Prometheus

Go your way. Forget Prometheus,
And all the woe that he is doom'd to bear;
By his own choice this vile estate preferring
To ignorant bliss and unfelt slavery. ~ Hartley Coleridge

Prometheus (Ancient Greek Προμηθεύς "Forethinker") is a Titan of Greek mythology, the son of Iapetus and Themis, and brother to Atlas, Epimetheus and Menoetius. He was a champion of mankind, known for his wily intelligence, who stole fire from Zeus and the gods and gave it to mortals. Zeus then punished him for his crime by having him bound to a rock while a great eagle (or vulture) ate his liver every day only to have it grow back to be eaten again the next day. The Greek derivation of Prometheus from the Greek pro (before) + manthano (learn) and the agent suffix -eus, thus "Forethinker", which engendered a contrasting brother Epimetheus ("Afterthinker"), has been disputed by some linguists who believe that the name comes from the Proto-Indo-European root which also produces the Vedic pra math, "to steal," hence pramathyu-s, "thief", whence "Prometheus", the thief of fire. The Vedic myth of fire's theft by Mātariśvan (Agni) is an analog to the account found in Greek myth and to these etymological cognates, can be added pramantha, the tool used to create fire.

Quotes

I must bear
What is ordained with patience, being aware
Necessity doth front the universe
With an invincible gesture. ~ Aeschylus as translated by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

A man contains all that is needed to make up a tree; likewise, a tree contains all that is needed to make up a man. Thus, finally, all things meet in all things, but we need a Prometheus to distill it. ~ Cyrano de Bergerac

Prometheus, I have no Titan's might,
Yet I, too, must each dusk renew my heart,
For daytime's vulture talons tear apart
The tender alcoves built by love at night. ~ Philip José Farmer

Quotes about Prometheus arranged by author or source

Mike is our Prometheus — but that's all. Mike keeps emphazing this. ~ Robert Heinlein, in Stranger in a Strange Land

It is stern work, it is perilous work, to thrust your hand in the sun
And pull out a spark of immortal flame to warm the hearts of men… ~ Joyce Kilmer

If the first Prometheus brought fire from heaven in a fennel-stalk, the last will take it back — in a book. ~ John Cowper Powys

To defy Power, which seems Omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates... ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

This, like thy glory, Titan! is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life; Joy, Empire, and Victory! ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

• Why should the thirst for knowledge be aroused, only to be disappointed and punished? My volition shrinks from the painful task of recalling my humiliation; yet, like a second Prometheus, I will endure this and worse, if by any means I may arouse in the interiors of Plane and Solid Humanity a spirit of rebellion against the Conceit which would limit our Dimensions to Two or Three or any number short of Infinity.
  • Edwin Abbott Abbott, in Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), Ch. 19 : How, Though the Sphere Showed Me Other Mysteries of Spaceland, I Still Desired More; and What Came of It

• I am absolutely destitute of converts, and, for aught that I can see, the millennial Revelation has been made to me for nothing. Prometheus up in Spaceland was bound for bringing down fire for mortals, but I — poor Flatland Prometheus — lie here in prison for bringing down nothing to my countrymen. Yet I exist in the hope that these memoirs, in some manner, I know not how, may find their way to the minds of humanity in Some Dimension, and may stir up a race of rebels who shall refuse to be confined to limited Dimensionality.
  That is the hope of my brighter moments.
  • Edwin Abbott Abbott, in Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), Ch. 22. How I Then Tried to Diffuse the Theory of Three Dimensions by Other Means, and of the Result

• I must bear
  What is ordained with patience, being aware
  Necessity doth front the universe
  With an invincible gesture.
  • Aeschylus, in Prometheus Bound, as translated by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1833)

• It is not time
  Now to disclose that which requires the seal
  Of strictest secresy; by guarding which I shall escape the misery of these chains.
  • Aeschylus, in Prometheus Bound; Prometheus in lines 510 - 524, as translated by R. Potter (1860)

• I imagine that some one there is declaiming a great poem, that some one is speaking of Prometheus. He has stolen light from the gods. In his entrails he feels the pain, always beginning again, always fresh, gathering from evening to evening, when the vulture steals to him as it would steal to its nest. And you feel that we are all like Prometheus because of desire, but there is neither vulture nor gods.
  • Henri Barbusse, in The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVII

• A man contains all that is needed to make up a tree; likewise, a tree contains all that is needed to make up a man. Thus, finally, all things meet in all things, but we need a Prometheus to distill it.
  • Cyrano de Bergerac, in The Other World (1657)

• Shelley, who in Prometheus Unbound had observed that the wise lack love and those who have love lack wisdom, went to his end in The Triumph of Life asking why good and the means of good were irreconcilable.
  • Harold Bloom, in The Anatomy of Influence (2011), p. 142

• It is not enough to demand insight and informative images of reality from the theater. Our theater must stimulate a desire for understanding, a delight in changing reality. Our audience must experience not only the ways to free Prometheus, but be schooled in the very desire to free him. Theater must teach all the pleasures and joys of discovery, all the feelings of triumph associated with liberation.
  • Bertolt Brecht, in Essays on the Art of Theater (1954)

• Sweet were change,
  If but a change of tortures! But to grow
  A motionless rock, fast as my strong prison,
  Age after age, till circling suns outnumber
  The sands upon the tide-worn beach! No hope,
  Or that sad mockery of hope that fools
  With dull despair, spanning the infinite!
  Torment unmeasurable!
  • Hartley Coleridge, in Prometheus (fragments of an unfinished play c. 1820); Prometheus

• Hard I strove
  To put away my immortality,
  Till my collected spirits swell'd my heart
  Almost to bursting; but the strife is past.
  It is a fearful thing to be a god,
  And, like a god, endure a mortal's pain;
  To be a show for earth and wondering heaven
  To gaze and shudder at! But I will live,
  That Jove may know there is a deathless soul
  Who ne'er will be his subject. Yes, 'tis past.
  The stedfast Fates confess my absolute will,—
  Their own co-equal.
  • Hartley Coleridge, in Prometheus (c. 1820); Prometheus

• Now shall I become a common tale,
  A ruin'd fragment of a worn-out world;
  Unchanging record of unceasing change.
  Eternal landmark to the tide of time.
  Swift generations, that forget each other,
  Shall still keep up the memory of my shame
  Till I am grown an unbelieved fable.
  • Hartley Coleridge, in Prometheus (c. 1820); Prometheus

• Go your way. Forget Prometheus,
  And all the woe that he is doom'd to bear;
  By his own choice this vile estate preferring
  To ignorant bliss and unfelt slavery.
  • Hartley Coleridge, in Prometheus (c. 1820); Prometheus

• Jove is not one half so merciless
  As thou art to thyself. But fare thee well;
  Our love is all as stubborn as thy pride,
  And swift as firm.
  • Hartley Coleridge, in Prometheus (c. 1820); Sylphs

• Prometheus, thief of light, giver of light, bound by the gods, must have been a book.
  • Mark Z. Danielewski, in House of Leaves (2000) Entry for "O", 11 November 1994

• Playing God is indeed playing with fire. But that is what we mortals have done since Prometheus, the patron saint of dangerous discoveries. We play with fire and take the consequences, because the alternative is cowardice in the face of the unknown.
  • Ronald Dworkin, in Sovereign Virtue (2000), p. 446

• Prometheus, I have no Titan's might,
  Yet I, too, must each dusk renew my heart,
  For daytime's vulture talons tear apart
  The tender alcoves built by love at night.
  • Philip José Farmer, in "In Common" in Starlanes #14 (April 1954); re-published in Pearls From Peoria (2006)

• Mike is our Prometheus — but that's all. Mike keeps emphazing this. Thou art God, I am God, he is God — all that groks. Mike is a man like the rest of us. A superior man admittedly — a lesser man taught the things the Martians know, might have set himself up as a pipsqueak god. Mike is above that temptation. Prometheus… but that is all.
  • Robert Heinlein, in Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)

• It is stern work, it is perilous work, to thrust your hand in the sun
  And pull out a spark of immortal flame to warm the hearts of men:
  But Prometheus, torn by the claws and beaks whose task is never done,
  Would be tortured another eternity to go stealing fire again.
  • Joyce Kilmer in "The Proud Poet" in Main Street and Other Poems (1917)

• The scientist, like the magician, possesses secrets. A secret — expertise — is somehow perceived as antidemocratic, and therefore ought to be unnatural. We have come a long way from Prometheus to Faust to Frankenstein. And even Frankenstein's monster is now a joke.
  • John Leonard, in "Books of the Times" in The New York Times (6 July 1981)

• The myth of Prometheus means that all the sorrows of the world have their seat in the liver. But it needs a brave man to face so humble a truth.
  • François Mauriac, in Le Nœud de vipères (1932), cited from Oeuvres romanesques, vol. 2 (Paris: Flammarion, 1965) p. 166; Gerard Hopkins (trans.) Knot of Vipers (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1951) p. 151.

• Civilization begins with a rebellion. Prometheus, one of the Titans, steals fire from the gods on Mount Olympus and brings it as a gift to man, marking the birth of human culture. For this rebellion Zeus sentences him to be chained to Mount Caucasus where vultures consume his liver during the day and at night it grows back only to be again eaten away the next day. This is a tale of the agony of the creative individual, whose nightly rest only resuscitates him so that he can endure his agonies the next day.
  • Rollo May, in Power and Innocence : A Search for the Sources of Violence (1972), Ch. 11 : The Humanity of the Rebel

• Man is the animal who weeps and laughs — and writes. If the first Prometheus brought fire from heaven in a fennel-stalk, the last will take it back — in a book.
  • John Cowper Powys, in The Pleasures of Literature (1938), p. 17

• That man, the unsubmissive and first, stands in the opening chapter of every legend mankind has recorded about its beginning. Prometheus was chained to a rock and torn by vultures — because he had stolen the fire of the gods. Adam was condemned to suffer, — because he had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Whatever the legend, somewhere in the shadows of its memory mankind knew that its glory began with one and that that one paid for his courage.
  • Ayn Rand, in The Fountainhead (1943), Part IV

• John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains — and he withdrew his fire — until the day when men withdraw their vultures.
  • Ayn Rand, in Atlas Shrugged (1957)

• The good want power, but to weep barren tears.
  The powerful goodness want: worse need for them.
  The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom;
  And all best things are thus confused to ill.
  Many are strong and rich, and would be just,
  But live among their suffering fellow-men
  As if none felt: they know not what they do.
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley, in Prometheus Unbound (1818-1819); lines spoken by a Fury, about Humanity's fate while Prometheus is bound, in Act I, l. 625–631

• To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
  To forgive wrongs darker than Death or Night;
  To defy Power, which seems Omnipotent;
  To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates
  From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
  Neither to change nor falter nor repent;
  This, like thy glory, Titan! is to be
  Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
  This is alone Life; Joy, Empire, and Victory!
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley, in Prometheus Unbound (1818-1819); Demogorgon, in Act IV, closing lines

• As technology became more important, the Trickster underwent a shift in character and became the god of crafts — of technology, if you will — while retaining the underlying roguish qualities. So we have the Sumerian Enki, the Greek Prometheus and Hermes, Norse Loki, and so on.
  • Neal Stephenson, in The Diamond Age (1995), Part the First

• The current rampages of territorial-emotional pugnacity sweeping this planet are not just another civilization failing … They are the birth-pangs of a cosmic Prometheus rising out of the long nightmare of domesticated primate history.
  • Robert Anton Wilson, in Prometheus Rising (1983), Ch. 5 : Dickens & Joyce : The Two-Circuit Dialectic, p. 90