Daedalus

Thus property is as an instrument to living; an estate is a multitude of instruments; so a slave is an animated instrument, but every one that can minister of himself is more valuable than any other instrument; for if every instrument, at command, or from a preconception of its master's will, could accomplish its work (as the story goes of the statues of Daedalus; or what the poet tells us of the tripods of Vulcan, "that they moved of their own accord into the assembly of the gods "), the shuttle would then weave, and the lyre play of itself; nor would the architect want servants, or the [1254a] master slaves.

But suppose I should waste ten years of my life in making a file to file off my bars, or in braiding cords to let myself down from the window, or in sticking wings on my shoulders to fly, like Daedalus? But luck is against me now.

In the paroxysms of eagerness he dreamt of aerial ways, - the discovery of following century; he called to his mind Daedalus and the vast wings that had saved him from the prisons of Crete.

For virtue may be under the guidance of right opinion as well as of knowledge; and right opinion is for practical purposes as good as knowledge, but is incapable of being taught, and is also liable, like the images of Daedalus, to 'walk off,' because not bound by the tie of the cause.

Furthermore he wrought a green, like that which Daedalus once made in Cnossus for lovely Ariadne.

The spangled heavens should be used as a pattern and with a view to that higher knowledge; their beauty is like the beauty of figures or pictures excellently wrought by the hand of Daedalus, or some other great artist, which we may chance to behold; any geometrician who saw them would appreciate the exquisiteness of their workmanship, but he would never dream of thinking that in them he could find the true equal or the true double, or the truth of any other proportion.

Beyond the Tournelles, as far as the wall of Charles V., spread out, with rich compartments of verdure and of flowers, a velvet carpet of cultivated land and royal parks, in the midst of which one recognized, by its labyrinth of trees and alleys, the famous Daedalus garden which Louis XI.

(1) Only four paragraphs long, the poem's central theme clearly contrasts Daedalus' rational calculations and pragmatic motivations with the playfulness and high spirits--literally and metaphorically--that led to Icarus' downfall.

In wide leg stance two bodies are at a cross-roads, Daedalus reaching behind and around Icarus' back to affix to new-muscled flesh, the white-feathered wings of wax.

1988 - The human-powered aircraft Daedalus crashed into the sea near the Aegean island of Santorini when a gust of wind broke a wing after a record-breaking flight from Crete.