-1943)
Solzhenitsyn can imagine what pain is like when it happens to strangers. Even more remarkably, he is not disabled by imagining what pain is like when it happens to a million strangers — he can think about individuals even when the subject is the obliteration of masses, which makes his the exact reverse of the ideological mentality, which can think only about masses even when the subject is the obliteration of individuals.
Clive James (At the Pillars of Hercules)
How brave, then, were the Vivaldi brothers and their men when they sailed their galleys past the pillars of Hercules and out of recorded history! We do not know in what form disaster finally struck. What we can guess, however, is that the galleys, emergent objects constituted by a heterogeneous engineer, were dissociated into their component parts. The
Wiebe E. Bijker (The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology)
Carthage was a spider’s web of trade and communications that spread eastward to Egypt and the Levant, and westward as far as scarcely imaginable places beyond Spain. Where the Mediterranean issued between the giant Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar and Ceuta) into the misty Ocean that lapped the whole world round, the Carthaginians had planted trading posts. Their interests extended as far north as Britain and the Baltic, as well as to the Canary Islands, the Cameroons, and possibly even the Azores.
Ernle Bradford (Hannibal)
While working at the Great Library, he grew fascinated by a manuscript left by an intrepid mariner named Pytheas from the Greek colony of Massalia (today’s Marseilles). Beginning around 320 BCE, Pytheas had made several voyages at the far end of the western Mediterranean, including beyond the famed Pillars of Hercules, or Strait of Gibraltar. Pytheas also sailed around the coast of Spain and made at least one trip across the English Channel, including circumnavigating the British Isles. In addition, he gathered what information he could about lands lying still farther west. Pytheas had published his extraordinary voyages as the History of the Ocean (now lost). His account fit none of the accepted conceptions about the shape of the world, and Aristotelian scholars in particular branded him a liar. Eratosthenes, however, instantly saw its value.
Arthur Herman (The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization)
Eratosthenes took Pytheas’s book and did some quick calculations based on his own estimate of the earth’s diameter. He concluded that if the Indian Ocean was not a landlocked sea, as most Greeks supposed, but opened up onto a still larger ocean extending to the shores of the Pillars of Hercules, as Pytheas’s voyage indicated, then it might be possible for a sailor to sail west from Spain to India, although Eratosthenes calculated it would take at least thirteen thousand miles.§ Furthermore, he speculated, perhaps there was even another “inhabited world” (oikoumenē) to be found between Spain and India, one that covered at least part of the western hemisphere of the globe—a hemisphere that mathematics proved had to exist since the earth was round, but which was still entirely unknown.
Arthur Herman (The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization)
The fact that Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo seems to have given up attempting to seize Hawaii after the Battle of Midway, when U.S. forces in the Pacific were still so relatively weak, is amazing. Compared with the Hawaiian Islands, acquisitions such as New Guinea and Burma were mere bagatelles; they would in any case have fallen into Japan’s lap as a consequence of Tokyo’s having first taken the most vital strategic place in the entire Pacific. Hitler’s failure to get his hands on Gibraltar—or, at the very least, to persuade Franco to neutralize it—was another major deficiency, explained perhaps by his obsession with the drive to the east. So also was the Italian-German inability to crush the British air and naval bases on Malta. Had the Pillars of Hercules been blocked, with Algeria staying in sympathetic Vichy hands and Malta transformed into a giant Luftwaffe base, how long would it have been before Egypt itself fell?
Paul Kennedy (Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned The Tide in the Second World War)
In the last few years, Meg had been to hell and back- literally. She'd sold her soul to the god of the Underworld and spent her days and nights fulfilling Hades's every demand. While she still walked in the land of the living, her life was no longer her own. Meeting Hercules had awoken something in her. Honestly, she wasn't sure what that something was, but she knew it felt important. Why else would she have leaped in front of a falling pillar to save him, causing her own demise in the process? That moment, and Wonder Boy's rescue of her afterward, was a blur now, like so many nightmares she tried hard to forget. The next thing she remembered was air filling her lungs as if she'd held her breath underwater for too long. Then there had been a crack of lightning, a flurry of clouds, and she and Wonder Boy were being whisked into the heavens toward Mount Olympus.
Jen Calonita (Go the Distance)
know they are fearsome,” Sapphira told her people, “but I am your future queen, and I am not afraid! By the time we’re finished with them, Davy Jones will never dare sail past the Pillars of Hercules into our waters again! But I cannot do this alone. So who’s with me?” she cried, raising her spear.
E.G. Foley (Secrets Of The Deep (The Gryphon Chronicles, #5))