"Alchemist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dissolving silver, and of applying it as a permanent ink; but what was their solvent? I know of none that would act on the metal and decompose flax fibre but nitric acid, which we have been told was unknown until discovered by the alchemist in the thirteenth century, which was about 2200 years after the date of this mummy, according as its superscription ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... a man of theory, Raymond Lulli (1235-1315), of Majorca, the famous Alchemist, who is credited with the first suggestion of the idea of seeking a way to India by rounding Africa on the ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... of Ispahan and contemporary with Ferdusi. He became so celebrated as a writer, that the title of Honor of Writers was given him. He was an alchemist, and wrote a treatise ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... The eccentric German alchemist and philosopher, Henry Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535), described a prosperous charlatan of his day as "clad in brave apparel, and having on his fingers showy rings, glittering with precious stones; a fellow who had gotten fame on account of his travels in far countries, and by reason of his ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... flattered and encouraged by the right hon. gentleman's panegyric on my talents, if ever I again engage in the compositions he alludes to, I may be tempted to an act of presumption—to attempt an improvement on one of Ben Jonson's best characters, the character of the Angry Boy, in the "Alchemist."' ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... Hartford stock, which had grown into a huge block of both stocks and bonds from the various expansions of stock and consolidations of property that had meanwhile taken place. The Kimballs had come from the Pacific coast, where the same alchemist's result had been wrought with a block of Southern Pacific Railway stock. The family tree of the Earls had rooted itself into the subsoil of real culture, while that of the Kimballs was mostly displayed above ground with only here and there a stray fibre ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... the legislator who passed laws against witches, and the burgher who defended his guild from some feudal aggression? between the enlightened scholar and the dunce of to-day, than there was between the monkish alchemist and the block head of yesterday? Peasant, voter, and dunce of this century are no doubt wiser than the churl, burgher, and blockhead of the twelfth. But the gentleman, statesman, and scholar of the present age are at least quite as favorable a contrast to the alchemist, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... eighteenth century there was also a well-known Baron Wilhelm Ungern, who was referred to as the 'brother of Satan' because he was an alchemist. My grandfather was a privateer in the Indian Ocean, taking his tribute from the English traders whose warships could not catch him for several years. At last he was captured and handed to the Russian Consul, who transported him to Russia where he was sentenced to deportation ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... A Danish governor once filled his pockets, and recovered sight only by throwing away the plunder. A brother of the Ada chief offered to show this magic-fenced placer to the late Mr. Nicol Irvine, moyennant the trifle of 50l. The transaction reminded me of the Hindu alchemist who asks you ten rupees to make a ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... had its danger. It is said of him that he was singularly happy "in never having encountered a wicked man nor a bad book." For, even if the book were bad, he would unconsciously impute to the author some of his own ideas. Like the alchemist, he found gold in the melting-pot, from the fact he had placed it there himself. However, it is to him that all honour is due for having introduced among us the fertile criticism of beauties, which he substituted for that of defects. Chateaubriand himself, in that ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... his next long poem, published some two years later, the strength of his later work is first definitely felt. Taking for theme the life of the sixteenth-century physician, astrologer, alchemist, conjuror,—compound of Faust and Cagliostro, mixture of truth-seeker, charlatan, and dreamer,—Browning makes of it the history of the soul of a feverish aspirant after the finality of intellectual power, the knowledge which should be for man the key to the universe; the tragedy of its failure, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... performance of the drama of familiar life. The shadow of my elbow rests on the shadow table as the shadow ink flows over the shadow paper. It is all symbolic, and as a symbol the physicist leaves it. Then comes the alchemist Mind who transmutes the symbols. . . . To put the conclusion crudely, the stuff of the world is mind-stuff. . . . The realistic matter and fields of force of former physical theory are altogether irrelevant except in so far as the mind-stuff has itself spun these imaginings. . . . The external ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... year he lost his father. In 1505 he modelled the group which we now see over the northern door of the San Giovanni, at Florence. In 1514 he was invited to Rome by Leo X., but more in his character of philosopher, mechanic, and alchemist, than as a painter. Here Raphael was at the height of his fame, and engaged in his greatest works, the frescos of the Vatican. The younger artist was introduced to the elder; and two pictures which Leonardo painted while at Rome—the "Madonna of St. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... poetry for rhetoric; the basilica became an abbey and the hermitage a school. The feudal ages were a wonderful seed-time in a world all gaunt with ruins. Horrors were there mingled with delicacies and confusion with idyllic peace. It was here a poet's childhood passed amid the crash of war, there an alchemist's old age flickering away amid cobwebs and gibberish. Something jocund and mischievous peeped out even in the cloister; gargoyles leered from the belfry, while ivy and holly grew about the cross. The Middle Ages were the true ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... we have mentioned, it has always been working itself clearer and clearer, and depositing impurity after impurity. There was a time when the most powerful of human intellects were deluded by the gibberish of the astrologer and the alchemist; and just so there was a time when the most enlightened and virtuous statesmen thought it the first duty of a government to persecute heretics, to found monasteries, to make war on Saracens. But time advances; facts accumulate; doubts arise. Faint glimpses of truth ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... battles with Fomor and releases the power— a princess in the story. This fight with the demon must be fought by everyone who would enter the land of the Gods, whether in conscious occult adventure or half-consciously after death, when the strange alchemist Nature separates the subtile from the gross in the soul in this region which Oisin passes through. Tir-na-noge, the land of Niam, is that region the soul lives in when its grosser energies and desires have been subdued, dominated ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... Brace-Bridge Hall will recollect a pleasing and popular exposition of the alternately splendid and benevolent, and always passionate reveries of the Alchemist, in the affecting story ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... shall we grumble when thy flames do scourge us? Our sins breathe fire; thy fire returns to purge us. Lord, what an alchemist art thou, whose skill Transmutes to perfect good from ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... alchemists could create rose blooms out of their ashes. We are prone to believe it for, at the close of a fair New England day we have seen the Master Alchemist, the sun, beneath his spacious workshop of July skies, transmuting the gray mists and vapors into sunset's glow; and lo! we had the blooming roses there. He melted his many ingredients with the falling dew and distilled from them the gold with which he burnished the western sky, making ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... profound tranquillity, internal and external, and our annalists find leisure to advert to various circumstances of domestic history. They mention a corporation formed for the transmutation of iron into copper by the method of one Medley an alchemist, of which the learned but credulous sir Thomas Smith, secretary of state, was a principal promoter, and in which both Leicester and Burleigh embarked some capital. The master of the Mint ventured to express a doubt of the success of the experiment, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... hears of an ALCHEMIST, who lives at the village of Lilley, midway between Luton and Hitchen. The whole of his interview with this eccentric personage, will doubtless ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 342, November 22, 1828 • Various
... nor smoking tobacco, but with his hands folded, and in silence. "I know not why it is," said he, "but that story of yours, my friend, brings to my mind a story of a man whom I once knew—a great magician in his time, and a necromancer and a chemist and an alchemist and mathematician and a rhetorician, an astronomer, an astrologer, and ...
— Twilight Land • Howard Pyle
... nomenclature was last revised, the organic bodies were little dealt with. We know that we owe this universal "oil" to the old alchemist, much in the same way as "spirit" has been used, but a little consideration quickly indicates the folly of its continued use. We can no longer call otto of rosemary, or otto of nutmegs, essential ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... the popular voices of the day to the comments of those capable of appraising genius, "What a master of composition Fielding was!" exclaimed Coleridge, "Upon my word I think 'Oedipus Tyrannus,' the 'Alchemist,' and 'Tom Jones' the three most perfect plots ever planned." To Sir Walter Scott Tom Jones was "truth and human nature itself." Gibbon described the book as "the first of ancient or modern romances"; and, as ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... drawing; his treatise remained in manuscript. The adventurers who risked their lives on wings of their own making are truer ancestors of the flying man. In 1507 John Damian, who was held in esteem as an alchemist and physician at the court of King James IV of Scotland, 'took in hand to fly with wings, and to that effect he caused make a pair of wings of feathers, which being fastened upon him, he flew off the castle wall of Stirling, but shortly ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... astronomy. His independence of character, his ardent attachments, his strong hatreds, and his love of splendour, are characteristics which distinguish him from all other men of his age. This remarkable man was an astronomer, astrologer, and alchemist; but in his latter years he renounced astrology, and believed that the stars exercised no influence ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... Paracelsus is divided into five parts, each of which describes an important period in the experience of Paracelsus, the celebrated German-Swiss physician, alchemist, and philosopher of the sixteenth century. Book I tells of the eagerness and pride with which he set out in his youth to compass all knowledge; he believed himself commissioned of God to learn Truth and to give it to mankind. Books II and III show him followed and idolized ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... biographies. Suffice it here to say that he was born at Einsiedeln, near Zurich, in 1493, the son of a physician, from whom he appears to have had his early training both in medicine and in chemistry. Under the famous abbot and alchemist, Trithemiusof Wurzburg, he studied chemistry and occultism. After working in the mines at Schwatz he began his wanderings, during which he professes to have visited nearly all the countries in Europe and to have reached India and ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... aims of mystical persons invariably gross or trivial? To my plain mind, it is inane to raise the dead in order to hear from their phantom lips nothing but commonplaces. And I really cannot see that the alchemist who spent his life in the attempted manufacture of gold was a more respectable object than the outside ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... that city was at the height of its fame, Herschel would rush home, and without even delaying to take off his lace ruffles, he would plunge into his manual labours of grinding specula and polishing lenses. No alchemist of old was ever more deeply absorbed in a project for turning lead into gold than was Herschel in his determination to have a telescope. He transformed his home into a laboratory; of his drawing-room he made a carpenter's shop. Turning lathes were the furniture of his best bedroom. A ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... and all things borne upon the bosom of Mother Earth, checking the succulence of precocious overgrowths, hardening fibre, turning plant energy away from selfish exuberance in mere stalk building into the altruistic sacrament of ripening fruit and hardening grain. A wise old alchemist is Mother Earth, working in time but ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... chiefly of animal origin. It is mostly procured by the decomposition of the phosphoric acid which is found in bones. It was accidentally discovered at Hamburgh, in 1669, by an alchemist named Brandt. ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... System that with logic absolute Both Standard Oil and Copper can confute; The Sovereign Alchemist that in a trice National ...
— The Re-echo Club • Carolyn Wells
... contained nothing but articles of a special character which gave it the appearance of some alchemist's laboratory in the middle ages: stuffed owls, skeletons, skulls, copper alembics, astrolabes and all around, hanging on the walls, amulets of every description, mainly hands of ivory or coral with two fingers ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... scarce had its laugh at Bell, and its shout of "I told you so!" at poor Langley, when lo! the telephone became the world's nervous system, and aeroplanes began to multiply like summer flies. To common sense the alchemist's dream of transmuting lead into gold seems preposterous, yet in a hundred laboratories radium is breaking down into helium, and the new chemistry bids fair to turn the time-honored jeer at the alchemists completely upside down. ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... touching here a sketch by Bixiou, that maker of caricatures, there the cast of an angel holding a vessel of holy water (presented by Francois Souchet), farther on a coquettish painting of Joseph Bridau, a gloomy picture of a Spanish alchemist by Hippolyte Schinner, an autograph of Lord Byron to Lady Caroline Lamb, framed in carved ebony, while, hanging opposite as a species of pendant, was a letter from Napoleon to Josephine. All these things were placed about without the slightest symmetry, ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... who, with his yeoman, overtakes the pilgrims, is the rich canon, the alchemist who could pave with gold "all the road to Canterbury town." He is said to have already ridden three miles, but whence he had come it is impossible to say. That the pilgrims who had ridden not quite five miles had come from Ospringe might seem ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... not dead, and the occult sciences still found followers among the Oxford towers. From his early years Temple's mind seems to have been set strongly towards mysticism of all kinds, and he and Jocelyn were versed in the jargon of the alchemist and astrologer, and practised according to the ancient rules. It was his reputation as a necromancer, and the stories current of illicit rites performed in the garden-rooms at St. John's, that contributed largely to his being dismissed from that College. He had also become acquainted with Francis ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... tale of Cologne deals with the famous magician and alchemist, Albertus Magnus, who at one time dwelt in the convent of the Dominicans, not far from that city. It is recorded that on one occasion, in the depth of winter, Albertus invited William of Holland to a feast which was to be held in the convent garden. The recipients ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence |
