"Transmute" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... but the good, when picked up again, never is picked up as originally dropped. Between the original dropping and return to its vicinity along the tracks of the spiral, fresh elements join. These new accretions so transmute whatever is re-picked up that it is essentially remodeled. The "Communism," for instance, that the race is now heading toward, is, materially, a different article from the "Communism" it once left behind. We move in an upward spiral. No doubt moral concepts are the reflex ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... 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 places in country as an excise officer. ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... on a programme, it would prove awe-inspiring. 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 to find a great emporium, ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... without the terrible frustrations of form. Obviously, there is a golden mean in the arts as in all things, and there comes a point at which form passes into formalism. Genius requires just enough frustration to increase its vehemence, and so to transmute nature into art. It is possible that some frustration of a comparable kind is needed in order to transmute nature into morality, and that the man who would, in Milton's phrase, make of his life ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... 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, a ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... hear more of Suzanna's fancies, but Suzanna remained silent, having been chilled a little by Maizie's practicality. So Maizie put out her hand and touched her sister. "Will the petticoat be a petticoat?" she asked, and wondered excitedly into what beauty Suzanna's imagination would transmute ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... providing for the wants of the emigrating myriads to the coast of Africa: we have ships enough, and, notwithstanding the hardness of the times, money enough. O, the surpassing utility of the arithmetic! it is more potent than the stone of the philosopher, which, when discovered, is to transmute, at a touch, base metal into ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... narrow streets, unlovely and sombre, muddy and ill-smelling, immured in dreary houses and surrounded with mean and depressing sights and sounds, the spirit of childhood took radiance and color from its own inner light and the alchemy of youth could still transmute its lead to gold. No little princess in the courts of fairyland could feel a fresher interest and pleasure in life than Esther sitting at the Seder table, where her father—no longer a slave in Egypt—leaned royally upon two chairs ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... 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 ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... question of 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 ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... terror 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 bodies ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... this is what the Master meant when he 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 ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine
... 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, sometimes ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... power to purchase true friendship and only eternal things are given away. So, what matters it whether we travel east or west as long as our souls retain the freshness and fragrance of the early morning's hours? We can be our own alchemists, and through the gray vapors of our poor lives transmute them into golden flowers of character that shall gleam and sparkle as the evening of our closing days draw near, like coruscating stars in the violet dusk of ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... a 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 ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... 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 as an introduction to the republication ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... property of instability, but in its case the instability is more pronounced. A relatively large fraction of its atoms transmute per second to a solid element designated Radium A. In turn this new generation of atoms breaks up—even faster than the emanation—becoming yet another element with specific chemical properties. And so on for a whole sequence of transmutations, till finally a stable substance is formed, identical ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... 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
... are 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 ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... both to 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 ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... in fine streams diffusive ACIDS flow, Or wing'd with fire o'er Earth's fair bosom blow; Transmute to glittering Flints her chalky lands, Or sink on Ocean's bed in countless Sands. Hence silvery Selenite her chrystal moulds, 220 And soft Asbestus smooths his silky folds; His cubic forms phosphoric Fluor prints, Or rays in spheres his amethystine tints. Soft cobweb clouds ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... Cordelia; 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
... but the dreams and ambitions had died, too, never to come again. And as it is in the nature of things that no one is less lenient towards romantic longings than he who has suffered disappointment in them, who has failed to transmute them into reality, so, in this case, the son's first tentative leanings to a wider life, met with a more deeply-rooted, though less decisive, opposition, on the part of the father than ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... with Logic absolute The Two-and-Seventy jarring Sects confute: The Sovereign Alchemist that in a trice Life's leaden metal into Gold transmute: ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... please the fairy king, Full every deal they laugh and sing, And antic feats devise; Some wind and tumble like an ape, And other-some transmute their shape ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 189, June 11, 1853 • Various
... cartons and tattered relics. These relics—crumpled leaves of the old comic journals of the period from 1830 to 1855—are neither rare nor expensive; but I happened to have lighted on a particularly copious collection, and I made the most of my small good-fortune, in order to transmute it, if possible, into a sort of compensation for my having missed unavoidably, a few months before, the curious exhibition "de la Caricature Moderne" held for several weeks just at hand, in the ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... 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
... innocence, for gore Or poison none this festal did pollute, But, piled on high, an overflowing store 2310 Of pomegranates and citrons, fairest fruit, Melons, and dates, and figs, and many a root Sweet and sustaining, and bright grapes ere yet Accursed fire their mild juice could transmute Into a mortal bane, and brown corn set 2315 In baskets; with pure streams their thirsting ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... fearful joy in their darling's acquirements; and if it should live, think they, of what remarkable talents will it not be the possessor! By degrees, the extreme quickness of intellect becomes less remarkable; but the body begins to increase in robustness; and a year will sometimes suffice to transmute the little fairy, so quick, so clever, but so fragile, into a very commonplace, merry, rosy, romping child. I may add that it is well to bear in mind the converse of this; to remember that body and mind rarely grow in equal proportion at one time; that the incorrigible little dunce, though not ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... NASO, a great Necromancer in the famous Court of AUGUSTUS CAESAR, did by art poetic transmute Men, Women, and even Gods and Goddesses, into Trees and Flowers; I have undertaken by similar art to restore some of them to their original animality, after having remained prisoners so long in their respective vegetable mansions; and have here ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... 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 ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... longer in need of seeking out knowledge of strange adventures. The tyrannical imam of Oman, who imprisoned my brother, is dead, and his successor, commiserating the poor youth's sorrows, has not only liberated him, but given him the vermillion edifice of his incarceration. This my brother intends to transmute into gold, for he has hit upon the happy expedient of grinding it up into a face powder, a rouge, beautiful in tint and harmless in composition, for the rock was quarried in one of the most salubrious locations upon the upper waters of the great river Euphrates. I trust I shall sometimes see you ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... midday meal is a readjustment. But the long hours of morning sleep are just a damage. We submit our now active centers of upper consciousness to the dominion of the blood-automatic flow. We chain ourselves down in our morning sleep. We transmute the morning's blood-strength into false dreams and into an ever-increasing force of inertia. And naturally, in the same line of inertia we persist ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... is, I am more and more confirmed in believing, the most beautiful place I was ever resident in: far more so than Gressoney or even St.-Pierre de Chartreuse. You would indeed delight in seeing the magnificence of the mountains,—the range on either side, which morning and evening, in turn, transmute literally to gold,—I mean what I say. Their utterly bare ridges of peaks and crags of all shape, quite naked of verdure, glow like yellow ore; and, at times, there is a silver change, as the ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... a term usually employed to designate the ancient art of the transmutation of metals—particularly of the base metals into gold. The word "Transmute" means "to change from one nature, form, or substance, into another; to transform" (Webster). And accordingly, "Mental Transmutation" means the art of changing and transforming mental states, forms, and conditions, into others. So you may ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... 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, ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... German would have thought nothing more was needed; and the name of Goethe himself reminds one how great for the artist may be the danger of overmuch science; how Goethe, who, in the Elective Affinities and the first part of Faust, does transmute ideas into images, who wrought many such transmutations, did not invariably find the spell-word, and in the second part of Faust presents us with a mass of science which has almost no artistic character at all. But Leonardo ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... contrary, 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 ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... alter, exchange, shift, transmute, commute, metamorphose, substitute, turn, convert, modify, transfigure, vary, diversify, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... 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 local influences, ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... the 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 of fix ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... gave me this record among others in the belief that it would help to tell me what he had always known in the silences, yet could never in life transmute into the friendly counters of speech. During the last years of his all too brief experience of his friends, more than once he shyly sought to tell what he knew, yet always silence claimed him, and nothing but ...
— The Forgotten Threshold • Arthur Middleton
... temptation, by toil and expenditure, through all the hardships and hazards of daily life its value is determined and its destiny shaped. And according to the measure in which we use these experiences, and transmute them by obedience to the will of God into means of good, do we grow in Christian character and approximate to the full stature ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... the duchess, "that Henry of Windsor employed learned men to transmute the baser metals into gold. ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... whose brows the brand of Rheims is graven, To spare the poet of our common race And find forgiveness for the Bard of Avon; And all the little lore he feebly guessed, Phantasy, rhetoric, and trope and sermon, To clasp politely to your mailed breast, Refine, transmute and render wholly German. ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914 • Various
... things missed were as beautiful as fine things achieved. Once Rowland passed an angry day. He had dreamed—it was the most insubstantial of dreams—that she had given him the right to believe that she looked to him to transmute her discontent. And yet here she was throwing herself back into Roderick's arms at his lightest overture, and playing with his own half fearful, half shameful hopes! Rowland declared to himself that his position was essentially detestable, and that all ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... change, alter, vary, wax and wane; modulate, diversify, qualify, tamper with; turn, shift, veer, tack, chop, shuffle, swerve, warp, deviate, turn aside, evert, intervert[obs3]; pass to, take a turn, turn the corner, resume. work a change, modify, vamp, superinduce; transform, transfigure, transmute, transmogrify, transume[obs3]; metamorphose, ring the changes. innovate, introduce new blood, shuffle the cards; give a turn to, give a color to; influence, turn the scale; shift the scene, turn over a new leaf. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... latterly allowed himself to decline to the manufacture of literary sillibub in the guise of novels about the smart set and Bohemia? How shall the stern critic dispose of Gertrude Atherton, who knows so much about California, New York, and the international scene but who somehow fails to transmute her materials to any lasting metal and leaves the impression of a vexed aristocrat scolding the age without either convincing it or convicting it of very serious deficiencies? How shall the accurate ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... Lover of the world if He knew nothing of that side of life? But He, and His greatest followers—St. Francis of Assisi, St. Catherine and St. Theresa, and countless others who have followed them—learned to transmute that great creative force, disdained both choices which I set before you, finding a nobler and more glorious way. These would neither repress this great impulse, nor dissipate it, but so used it for the service of ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... silently marvel at this alchemy? A little bundle of muscle and blood, which in this freezing weather can transmute frozen beetles and zero air into a happy, cheery little Black-capped Chickadee, as he names himself, ...
— Bird Stories • Edith M. Patch
... that many persons imagine that if any thing sweet is fed to bees, they will quickly transmute it into the purest nectar. There is, however, no more truth in such a conceit, than there would be in that of a man who supposed that he had found the veritable philosopher's stone; and that he was able to change all our copper and silver coins into the purest gold! Bees to be sure, can ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... can prove that I am right. What more do I want than this, and honest men and women who will listen to me?" The confidence he had in the strength of the Catholic argument was absolute, and this he showed by his zeal. His sole study was how to transmute this force into missionary form. Of all the wonders of the intellectual world he felt that the greatest is the faith of Catholics, and he knew by the lesson of his early life that it is but slightly ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... of his zeal for the revolutionary cause, has no remedy for the disease he calls Life. He is eaten up with rage at the world in general, and tries to make us all share his disgust with it. But he teaches us nothing; he has little to say that we can transmute into anything valuable. This is perhaps the reason why the world has temporarily, at any rate, lost interest in him. He was a new sensation, he shocked us, and gave us strange thrills, after the manner of new and unexpected sensations. Gorki came ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... 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 grim as anything ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... singer, no ballroom warbler. And why? Because I am practical. Mine is no squalor of song that cannot transmute itself, with proper exchange value, into a flower-crowned cottage, a sweet mountain- meadow, a grove of redwoods, an orchard of thirty-seven trees, one long row of blackberries and two short rows of strawberries, to say nothing of a ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... loving study of the classics. There is nothing technical here, and no room for any advice of mine; this essay does not profess to bestow insight and acumen on those who are not endowed with them by nature; valuable, or invaluable rather, would it have been, if it could recast and modify like that, transmute lead into gold, tin into silver, magnify a Conon or Leotrophides into ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... 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 ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... perfect creature, Take all she is or leave complete; Transmute you will not form or feature, Change feet for wings ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... if she were discovered, would transmute us all into stone," said the novelist, bowing gravely. "If she existed at all," he added deliberately, "it was my business to find her, and she has cost me many a vain pilgrimage. Like Rudel of Tripoli, I have crossed seas and penetrated deserts ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... the rose. 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, let us imagine seven ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... 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 he had deposited a further and ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Hartley's case, it 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
... society 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 citizens, and therefore ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... perilous moments; flashes of wild feeling; struggles of fierce power; love, 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 ...
