"Excrement" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not," said Sir Piercie Shafton, something hastily; "be well assured, holy father, that it is not. I dispute not the lad's qualities, for which your reverence vouches. But bows are but wood, strings are but flax, or the silk-worm excrement at best; archers are but men, fingers may slip, eyes may dazzle, the blindest may hit the butt, the best marker may shoot a bow's length beside. Therefore will ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... appetites and peculiar longings of pregnant women furnish curious matter for discussion. From the earliest times there are many such records. Borellus cites an instance, and there are many others, of pregnant women eating excrement with apparent relish. Tulpius, Sennert, Langius, van Swieten, a Castro, and several others report depraved appetites. Several writers have seen avidity for human flesh in such females. Fournier knew ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... these frothy paragraphs. Cambyses, Xerxes, Artaxerxes, Darius, are thrown in to make the gruel of rhetoric "thick and slab." The whole epistle ends in a long-drawn peroration of invective against "that excrement in human shape," who had had the ill-luck, by pretence to scholarship, by big gains from the Papal treasury, by something in his manners alien from the easy-going customs of the Roman Court, to rouse the rancour ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... dung, n. ordure, excrement, faeces, dejections, lesses, muck; puer, fumet, fiants, treddle, spraints, coprolite (petrified), mute, guano, ornithocopros. Associated Words: coprophagy, coprophagous, Augean, dungmeer, excrementitious, sterconst, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... trees. And, O king, immediately on seeing that mass of energy, flaming and brilliant as fire, seated with upraised arms, facing the sun, my friend, the graceful lord of the Rakshasas, Maniman, from stupidity, foolishness, hauteur and ignorance discharged his excrement on the crown of that Maharshi. Thereupon, as if burning all the cardinal points by his wrath, he said unto me, 'Since, O lord of treasures, in thy very presence, disregarding me, this thy friend hath thus affronted me, he, together with thy forces, shall meet with ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... knew any man so vile, To act the crimes these Whippers reprehend, Or what their servile apes gesticulate, I should not then much muse their shreds were liked; Since ill men have a lust t' hear others' sins, All good men have a zeal to hear sin shamed. But when it is all excrement they vent, Base filth and offal; or thefts, notable As ocean-piracies, or highway-stands; And not a crime there tax'd, but is their own, Or what their own foul thoughts suggested to them; And that, in all their heat of taxing others, Not one of them ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... into heaps, it often ferments so rapidly as to produce sufficient heat to set fire to some parts of the manure, and cause it to be thrown off with greater rapidity. This may be observed in nearly all heaps of animal excrement. When they have lain for some time in mild weather, gray streaks of ashes are often to be seen in the centre of the pile. The organic part of the manure having been burned away, nothing but the ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... not fall into the vulgar error, which is to curse and to dishonour the age in which we live. Erasmus called the sixteenth century "the excrement of the ages," fex temporum. Bossuet thus qualified the seventeenth century: "A wicked and paltry age." Rousseau branded the eighteenth century, in these terms: "This great rottenness amidst which we live." Posterity has proved these illustrious men in the wrong. It has said to Erasmus: "The sixteenth ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... frequent in those islands, since they are beaten by many currents which flow from the archipelago; and thus goes drifting on the waves what the sea hurls from its abysses, along with other debris, under the fury of the wind—this so precious substance, whether it be the excrement or vomit of whales, or a reaba which the sea produces in its depths. But in Jolo it is apt to be more often found, because those islands are scattered and their coasts prolonged for many leguas opposite many currents and channel-mouths. And for this reason some amber is usually found in Capul, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... which proceed from thence, whereof three branches spring into the tongue and two into the right hand. They hold also that these animals are of a constitution extremely cold: that their food is the air we attract, their excrement phlegm. And that what we vulgarly call rheums, and colds, and distillations, is nothing else but an epidemical looseness to which that little commonwealth is very subject from the climate it lies under. Farther, that nothing less than a violent heat can disentangle these creatures ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... and a direct violation of the rights of man; but the doctors were the most strenuous opposers of the measure, having no doubt very cogent reasons for wishing the continuance of the practice. They assured the inhabitants, that if human excrement was no longer to be accumulated in the streets, to attract the putrescent particles floating in the air, they would find their way into the human body, and a pestilential sickness ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... pinch, or tickle—or bite, or cut his nails, or hawk, or spit, or snift, or drum with his feet or fingers in company;—nor (according to Erasmus) shall he speak to any one in making water,—nor shall he point to carrion or excrement.—Now this is all nonsense again, quoth my uncle ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... ease."[321] We know that the dog, however well and regularly fed, often buries, like the fox, any superfluous food; and we see him turning round and round on a carpet, as if to trample down grass to form a bed; we see him on bare pavements scratching backwards as if to throw earth over his excrement, although, as I believe, this is never effected even where there is earth. In the delight with which lambs and kids crowd together and frisk on the smallest hillock, we see a vestige of ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... is to be avoided by not treading barefoot on ground polluted by victims of the disease, by preventing soil-pollution through the proper disposal of human excrement, and by ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... that they must all go out into the fields and bring her whatever they found. So the next day they went out in different directions and the old man found some human excrement and he thought "Well, my daughter-in-law told me to bring whatever I found" so he wrapped it up in leaves and took it home; and his daughter-in-law told him that he had done well and bade him hang up the packet at the back of the house. A few days later he found ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... ducks. The small birds of the plains and the curlew are still abundant: we saw a large bear, but could not come within gunshot of him. There are numerous tracks of the elk, but none of the animals themselves; and, from the appearance of bones and old excrement, we suppose that buffalo sometimes stray into the valley, though we have as yet seen no recent sign of them. Along the water are a number of snakes, some of a uniform brown color, others black, and a third speckled on the abdomen, and striped ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... leaves or bark of trees and shrubs, through which it pierces with its long jaws, so that it may suck sap from the soft tissues beneath. After a time it fixes itself by means of these jaws and the characteristic scale or protective covering, composed partly of a waxy secretion and partly of dried excrement, begins to grow over its body. The female loses legs and feelers, and never acquires wings, becoming little more than a sluggish egg-bag (fig. 7 e). The male on the other hand passes into a second larval stage in which there are no functional ...
— The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter
... and new commented lusts, For which wise nature hath not left a name. To this (what most strikes us, and bleeding Rome) He is, with all his craft, become the ward To his own vassal, a stale catamite: Whom he, upon our low and suffering necks, Hath raised from excrement to side the gods, And have his proper sacrifice in Rome: Which Jove beholds, and yet will sooner rive A senseless oak with thunder ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... exposing it to attacks from surrounding foes, the wary insect fortifies its new abode with additional strength and thickness, by blending with the filaments of its silken covering, a mixture of wax and its own excrement, for the external barrier of a new gallery, the interior and partitions of which are lined with a smooth surface of white silk, which admits the occasional movements of the insect, without injury to its delicate (?) texture. In performing these operations, ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... not so uncommon as it might at first seem. It is indeed almost an invariable rule among all land birds. With woodpeckers and kindred species, and with birds that burrow in the ground, as bank swallows, kingfishers, etc., it is a necessity. The accumulation of the excrement in the nest would prove most fatal ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs |
