"Elixir of life" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the dust; and let his epitaph and all his literature (of which my own works begin to form no inconsiderable part) be abolished even from the history of man! For a fool of this monstrosity of dulness, there can be no salvation: and the fool who looked for the elixir of life was an angel of reason to the fool who looks for ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... me there is a pathos in the close of this old man's life,— which I hope has not been lost by my way of describing it,—and there is certainly a moral. I have read of an unlucky sage who discovered the Elixir of Life, and who, after thrice renewing his existence, at last voluntarily resigned himself to death, because he had exhausted all that life had to offer of pleasure or of pain, and knew all its vicissitudes ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... sacrificing 3,000 or 4,000 francs to his practical joke. He also said that he could increase the size of pearls, which he could have proved very easily—in the same manner. He would not oblige Madame de Pompadour by giving the King an elixir of life: "I should be mad if I gave the King a drug." There seems to be a reference to this desire of Madame de Pompadour in an unlikely place, a letter of Pickle the Spy to Mr. Vaughan (1754)! This conversation Madame du Hausset wrote down on the day of ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... drug—"digitalis." That afternoon Marcella went back in the doctor's trap to get the new medicine, and it gave relief. Whenever, after that, the choking came back, Andrew would cry out for digitalis, which seemed to him the elixir of life. Sometimes he would pray for courage; sometimes, cracking suddenly, he would pray for digitalis and send Marcella often at midnight with a pleading note to the doctor to give him the drug and a little soothing for his heart that was running ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... glory of motion, the souls of those who had left the slough of humanity behind them. These transcendental notions were entirely corrupted at a very early date by the introduction of belief in an elixir of life, and later still by the practice of alchemistic experiments. Opposed by Buddhism, which next laid a claim for a share in the profits of popular patronage, Taoism rapidly underwent a radical transformation. It became a religion, borrowing ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... said, shaking the mixer with a sort of deft solicitude. "There's more than something in the tale. I've had a try myself to get details. Tippoo Tib believes in up-to-date physic, and when the old rascal's sick he sends for me. I offered to mix him an elixir of life that would make him out-live Methuselah if he'd give me as much as a hint of the general direction of ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... astonishment, a sort of divine amazement, as if it were toward this that always, inevitably, she had been moving,—and now it was here! Her blood leaped to it, and went racing fierily through her veins, as if there had been poured into it the elixir of life. She was gloriously conscious of her youth and her womanhood. A quick and vivid rush of warm blood stained her, brow to bosom. Her every-day mind was saying, "It is the stranger who's staying at Grandma Baker's—the gentleman who's been ill." But beyond and behind ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... occupying the interior of the hoop. Such a ring might be worn without suspicion of its true import, looking simplicity itself, but fraught with unholy meaning. It was probably constructed for some mystic philosopher, or student of the occult sciences, searching for the philosopher's stone, the elixir of life, and the power given to man to control ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt |
