"Transmute" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... answer, that I have just discovered one way of beginning the chapter, after all! For what I should like to do in this book is to set forth in decent prose some of the strange potencies of verse: its power, for instance, to seize upon a physical image like that of a woman planting bulbs, and transmute it into a symbol of the resurrection of the dead; its capacity for turning fact into truth and brown earth into beauty; for remoulding the broken syllables of human speech into sheer music; for lifting the mind, bowed down by wearying thought and haunting fear, into a brooding ecstasy ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... for which all this has been the preparation. Into him must pour all the forces that make against man, in order that in him they may be changed into forces that help. Thus he becomes one of the Peace-centres of the world, which transmute the forces of combat that would otherwise crush man. For the Christs of the world are these Peace-centres into which pour all warring forces, to be changed within them and then poured out as forces ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... There his brain, always teeming with gigantic conceptions, suggested to him a new fancy. Could not the headland jutting out beyond Sarzana into the Tyrrhene Sea be carved by his workmen into a Pharos? To transmute a mountain into a statue, holding a city in either hand, had been the dream of a Greek artist. Michael Angelo revived the bold thought; but to execute it would have been almost beyond his power. Meanwhile, in November 1505, the marble was shipped, ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... themselves were inherently evil. To us they are the energies of the soul, neither good nor bad in themselves. Like dynamite, they are capable of all sorts of uses, and it is the business of civilization, through the family and the school, religion, art, science, and all institutions, to transmute these energies into fine values. Behind evil there is power, and it is folly,—wasting and disappointing folly,—to ignore this power because it has found an evil issue. All that is dynamic in human character is in these rooted lusts. The great error ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... discover that, but they are men groping in the dark, who can feel but not see and understand. Throughout what all nations have agreed to call the dark ages there have been men called alchemists, whom other men have mocked because they sought to transmute baser metals into gold. Do you think they sought what was impossible? Nothing is impossible! They dimly discerned the possibility. And it may be that their ears had caught the legend of what has been known in India for ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... hate, grief, frenzy; in a word, all the worn-out heart of the old earth had been revealed to him under a new form. His portfolio was filled with graphic illustrations of the volume of his memory, which genius would transmute into its own substance, and imbue with immortality. He felt that the deep wisdom in his art, which he had sought so far, ...
— The Prophetic Pictures (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Before we can transmute, with Mr. Muller, these objects of a somewhat vague religious regard into a kind of gods, we have to adopt Noire's philological theories, and study the effects of auxiliary verbs on the development of personification and of religion. Noire's philological theories ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... interest in nature and the physical sciences, which spurred many another Elizabethan besides Bacon to "take all knowledge for his province." This new interest was generally romantic rather than scientific, was more concerned with marvels, like the philosopher's stone that would transmute all things to gold, than with the simple facts of nature. Bacon's chemical changes, which follow the "instincts" of metals, are almost on a par with those other changes described in Shakespeare's ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... against it? On the contrary, his path was the path of sacrifice—the utmost sacrifice of love. The meaning of such sacrifice is to reach some ultimate truth, some positive ideal, which in its greatness can accept suffering and transmute it into the profound peace of self-renunciation. True emancipation from suffering, which is the inalienable condition of the limited life of the self, can never be attained by fleeing from it, but rather by changing its value in the realm of truth—the truth ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... a most amiable person yourself," I went on. "It's one of your characteristics, of course much more precious than in other people. You transmute the commonest traits into gold of your own; but after all there are no new names. You are amiable. You were most amiable to me when I ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... of Percy Darrow, awestricken. "With fifty centigrammes only you could—you could transmute any substance—why, you could make anything you pleased almost! You could make enough diamonds to fill that chest! It is ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Isabel enjoyed the lurid picture with all the zest of sentimentalists dwelling upon the troubles of other times from the shelter of the safe and peaceful present. They were both poets in their quality of bridal couple, and so long as their own nerves were unshaken they could transmute all facts to entertaining fables. They pleasantly exercised their sympathies upon those who every year perish at Niagara in the tradition of its awful power; only they refused their cheap and selfish compassion to the Hermit of Goat ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... in the end. Transmute it into its finest possible form, let it be as subtle and civilized as you please, as yearning and noble, as enlightened, it still sets itself over against the wholeness of things; its role is that of the part at war with the whole. Milton's Lucifer had the mind of ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... on her road from Vienna to espouse his son; for, to crown his career, Beckendorff has successfully negotiated a marriage between a daughter of the House of Austria and the Crown Prince of Reisenburg. It is generally believed that the next step of the Diet will be to transmute the father's Grand Ducal coronet into a Regal crown; and perhaps, my good sir, before you reach Vienna, you may have the supreme honour of being presented to his Majesty ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... these forty-nine days was to invite one hundred and eight Buddhist bonzes to perform, in the main Hall, the High Confession Mass, in order to ford the souls of departed relatives across the abyss of suffering, and afterwards to transmute the spirit (of Mrs. Ch'in); that, in addition, an altar should be erected in the Tower of Heavenly Fragrance, where nine times nine virtuous Taoist priests should, for nineteen days, offer up prayers for absolution from punishment, and purification from retribution. That after these ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... to work, to act. At this moment thousands of women and children are starving in England—absolutely perishing for lack of bread. Come with me and help remove the tax that places food out of the reach of many. Transmute grief for the dead into love for the living. Let us never rest until the Corn Laws are abolished— Come!" To dedicate himself to humanity now seemed easy for John Bright. This he did, and life took on a great, quiet sanctity, purified and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... send to Gibblet's for meat; it is equally impossible to get it any where else; and as for the only two natural productions of the country, vegetables and eggs, I need no extraordinary penetration, to be certain, that your cook cannot transmute the latter into an omelette aux huitres, on the former into legumes ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... he would bring to his task, his leisure, his relations with others, his exits and entrances, his silence and his speech, a freshness and a zest, not directed to surprising or interesting others—that was the most vulgar expedient of all—but with a deliberate design to transmute, as by the touch of the magical stone, the common materials of life into pure gold. He would endeavour to discern the poetical quality in everything and in everyone. In inanimate things this was easy enough, for they were already ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... alchemists of old felt that they lacked but one element; if they could obtain that one, they believed they could transmute the baser metals into pure gold. It is so in character. There are individuals with rare mental gifts, and delicate spiritual discernment who fail utterly in life because they lack the one element,—self- reliance. This would ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... strikes me as the instinctive ability to evolve a finished work of art from a few fripperies, without the aid of technical training. Give her two or three feathers, a yard of ribbon and a handful of mixed sundries, and she'll magically transmute them into—this." ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... relative, and could not help concluding that so much subtlety united to a too vivid imagination would in all likelihood have been rewarded with a pair of sandwich-boards or a super's banner. Absorbed in this train of thought, and admiring the perverse dexterity which could transmute the face of a sickly woman and a case of brain disease into the crude elements of romance, Salisbury strayed on through the dimly-lighted streets, not noticing the gusty wind which drove sharply round corners ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... and factories with men, women and children, and I transmute the base metal of their bones into the noble coin of the realm; my coffers grow fat, my slaves grow lean, but I acquire the reputation of a public benefactor, a public-spirited citizen, ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... one save himself had been trivial. Now the baby had gone, but there remained this vast apparatus of pride and pity and love. For the dead, who seemed to take away so much, really take with them nothing that is ours. The passion they have aroused lives after them, easy to transmute or to transfer, but well-nigh impossible to destroy. And Philip knew that he was still voyaging on the same magnificent, perilous sea, with the sun or the clouds above him, and the ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... has a strange affinity for the opposite of saintship. Sanctity is not aloofness. 'There were saints in Caesar's household'—a very unlikely place; they were flowers on a dunghill, and perhaps their blossoms were all the brighter because of what they grew on, and which they could transmute from corruption into beauty. So sanctity is no blue ribbon of the Christian profession, to be given to a few select (and mostly ascetic) specimens of consecration, but it is the designation of each of us, if we are disciples who are more ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... other basic activities of the soul, that it is extremely difficult to disentangle from our impressions of sight, of sound, of touch, of taste, and of smell, those interwoven threads of reason, imagination and so forth which so profoundly modify and transmute, even in the art of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling, the various manifestations of "the objective mystery" which we apprehend in ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... of the black stones which the science of the time expected to transmute into gold, also some Esquimaux trinkets made of bone, and a few shells. These were for the mother and Cis, and there were also the tusks of a sea-elephant which Humfrey would lay up at my Lord's London lodgings till his father sent tidings ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... some, ambiguous; in two or three, to a close scrutiny, all but incipiently malign, the variation of less than a hair's breadth in the linear shadings round the mouth sufficing to all this. Now, Excellenza, transmute that general gravity into joyousness, and subject it to twelve of those variations I have described, and tell me, will you not have my hours here, and Una one of ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... New Hope River chattered its incessant gossip to the vexing boulders. Above, in the