— The Prophetic Pictures (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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 for ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... 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 the social life of ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... one to transmute apparent misfortunes into real blessings, is a fortune to a young man or young woman just crossing the threshold of active life. There is nothing but ill fortune in a habit of grumbling, which "requires no talent, no self-denial, no brains, no character." Grumbling only makes an employee ...
— Cheerfulness as a Life Power • Orison Swett Marden
... with the number of his regiment wrought in gold on the front of a broad brimmed hat lying on a book-table near him. Not an ill-looking man by any manner of means, in spite of the violent antipathy for him which Miss Emily had managed to transmute out ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... willing 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. Will you ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... alchemists, and found that it will not withstand six 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 the ear of kings, whose desire ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... illusions. The entire absence of rhetoric in the author's mode of "putting things" adds to its effectiveness. He attempts to reveal the common,—one of the rarest of revelations; and shows what heroic qualities are needed to overcome the superficial circumstances of our life, and transmute them into occasions for that humble, obscure heroism which God alone apprehends and rewards. The freedom of the writer from all the stereotyped phraseology of sanctity in doing this work, and his innocent sympathy with everything cheerful, pleasurable, and lovable in Nature ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... on the occasion referred to, had remarked of him most truly,—"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 endeavoured by the might of genius to transmute what was base into what is precious as the beaten gold;" observing, indeed, yet further—"He has mingled in the common walks of life; he has made himself familiar with the lower orders of society." As if in supplementary and conclusive justification of those words, Dickens, within less ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... suffered from lack of interest in life. Many a vivid moment dwelt in her memory; joys and sorrows, personal or of larger scope, affected her the more deeply because of that ruling intelligence which enabled her to transmute them into principles. No longer anticipating or desiring any great change in her own environment, in the modes and motives of her activity, she found it a sufficient happiness to watch, and when possible to direct, ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... 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 ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... "Resist not evil." We may find, in similar exalted pronouncements, truths that are very useful to disciples but which might be confusing and misleading to the man of the world if he attempted to literally apply them. Perhaps for the average mortal "kill out desire" might be interpreted "transmute desire." Without desire man would be in a deathlike and dangerous condition—a condition in which further progress would be impossible. But by transmuting the lower desires into the higher he moves steadily forward ...
— Self-Development and the Way to Power • L. W. Rogers
... of vulgarity in his language, save when the right delineation of character orders it so: words, that are nothing but vulgar as used by vulgar minds, are somehow in his use washed clean of their vulgarity; for there was a cunning alchemy in his touch that could instantly transmute the basest materials into "something rich and strange." In this respect, Mr. White justly applies to him what ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... 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 than disciples, that is, 'believers.' ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... that we can make iron float by the same law by which it sinks. It is the discovery that what we call the mortal part of us is capable of being brought under a higher application of the Universal Law of Life, which will transmute it into an immortal principle. When we see what we call the mortal part of us in this light we can employ the very principle on which the negative race-thought is founded as a weapon for the destruction of that thought ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... those Chymists that, Supposing with me the Truth of what Helmont relates of the Alkahest's wonderful Effects, have a right to press me with his Authority concerning them, and to alledge that he could Transmute all reputedly mixt Bodies into insipid and meer Water; To those I shall represent, That though his Affirmations conclude strongly against the Vulgar Chymists (against whom I have not therefore scrupl'd to Employ Them) since they Evince that ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... Edgartown, on the island of Martha's Vineyard, I became acquainted with a certain carver of tombstones, who had travelled and voyaged thither from the interior of Massachusetts, in search of professional employment. The speculation had turned out so successful, that my friend expected to transmute slate and marble into silver and gold, to the amount of at least a thousand dollars, during the few months of his sojourn at Nantucket and the Vineyard. The secluded life, and the simple and primitive spirit which still characterizes the inhabitants of those islands, especially of Martha's ...
— Chippings With A Chisel (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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 ...
