Delphic Quotes & Sayings

I was meant to date the captain of the football team, I was going to be on a romantic excursion every Saturday night, I was destined to be collecting corsages from every boy in town before prom, accepting such floral offerings like competing sacrifices to a Delphic goddess. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

In recent years it has become impossible to talk about man's relation to nature without referring to "ecology" ... such leading scientists in this area as Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Eugene Odum, Paul Ehrlich and others, have become our new delphic voices ... so influential has their branch of science become that our time might well be called the "Age of Ecology". — Rachel Carson

If commas are open to interpretation, hyphens are downright Delphic. — Mary Norris

What had brought me to New York in the autumn of 1972 was a letter of recommendation written by Norman Mailer, the author of 'The Naked and the Dead' and American literature's leading heavyweight contender, to Dan Wolf, the delphic editor of 'The Village Voice.' — James Wolcott

What we strive to restore and re-animate will never come from the promises of the middle class politicians, but will come instead from the spirit of the last Delphic prophecy, which foresaw that, 'One day Apollo will return and it will be forever'. — Guillaume Faye

Many physicists these days sound like the Delphic oracle - with equations. — John Twelve Hawks

They sometimes behave like the Delphic oracle that told King Croesus that if he crossed the Halys River he would destroy a large kingdom. It was only after he had been completely defeated in battle after the crossing that he discovered that the kingdom meant by the oracle was his own. — C. G. Jung

Stahl trailed him upstairs, across a mezzanine, and out into the darkness of the sloping balcony. Tom gave the aisle his torch so his guest could see. On the screen below a woman's head was wavering, two or three times larger than life. A metallic voice clanged out, echoing sepulchrally all over the house, like a modern Delphic Oracle. 'Go back, go back!' she said. 'This is no place for you!'
Her big luminous eyes seemed to be looking right at Lew Stahl as she spoke. Her finger came out and pointed, and it seemed to aim straight at him and him alone. It was weird; he almost stopped in his tracks, then went on again. He hadn't eaten all day; he figured he must be woozy, to think things like that. ("Dusk To Dawn") — Cornell Woolrich

As an example of just how useless these philosophers are for any practice in life there is Socrates himself, the one and only wise man, according to the Delphic Oracle. Whenever he tried to do anything in public he had to break off amid general laughter. While he was philosophizing about clouds and ideas, measuring a flea's foot and marveling at a midge's humming, he learned nothing about the affairs of ordinary life. — Desiderius Erasmus

The forest is my loyal friend
A Delphic shrine to me. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

They assembled together and dedicated these as the first-fruits of their love to Apollo in his Delphic temple, inscribing there those maxims which are on every tongue- 'know thyselP and 'Nothing overmuch.' — Plato

About the new saga of Camp Half-Blood, Percy continues to narrate the book? Rachel (the new Delphic oracle) will remain on the books (I am Brazilian and I love your books ... I can not wait for the books debut in Portuguese). — Rick Riordan

Nero wasn't worried at all when he heard the utterance of the Delphic Oracle: "Beware the age of seventy-three." Plenty of time to enjoy himself still. He's thirty. The deadline the god has given him is quite enough to cope with future dangers. — C.P. Cavafy