sky, lazy June clouds, wool-white, drifted to westward, as though seeking the glory that there promised to transmute ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... the burden of those rights. Women need the franchise if only to make their influence, of which we hear so much, effective, but more than they need the ballot, this nation needs the active devotion of its women to transmute to golden fulfillment its leaden life; it needs, it must have all that we can give it, your life and mine; if it is to go forward, its sons and daughters must ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... reason chafe Thousand minstrels woke within me Thy foes to hunt, thy enviers to strike down Thy summer voice, Musketaquit Thy trivial harp will never please To and fro the Genius flies To clothe the fiery thought To transmute crime to wisdom, so to stem Trees in groves True Brahmin, in the morning meadows wet Try the might the Muse affords Two things thou shalt not long for, if thou love a mind serene ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... like ours, where every man may transmute his private thought into history and destiny by dropping it into the ballot-box, a peculiar responsibility rests upon the individual. Nothing can absolve us from doing our best to look at all public questions as ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... Adam and Eve among embowering roses and lilies, while the sun, moon, and stars simultaneously shine, is impermissible to the portrait-painter or the landscapist, who has to idealise actuality to the point only of artistic realism, and not to transmute it at the outset from happily-perceived concrete facts to ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... To transmute creatures belongs to Him Who preserves them. Now this belongs to God alone, according to Heb. 1:3: "Upholding all things by the word of His power." Therefore God alone has omnipotence with regard to the transmutation of creatures. Therefore ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... of the great New York firm founded in 1840 by an ancestor grown weary of watching the broad acres of Ruyler Manor automatically transmute themselves into the yearly rent-roll, and reverting to the energy and merchant instincts of his Dutch ancestors, had been conducted skillfully for the thirty years preceding the disaster by Price's uncle, Dryden Ruyler. But the earthquake and fire in which ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... will entirely depend upon your attitude towards the long-vexed question of the permissible in art. If you hold that all life (which in this association generally means something disagreeable) is its legitimate province and that genius can transmute an ugly study of morbid pathology into a romance, you will admire the force of this vivid little book; otherwise, I warn you frankly, you are like to be repelled by the whole business. The title, to begin with, is an irony as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... the use of materials: either to select only the choicest and rarest, or to transmute coarse to fine by skill in using. How perfect is the delicacy with which the woods and fields are kept, throughout the year! All these millions of living creatures born every season, and born to die; yet where are the dead bodies? ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... We thought we knew phosphorus. We warm a portion of it sealed in an empty tube, for about a week. It has become a brown infusible substance, which does not shine in the dark nor oxidate in the air. We heat it to 500 F., and it becomes common phosphorus again. We transmute sulphur in the same singular way. Nature, you know, gives us carbon in the shape of coal and in that of the diamond. It is easy to call these changes by the name allotropism, but not the less do they confound our ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... mingled in the common walks of life; he has made himself familiar with the lower orders of society. He has not been deterred by the aspect of vice and wickedness, and misery and guilt, from seeking a spirit of good in things evil, but has endeavored by the might of genius to transmute what was base into what is precious as the beaten gold. . . . But I shall be betrayed, if I go on much longer,—which it would be improper for me to do,—into something like a critical delineation of the genius of our illustrious guest. I shall not attempt that; but I cannot but express, in ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... rekindled, and only those who live can rekindle them. The only stuff that can retain the life-giving heat is the stuff of living hearts. And the hopes of mankind cannot be kept alive by words merely, by constitutions and doctrines of right and codes of liberty. The object of democracy is to transmute these into the life and action of society, the self-denial and self-sacrifice of heroic men and women willing to make their lives an embodiment of right and service and enlightened purpose. The commands of democracy ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... Edward has already a military gait, and when he has acquired a habit of obedience at all comparable with his power of command, he will be able to take up the white man's burden with distinguished success. Meantime I can never look at him without marvelling how the English climate can transmute bacon and eggs, tea and the solid household loaf into such radiant roses and lilies as bloom upon ...
— The Diary of a Goose Girl • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... had some great architect among us," replied he, "he would transmute for our country ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... proved in after days how real were Ayesha's alchemy, and the knowledge which enabled her to solve the secret that chemists have hunted for in vain, and, like Nature's self, to transmute the commonest into the most precious of the metals. At the first town that I reached on the frontiers of India, I took this knife to a jeweller, a native, who was as clever as he proved dishonest, and asked him to test the handle. He did ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... one or two at once. "Now, Williams, you are on your mettle, old boy; stand true to your colours, and transmute the sentence into ...
— Life in London • Edwin Hodder
... problems. The notion that therapeutics or hygiene or surgery is any more or less scientific than making or cleaning boots is entertained only by people to whom a man of science is still a magician who can cure diseases, transmute metals, and enable us to live for ever. It may still be necessary for some time to come to practise on popular credulity, popular love and dread of the marvellous, and popular idolatry, to induce the poor to comply with ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... as we choose, but we are certainly not interesting or picturesque. We may be as beautiful to the statistician as a column of figures, and dear to the political economist as a social phenomenon; but our hive has little of that marvellous bee-bread that can transmute the brain to finer issues than a gregarious activity in hoarding. The Puritans left us a fine estate in conscience, energy, and respect for learning; but they disinherited us of the past. Not a single stage-property of poetry did they bring with them but the good old Devil, ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... moment like this to transmute such thoughts as seethed in the man's head to a burst of fury. Fury is action, and action a relief to the strained heart. There was a half-concealed, unintended mockery in her tones which brought a sudden fire of anger to his eyes. He raised both hands and ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... of hope, and the latter can only build with the bricks which the former gives. So the Christian has to lay hold on all that God's mercy has done in the ages that are gone by, and because He is a 'faithful Creator' to transmute history into prophecy, and triumph in that 'the God ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... he produced symbolizes this purpose—the mass of it ennuyant, depressing: the Aids to Reflection, for instance, with Archbishop Leighton's vague pieties all twisted into the jargon of a spiritualistic philosophy. But sometimes 'the pulse of the God's blood' does transmute it, kindling here and there a spot that begins to live; as in that beautiful fragment at the end of the Church and State, or in the distilled and concentrated beauty of such a passage ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... but he could transmute speech into action. Instead of wasting words, he began to deliver convincing blows. His first stroke sent the obscene corporal to the floor, minus front teeth and consciousness. The amazed captain labored to unsheath his sword, but ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... good temper, my gentleness into play. Is my father bad? Bad to himself, but good to me. This is the rod of Hermes; touch what you will with it, they say, and it becomes gold. Nay, but bring what you will and I will transmute it into Good. Bring sickness, bring death, bring poverty and reproach, bring trial for life—all these things through the rod of Hermes shall ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... nothing of the matter,' Saxon answered, 'save that they denied that Gervinus of Nurnberg, whom I guarded in prison, or any other man, could transmute metals.' ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... soul-consciousness, know that old age is but physical; that it is the vacation time between the functions of physical activity and that of the soul-life. Old age is the wise provision of the Cosmic Law which compels those who will not do so of their own volition and wisdom, to transmute the life-energy into higher channels. If the race knew enough to consciously transmute the creative sex-energy into an interior function, there would come to pass the time prophecied by St. Paul when Man shall consciously "lay down his body and ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... in one who was known as the 'Man of Sorrows.' The conscience of Mankind has ever recognised self-sacrifice as the supreme element of virtue, and self-sacrifice is never real when it is only the exchange of a less happiness for a greater one. No moral chemistry can transmute the worship of Sorrow, which Goethe described as the essence of Christianity, into the worship of happiness, and probably with most men health and temperament play a far larger part in the real happiness of their ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... container and limiter of possibilities, a guarantee that the upshot shall be good. Taken in this way, the absolute makes all good things certain, and all bad things impossible (in the eternal, namely), and may be said to transmute the entire category of possibility into categories more secure. One sees at this point that the great religious difference lies between the men who insist that the world MUST AND SHALL BE, and those who are contented with believing that the world MAY BE, saved. The ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... moral honour which pervades the minds of a people, when despair has been suddenly thrown off and expectations are lofty; the apprehensiveness to a touch unkindly or irreverent, where sympathy is at once exacted as a tribute and welcomed as a gift; the power of injustice and inordinate calamity to transmute, to invigorate, and to govern—to sweep away the barriers of opinion—to reduce under submission passions purely evil—to exalt the nature of indifferent qualities, and to render them fit companions for the absolute virtues with which they are summoned to associate—to ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... in the plot.[257] His conduct does not admit of excuse. But it is not for the plain, matter-of-fact man to pass judgement lightly on the weakness of a highly-strung, nervous, artistic temperament; the artist's imagination may transmute pain such as others might hope to bear, to anguish such as they cannot even imagine. There lies the palliation, if palliation it be, of Lucan's crime. But it availed him nothing: the reprieve was never won; he was condemned to die, the manner of his death being left to his free choice. He ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... The important point is that we should not look coldly and without feeling upon these thoughts which serve to build up such a symbolical concept. After dwelling for a time upon the above mentioned thoughts and feelings, let us try to transmute them into the following symbolical concept. Let us imagine a black cross. Let this be the symbol for the destroyed lower element of our desires and passions and there where the beams of the cross intersect, ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... it would seem to transmute Socrates into a mythus, considering the broad daylight which then rested upon Athenian history, and the inextricable way in which Socrates is entangled in that history (although we have all seen many a Scriptural personage so transmuted under ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... brought me here, that Barjas, the tavern-keeper of the Porta Capena, had sold for wine a decoction of roots and barks in which there was not a single drop of the juice of the grape. I had been unable to transmute this vile brew into blood, for it was not wine, and wine alone is changed into the blood of Jesus Christ. Therefore all my consecrations were invalid, and unknown to us, my faithful and myself had for forty years been deprived of the sacrament and were in fact ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... now is uttered. Let Ovid be silent concerning Cadmus and Arethusa, for if, poetizing, he converts him into a serpent and her into a fountain, I envy him not; for two natures front to front never did he transmute, so that both the forms were prompt to exchange their matter. To one another they responded by such rules, that the serpent made his tail into a fork, and the wounded one drew together his feet. The legs and the ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... with logic absolute Both Standard Oil and Copper can confute; The Sovereign Alchemist that in a trice National Lead can into Gold transmute. ...
— The Re-echo Club • Carolyn Wells
... not to find the same words in Mr. Macaulay. He would pause—he would first consider whether "the fellow" spoken of was a Whig or a Tory. If a Whig, the thing would be treated as a joke, and Mr. Macaulay would transmute it playfully into "the rogue startled me"; but if a Tory, it would take a deeper dye, and we should find "the villain assaulted me"; and in either case we should ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... the oldest and falsest of our beliefs regarding women is that they are protected—that some way in the battle of life they get the best of it. People talk of men's chivalry, that vague, indefinite quality which is supposed to transmute the common clay of ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... prolong life and heal diseases was probably a later phase of alchemy, possibly developed by attempts to connect the power of the mysterious essence with Biblical teachings. The early Roman alchemists, who claimed to be able to transmute metals, seem not to have made other claims ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... liquors,"[16]—and last, but not least assuredly, of one who was by turns a fanatical preacher and an obscure practitioner of physic, and who passed his old age at Clitheroe in Lancashire in attempting to transmute metals and discover the philosopher's stone.[17] So strange a band of Apostles of reason may occasion a smile; it deserves, at all events, a little more particular consideration before we address ourselves to the short narration which may be deemed necessary ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... for a week, then for a fortnight. Having succeeded, you can choose a harder thing to do, and so on. By this forcing of action, you strengthen the will. Day after day it grows greater in power, and you find your inner strength increases. First have a strong desire. Then transmute it into ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... of the alchemist was to transmute one element into another, with the prime object of producing gold. Such transmutation has been actually accomplished within the last few years, but the process is invariably one of disintegration—the more complex elements being broken up into simpler constituents. Much remains ...
— The New Heavens • George Ellery Hale
... the relation of political emancipation to human emancipation. We criticize the religious weakness of the political State by criticizing the political State in its secular construction, apart from the religious weaknesses. We transmute the contradiction of the State with a specific religion, like Judaism, into the contradiction of the State with specific secular elements, and the contradiction of the State with religion generally into the contradiction of the State with ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... farmer learns to transmute compost into grass and grain, and these into beef, he usually stops, content. To be a scientist in the true sense, one must love knowledge for its own sake, and not merely for what it will bring on market-day, and so the Humboldts were led on through ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... ran through him as he recollected the whole scene: for surely he knew all the faces of the six men who had gone through the gate. The devil indeed must have given the mysterious Englishman power to transmute himself and his gang wholly into the ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... have made them hardworking; but it took ten serfs to do, languidly and poorly, what two free men in America would do quickly and well. They were naturally a kind people; but let one example show how serfage can transmute kindness. It is a rule, well known in Russia, that when an accident occurs, interference is to be left to the police. Hence you would see a man lying in a fit, and the bystanders giving no aid, but waiting for the authorities. Some ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... manuscript was in an ivory casket, the key of which she kept religiously; indeed her laboratory was a closed room to all but myself. I saw a small cask full of 'platina del Pinto', which she told me she could transmute into gold when she pleased. It had been given her by M. Vood himself in 1743. She shewed me the same metal in four phials. In the first three the platinum remained intact in sulphuric, nitric, and muriatic acid, but in the fourth, which contained ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... all with good-humour and, really, complete good breeding. She invited nothing, provoked nothing, but resented nothing. It seemed to me as if all these things were indeed nothing to her; that she hardly knew that they were done; as if her soul could render them at their proper worth, transmute them, sherd them off, discard them. It was, then, her surface which took them; what her soul received was ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... beast had appeared on the scene shortly after I left on Saturday; a Gujar told the shikari, and the shikari told me, so it must be true.) When we had gathered as many flowers as we could carry, we strolled back to the camp to watch the sunset transmute the snowy crest of Haramok to ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... or seven exposures to fire. But scepticism of this kind was not universal. Roger Bacon—or more probably some one who usurped his name—declared that with a certain amount of the philosopher's stone he could transmute a million times as much base metal into gold, and on Raimon Lull was fathered the boast, "Mare tingerem si mercurius esset.'' Numerous less distinguished adepts also practised the art, and sometimes were so successful in their deceptions that they gained ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the Tower of Babel should be true. That everything in the whole world had been natural. He was the enemy of alchemy, not only in language, but in science. One passage from him is enough to show his philosophy in this regard. He says: "To transmute iron into gold two things are necessary. First, the annihilation of the iron; second, the creation of gold." Voltaire was a man of humor, of good nature, of cheerfulness. He despised with all his heart the philosophy of Calvin, the creed ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... waves That through the eastern windows pour And, with a warmth my nature craves, Transmute to gold the polished floor! Then mount to gild my desk, my chair, And e'en the spotless paper there, Which