— The New Heavens • George Ellery Hale
... inspired them. Keats, it must be remembered, was a sensualist. His poems belong to the literature of the higher sensualism. They reveal him as a man not altogether free from the vulgarities of sensualism, as well as one who was able to transmute it into perfect literature. He seems to have admired women vulgarly as creatures whose hands were waiting to be squeezed, rather than as equal human beings; the eminent exception to this being his sister-in-law, Georgiana. His famous declaration of independence of them—that he ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... "dewy-feathered sleep," "the studious cloister's pale," "a dim religious light," the "silver lining" of the cloud, "west winds with musky wing," "the laureate hearse where Lycid lies." His poetic instinct enabled him to take common prosaic words and, by merely changing the position of the adjective, transmute them into imperishable verse. His "darkness visible" and "human face divine" are instances ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... eyes would turn from blue velvet to blue steel, and strength would flow into her from some divine, benignant source and transmute her into ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Acilia, of complicity 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 ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... game. (I need hardly remark that the noble but elusive 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 ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... 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
... countless unnamed peaks that surround them. Napoleon Bonaparte towered only a little over the ablest men around him. Yet that little was everything, and he overran Europe. A man who surpassed Napoleon, as Napoleon surpassed Murat, in the mental qualities which transmute thought into fact, would have made himself master of the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... his threshing, intolerable mane of flames, his face bans darkness and makes a burning void in his domains. He pours his lustihood and power upon the joyous spheres. His rays transmute all things. Through the dancing infant host his Magnificat is upborne on the breath of ...
— The Masque of the Elements • Herman Scheffauer
... stone, known 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 ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... Columbus shows how rarely men of the greatest insight and foresight, and also of the greatest perseverance, attain the exact ends they aim at. In this respect all such men partake the career of the alchemists, who did not transmute other metals into gold, but made valuable discoveries in chemistry. So, with Columbus. He did not rebuild the Holy Sepulchre; he did not lead a new crusade; he did not find his Kublai Khan, or his Prester John; but he brought into relation ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... eternity life and death have been at war with each other. No day and no night passes when the first cry of a child tossed up on the shores of light is not mingled with the wailings of mourners. Let me tell you how you may transmute your sorrow. A battle rages in the plain. The earth is shaken with the violent charges of the cavalry and with the tramping feet of men. Cruel weapons gleam in the sun. But to one afar off upon a hill the army is but a bright spot in the ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... girlish feeling; Oh, thrust it far behind thee! Give thou proof Thou'rt the daughter of the mighty—his Who where he moves creates the wonderful. Not to herself the woman must belong, Annexed and bound to alien destinies. But she performs the best part, she the wisest, Who can transmute the alien into self, Meet and disarm necessity by choice; And what must be, take freely to her heart, And bear and foster ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... to relieve such necessities. Unlike beauty, they are not their own excuse for being. Their embodiment is utilitarian, that of art is aesthetic. Political economy, for example, shows me how to buy two drinks for the same price I used to pay for one; while art inspires me to transmute a pewter mug into a Cellini goblet. My physical nature, perhaps, prefers two drinks to one; but, if my taste be educated, and I be not too thirsty, I would rather drink once from the Cellini goblet than twice from the mug. Political ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... tone. He made certain sigils, gestures and movements at the same time. For several minutes he continued to utter these words, until at length the growing volume dominated the whole room and mastered the manifestation of all that opposed it. For just as he understood the spiritual alchemy that can transmute evil forces by raising them into higher channels, so he knew from long study the occult use of sound, and its direct effect upon the plastic region wherein the powers of spiritual evil work their fell purposes. Harmony was restored first of all to his own soul, and thence to ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... from Nature 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? We never see them. Buried ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... pawnbrokers, ask no questions. The most remarkable of their vested powers was that of manufacturing money. The industrial manufacturer could not make goods unless he had the plant, the raw material and the labor. But the banker, somewhat like the fabled alchemists, could transmute airy nothing into bank-note money, and then, by law, force its acceptance. The lone trader or landholder unsupported by a partnership with law could not fabricate money. But let trader and landholder band in a company, incorporate, then persuade, ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... than that of self-control and self-denial can men and women now set going the causes which will build for them brains and bodies of a higher type for their future return to earth-life. They have to hold this instinct in complete control, to transmute it from passion into tender and self-denying affection, to develop the intellectual at the expense of the animal, and thus to raise the whole man to the human stage, in which every intellectual and ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... inspiration from themes which inspired Dante; he has sung sweet songs and musical lyrics; and whether writing in rhyme or blank verse, has proved himself a master of his instrument. He knows, like all true poets, how to transmute what may be called common into the pure gold of poetry."—Spectator, July ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... chemistry?" But in his scanty prophecies of what science might effect he showed curiously little resource. The truth is that this had not much interest for him, and he did not see that scientific discoveries might transmute social conditions. The world of 2440, its intolerably docile and virtuous society, reflects two capital weaknesses in the speculation of the Encyclopaedist period: a failure to allow for the strength of human passions and interests, and a deficient appreciation of the meaning of liberty. Much ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... who by persistent ingenuity simulates a master-work almost to perfection. By so much as genius is not an infinite capacity for pains, by so much is Bruckner's Ninth not a true symphony. Sometimes, under the glamor of his art, we are half persuaded that mere persistence may transmute pedantry into poetry. ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... endurance, would throw it off in anger, plunging probably into what would be deemed deeper abysses of depravity. Hawthorne's way was the best, for he contrived, by an exquisite process, best known to himself, to transmute this heavy moral burden into the very substance of the imagination, to make it evaporate in the light and charming fumes of artistic production. But Hawthorne, of course, was exceptionally fortunate; ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... 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 ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... through the five points or rules of the Master, and by the use of one part to a thousand, transmute and ennoble metals. You may then in reality say that your ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... common purposes as communities or as a nation stated in different terms than those suggested in the paragraphs above. For example, Franklin K. Lane, the Secretary of the Interior during the war, said, "Our national purpose is to transmute days of dreary work into happier lives—for ourselves first and for all others in their time." Again, President Wilson said that our purpose in entering the world war was to help "make the world ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn
... continue mute, In joyful awe before the Infinite, Until at length eternity transmute My ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... that opinions are but the reflection of a man's experiences, changing as his experiences change. In the two years following the publication of the first volume, Strindberg's experiences were such as to exercise a decisive influence on his views on the woman question and to transmute his early predisposition to woman-hating from a passive tendency to a positive, active force in his character ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... 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
... grape that can with logic absolute The two and seventy jarring sects confute: The sovereign Alchemist that in a trice Life's leaden metal into Gold transmute." ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... its spurs instead of its anthers. What family tie is betrayed in all this? No other than that sepals, petals, anthers and pistils are but leaves in disguise, and that we have detected nature returning to the form from which ages ago she began to transmute the parts of flowers in all their teeming diversity. The leaf is the parent not only of all these but of delicate tendrils, which save a vine the cost of building a stem stout enough to lift it to open air and sunshine. However thoroughly, or however long, a habit ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... 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 ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... thou sordid man!" exclaimed the poet. "Dost thou desire nothing brighter than gold, that thou wouldst transmute all this ethereal lustre into such dross as thou wallowest in already? For myself, hiding the jewel under my cloak, I shall hie me back to my attic-chamber in one of the darksome alleys of London. There night and day will I gaze upon it. My soul shall drink its radiance; it shall ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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 of appearance, swiftness of foot, and caution. These frequent ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... more subtile, slow degrees Thus may the mind transmute its all, That calmly it should dwell on these, As on another's fate ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... 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 of ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... He knew it was impossible that the story of 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 of the somber, of the ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... game he was playing, and he was unafraid, because he had only his life to lose, a life that was not much more than a hopeless derelict at most. Now it was different. Mary Josephine had come like some rare and wonderful alchemy to transmute for him all leaden things into gold. In a few minutes she had upset the world. She had literally torn aside for him the hopeless chaos in which he saw himself struggling, flooding him with the warm radiance of a great love and a still greater desire. On his lips he could feel the soft ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... in its practical attitude towards, and success against, this most real Evil. But Pantheism increases, whilst seeming to surmount, the theoretical difficulty, since the world as it stands, and not an Ultimate Reality behind it, is held to be perfect; and it entirely fails really to transmute Evil in practice. Theism, no more than any other outlook, really explains Evil; but it alone, in its fullest, Jewish-Christian forms, has done more, and better, than explain Evil: it has fully faced, it has indeed greatly intensified, the problem, by its noble ...