soon my written thought ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... we know how to Shakespeare, and in a lesser degree to some of the other great Elizabethans like Marlowe and Webster, there is nothing common and insignificant in life, nothing which the creative imagination of the artist cannot transform, transmute, from mere dross into pure gold. We say, and we say rightly, that here is the greatest thing that England has brought forth, and we think of it as representing the splendid youth and the first ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... many at the North, this dictation by Congress to acknowledged States in time of peace seemed high-handed and guilty usurpation. Northern Congressmen incessantly called slavery barbarism, and yet combined to transmute to-day into electors and law-makers those who but yesterday had been slaves. Black legislatures inevitably abused their power, becoming the instruments of base carpetbag leaders and ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... listen to a symphony. Go not to others for advice, but take counsel from the passing breezes, which relate the history of the world to those who listen." Thus we see that Debussy submits himself to the spells of Nature and tries to transmute them into sound. The only analogies to use in a verbal description of his music must be drawn from nature, for in each are the same shadowy pictures, the same melting outlines.[295] Debussy has a close affinity with that school of painters known as impressionists ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... resolute and often scornful expression which played about his lips. There was nothing amiable, nothing prepossessing, nothing soft in this man's face; and those who knew what his life had been could not wonder that the years had failed to sweeten his abrupt and contradictory acerbity or to transmute them into that kindly forbearance which old men, remembering how often they have stumbled and how many they have seen fall, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the view of Greek mythology taken in the Mysteries. The world of the gods is born in the soul. Man looks upon what he creates in images as his gods (cf. p. 33). But he must force his way through to another conception. He must transmute into divine images the divine force which is active within him before the creation of those images. Behind the divine appears the mother of the divine, which is nothing else than the original force of the human soul. Thus side by side with the gods, ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... glimpses into it, taken previously, to prevent me from making regular approaches to the gist and body of the book, where I fancied lay something like the philosopher's stone, a secret talisman, which would transmute even pitch and tar to ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... happy under the government of the best of princes, can be so infatuated as, without the utmost contempt and indignation, to hear of any terms from a Popish bigoted Pretender." But was it loyalty or sycophancy that could thus transmute even George I. into ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... through the dissolving face of the cold marble goddess there shine the beloved lineaments of Him who 'wears the Godhead's most benignant grace,' the smile upon His face becomes a motive that touches all hearts. Transmute obligation into gratitude, and in front of duty and appeals to self put Christ, and all the harshness and difficulty and burden and self-sacrifice of obedience becomes easy ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... fusing and transforming entire compositions, like the Stanzas on Resolution and Independence, or the Ode on the Recollections of Childhood, sometimes, as if at random, depositing a fine crystal here or there, in a matter it does not wholly search through and transmute, we trace the action of his unique, incommunicable faculty, that strange, mystical sense of a life in natural things, and of man's life as a part of nature, drawing strength and colour and character from ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... garden? These seeds were the bait I used to catch it, my ferrets which I sent into its burrow, my brace of terriers which unearthed it.... Other seeds I have which will find other things in that corner of my garden. Perfect alchemists I keep who can transmute substances without end, and thus the corner of my garden is an inexhaustible treasure-chest. Here you can dig, not gold, but the value which gold merely represents; and there is no Signor Blitz about it. Yet farmer's ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... the duchess, "that Henry of Windsor employed learned men to transmute the baser metals into gold. Wert thou one ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to share his burden? Would you take upon your shoulders his sin? He may have committed the one unpardonable sin, for he discovered the true philosopher's stone, that can transmute metals, make mountains nod, the stars to stop, and command the throne of Jehovah—oh, what blasphemy has been his in his daring music! If he could persuade one other soul besides mine to help him, he might be released from his woe. ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... during the first season; but the more delicate vegetables thrive better with successive years of cultivation. No matter how abundantly the ground may be enriched at first, time and chemical action are required to transmute the fertilizers into the best forms of plant-food, and make them a part of the very soil itself. Plowing or spading, especially if done in late autumn, exposes the mould to the beneficial action of the ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... were to be brought to pass that for the public nothing but amiable diversion should flow simultaneously from platform, stage, and press, then for the public would the millennium be come. A religious philosopher can transmute Adam's fall into a blessing, and we can recognize the wisdom of that dispensation which put enmity between the seed of Jubal, who was the "father of all such as handle the harp and pipe," and the seed of Saul, who, I take it, is the first critic of record (and a vigorous ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... in Irish—wore a hat of two colors, and so pliant in texture that he could at any time turn it inside out. His coat was—as indeed were all his clothes—made upon the time principle, so that when hard pressed by the authorities he could in a minute or two transmute himself into the appearance of a nun very different from the individual described to them. Indeed he was such a perfect Proteus that no vigilance of the Executive was ever a match for his versatility ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... for a soul that truly captured it; this life in which the emphasis should lie on the immediate percepts, the messages the world pours in on us, instead of on the sophisticated universe into which our clever brains transmute them? Plainly, it would mean the achievement of a new universe, a new order of reality: escape from the terrible museum-like world of daily life, where everything is classified and labelled, and all the graded fluid facts which have no label are ignored. It would mean ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... L10,000 [425] Burton had wooed fortune in many ways, by hard study in India, by pioneering in Africa, by diplomacy at Court, by gold-searching in Midian and at Axim, by patent medicining. Finally he had found it in his inkstand; but as his favourite Jami says, it requires only a twist of the pen to transmute duvat into ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... who with genius absolute, My poor satiric Logic can confute; The only Poet who, in modern Days, His Poems can to clinking Gold transmute! ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne • Gelett Burgess
... builds up his nature in time. All the objects of sense and thought, all facts and ideas, all things, are external to his essential personality. But he has bound up in his personal being sympathies and capacities which ally him with external objects, and enable him to transmute their inner spirit and substance into his own personal life. The process of his growth, therefore, is a development of power from within to assimilate objects from without, the power increasing with every vital exercise of it. The result of this assimilation is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... stage, have not taken rank by their art or by their reading of life with "The Building Fund "? It may be that it was the one theme susceptible of dramatic presentation that he had brooded over long enough to transmute into terms of drama, and that the later plays, full of successful stage tricks though they are, did not come out of his knowledge of Irish life. Knowledge of Ireland he ought to have, for he is said to have lived for comparatively long periods in various ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... the curtain, partly to give the exhibitors some little rest, partly to make an alteration in the exhibition. The artist had proposed to himself to transmute the first scene of night and lowliness into a picture of splendor and glory; and for this purpose had prepared a blaze of light to fall in from every side, which this interval was ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... also as the great elixir, or the red tincture, when shaken in very small quantity into melted silver, lead or other metal, was said to transmute it into gold. In minute doses it was supposed to prolong life and restore youth, and was then called elixir vitae.[247:2] Says Ben Jonson in "The Alchemist" (1610), "He that has once the Flower of the Sun, the perfect Ruby which we call Elixir . . ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... which I wrote for McClure's, I made comment on the essential mystery of the poet's art, a conjury which is able to transmute a perfectly commonplace landscape into something fine and mellow and sweet; for the region in which Riley spent his youth, and from which he derived most of his later material, was to me a depressing land, a country without a hill, a river or a lake; a commonplace country, flat, unkempt and without ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... between us that the world could have called wrong. We knew that we loved, and we knew that there was no hope. And that went on for eight years; for eight years I renounced—and strove with every power of my heart and soul to make something out of that renunciation, to transmute it into spiritual power. And I failed—I could not do it; and in the end I knew the reason. It was not beauty and nobility—it was madness and horror; it was not life—it was death! The time came when I knew that our renunciation was simply a ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... Next to making a good speech, I'd like to be skilled in sleight-of-hand affairs. I'd like to fish up a rabbit from the depths of an old gentleman's silk tile, or extract a dozen eggs from a lady's hand-bag, or transmute a canary into a goldfish. I'd like to see the looks of wonder on the faces of the audience and hear them gasp. The difficulty with such a subject as I have chosen, though, is to fill the frame. I went into a shop in Paris once to make some small purchase, expecting ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... ready money can jingle and glitter. But, useless as these crisp and rustling leaves of paper were to him, they held still all their old potentialities, and in the hands of honest men or courageous rascals each leaf might still transmute itself into a hundred golden emblems of sovereignty and power. He was neither that honest man nor that courageous rascal, and the money grew to be a sort of devilish tantalising fetish to him. Before he had owned it a fortnight, he had felt ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... townsmen used to tell him, that, in any other man's hands, Dr. Swinnerton's Brazen Serpent (meaning, I presume, the inherited credit and good-will of that old worthy's trade) would need but ten years' time to transmute its brass into gold. In Dr. Dolliver's keeping, as we have seen, the inauspicious symbol lost the greater part of what superficial gilding it originally had. Matters had not mended with him in more advanced life, after ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... immediate society and nothing more is reflected. There is from a very early time an active principle of personality, a growing selective power, a plus that comes out of the unmapped laboratory of creation, that may so arrange, transmute, and enrich the commonplace elements of the socio-religious matrix as to amount to genius. But, nevertheless, the newcomer can scarcely do more than select the given quarter which from day to day proves least unpleasant, while the fact of being on the ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... craftsmen, a most reluctant and unwelcome space of leisure, that I ever had the opportunity of considering the possibility of writing this book. I am too old to be a combatant, and too much of a specialist in literature to transmute my activities. I lately found myself with my professional occupations suddenly suspended, and moreover, like many men who have followed a wholly peaceful profession, plunged in a dark bewilderment as to the onset of the forces governing ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... said: "Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you and despitefully use you: thou shalt thereby be heaping coals of fire upon their heads." Ay, thou shalt melt them: before this force they cannot stand. Thou shalt melt them, and transmute them into friends. ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine
... vote-cribber, who, having returned, stands regarding the outcast man with singular interest, "would make drunk the whole jail. A week in 'Mount Rascal' The upper story used for the confinement of felons. will be necessary to transmute you, as they call it, into something Christian. On 'the Mount' you will have a chance to philosophize-mollify the temperature of your nervous system-which is out ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... through life itself, not so much by seeking experiences different from those that naturally come your way, as by becoming aware of the value of those that belong naturally to your life; and second, through learning to absorb and transmute the life that is in books, beginning with those that stand nearest to your stage of development. In the process of reading you will turn more and more to those writers who have a larger mastery of life, and who, by ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... can neither put aside the great religious questions nor give a positive answer to them. We must act on the hypothesis that one answer or the other is true; but we must not allow any juggling to transmute a judgment of probability into an undoubting conviction of truth. There are real arguments on both sides, and we must not ignore the existence of either. In the attack upon Manning he indicates ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... ;every man leading an active life, ought to read that," he said. "We should have a new order of things as the result Instead of fancying that our ordinary daily work was one thing and our religion quite another thing, we should transmute our drudgery into acts of worship. Instead of going to prayer-meetings to get into a 'good frame' we should live in a good frame from morning till night, from night till morning, and prayer and praise would be only another form ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... West. Then the international complications set in. First, William's passport—a healthy enough document at the start—had to be carried round the diplomatic quarter of London until it broke out into a thick rash of supplementary visas. Next we sought out the moneychangers in their dens, to transmute William's viaticum bit by bit into four foreign currencies. Then a Great Power through whose territory William will have to pass apparently was nervous of his approach and instituted a grand inquisition into the status and antecedents of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various
... other hand, should some future great chemical discovery realize the dream of the alchemists, and enable us to transmute iron into gold, and indeed every chemical Element into every other chemical Element (convertible identity), still the sixty-four (nearly) Chemical Elements now known would remain the real Elements of Organic and Inorganic Compounds, in a ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... now. Yet her relation to her husband's life was the same as that of the girl who had gone to his office the night of the Randolphs' dinner. And no external event—nothing that could happen to her (remember that even motherhood had "happened" in her case) could ever transmute that relation into the thing she wanted. If the alchemy were to be wrought at all, it would be by the act of her own will—at the cost of a deliberately assumed struggle. There was nothing, any more, to hope from waiting. The thing that whispered, "Wait! To-morrow—some to-morrow ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... as the old alchemists must have done," he often thought. "Here is a base metal. Why can I not transmute ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... then, that there should be a reawakening of interest in the lives of some of the men, who, dominated by some of the earlier scholastic ideas, by the tradition of the possibility of finding the philosopher's stone, which would transmute the baser metals into the precious metals, devoted themselves with quite as much zeal as any modern chemist to the observation of chemical phenomena. One of the most interesting of these—indeed, he might well be said to be the greatest of the alchemists—is ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... resign ourselves to the outward rule of Fate and to recognise that the non-human world is unworthy of our worship, it becomes possible at last so to transform and refashion the unconscious universe, so to transmute it in the crucible of imagination, that a new image of shining gold replaces the old idol of clay. In all the multiform facts of the world—in the visual shapes of trees and mountains and clouds, in the events of the life of man, even in the very omnipotence ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... senses of the body, and good acts, are declared by the Ved to be indispensable in the mind's approximation to God." Yet the spirit can for the time pervade and control every member and function of the body, and transmute what in form is the grossest sensuality into purity and devotion. The generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... whatsoever. Indeed, all that is sprinkled with the breath of its vapour is changed into the hardness of stone. It remains a doubt whether it be more marvellous or more perilous, that soft and flowing water should be invested with such a stiffness, as by a sudden change to transmute into the nature of stone whatsoever is put to it and drenched with its reeking fume, nought but the shape surviving. Here also are said to be other springs, which now are fed with floods of rising water, and, overflowing in full channels, cast a mass of spray upwards; ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned") |