— Progress and History • Various
... sententiousness. "In Miss Hartley's case, it 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 ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... so he can enjoy the faint autumnal splendour of the landscape, as he sees hill and plain, vineyard and forest, clad in one wonderful glory of fairy gold, which the first great winds of winter will transmute, as in the fable, into withered leaves. And so too he can enjoy the admirable brevity and simplicity of such little glimpses of country and country ways as flash upon him through the windows of the train; little glimpses that have ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... from the outward; and here the glory of man as a creator of conditions and opportunities, will be first measured and fully appreciated, for it is the woman only who can penetrate his works, draw thence their full significance and value, transmute their evils to goods, and incorporate their best spirit in humanity. It is a great thing to create that which helps any human soul to be diviner than without such help it would be. It is greater to develop conditions which establish and confirm true relations between the soul and its ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... had a love of gain, which under a better system would 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 Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... one or two at once. "Now, Williams, you are on your mettle, old boy; stand true to your colours, and transmute the sentence into a joke ...
— Life in London • Edwin Hodder
... she might have heard the whispered words in her every hut, "Open, Sesame;" but, so far as her humble domicile and her degraded person were concerned, there was no invisible but gracious Genii who, on the instant, could transmute the rudeness of her hut into instant elegance, and change the crude surroundings of her home into neatness, ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... negative way of evading pain and seeking security 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 ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... thou sordid man!' exclaimed the poet. 'Dost thou desire nothing brighter than gold that thou wouldst transmute all this ethereal lustre into such dross as thou wallowest in already? For myself, hiding the jewel under my cloak, I shall hie me back to my attic chamber, in one of the darksome alleys of London. There, night and day, will I gaze upon it; my soul shall drink its radiance; it shall ...
— The Great Stone Face - And Other Tales Of The White Mountains • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... delicate but substantial satisfaction. It is, as a rule, the people who scorn money who get most out of it; and Jack's elegant disdain of his wife's big balance enabled him, with an appearance of perfect good-breeding, to transmute it into objects of art and luxury. To the latter, I must add, he remained relatively indifferent; but he was buying Renaissance bronzes and eighteenth-century pictures with a discrimination that bespoke the ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... 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 ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... adepts to make the precious metals, and had not received any returns, his credulity remained unshaken, and he issued a pompous grant in favour of three other alchemists, who boasted that they could not only transmute metals, but could impart perpetual youth, with unimpaired powers both of mind and body, by means of a specific called the Mother and Queen of Medicines, the Celestial Glory, the Quintessence or Elixir ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... scholars were much better equipped for their task than any of the men whom we have so far studied, their gravest difficulty being an overweighting of learning which they sometimes failed to fuse with their spiritual vision and to transmute into power. But with all their propension to learning and their love of philosophy, they were primarily and fundamentally religious—they were disciples of Christ rather than disciples of Plato and Plotinus. Bishop Burnet's testimony to the positive spiritual ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... has been suggested, and some strong-growing vegetables may be seen at their best 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 air and frost, and the ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... benevolent; in 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 ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... average 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, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... 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 ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... our forests be worth without vigorous and intelligent men to make use of them? Why should we conserve our natural resources, unless we can by the magic of industry transmute them into the wealth of the world? What transmutes them into that wealth, if not the skill and the touch of the men who go daily to their toil and who constitute the great body of the American people? What I am interested in is having the government ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... base mechanic art for aught but to profit by the ignorance of the vulgar? Or think by pots and pans and mixing vile substances to make this, which by nature is this, into that which by nature it is not! I, a scholar? A scholar? No, I tell you, there was never alchemist yet could transmute but one thing—poor into rich, ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... truly divine, a Saviour of men, and he takes up the world-work 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 ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... "that road is evil and this good," taking council only of what was most in accord with his own will, forgetting that the Great Power embraces all within itself, knowing no good or evil, but seeing only a means to fulfil the eternal purpose of creation. It is we who must be the alchemists to transmute what we term evil into good, we, who are the servants and instruments by which that purpose must be achieved. If, seeing evil, we pass by on the other side, how shall the waste places of the earth be cleansed or the wilderness break ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... these cults who has not some sympathy with the power of a mystical idea to transmute the meanest and most trivial objects with a kind of magic. It is easy to talk of superstitiously attaching importance to sticks and stones, but the whole poetry of life consists of attaching importance to sticks and ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton |
