"Carbuncle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... there are certain classes of men more subject than others to certain infirmities; the Gascons are given to exaggeration and Parisians to vanity. As we see that apoplexy attacks people with short necks, or butchers are liable to carbuncle, as gout attacks the rich, health the poor, deafness kings, paralysis administrators, so it has been remarked that certain classes of husbands and their wives are more given to illegitimate passions. Thus they forestall the celibates, they form another sort of aristocracy. If any reader ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... nearly an hour since sunset, but the twilight still lingers in softened radiance, mellowing the mountain-scenery. The camp-wagons are drawn up on a low pebbly shelf at the foot of the hills, and the kindled fire has set a great carbuncle in the standing pool. A spring branch oozes out of the rocky turf, and flows down to meet a shallow river fretting over shoals. The road we have followed hangs like a rope-ladder from the top of the hills, sagging down in the irregularities till it reaches the river-bed, where it flies ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... romance, as in the story of the stern old regicide who suddenly appears from the woods to head the colonists of Massachusetts in a critical emergency; then he tries his hand at a bit of allegory, and describes the search for the mythical carbuncle which blazes by its inherent splendour on the face of a mysterious cliff in the depths of the untrodden wilderness, and lures old and young, the worldly and the romantic, to waste their lives in the vain effort to discover it—for the carbuncle ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... for truths, yet I am not very forward to reject them as impossibilities, and therefore I would not discourage any from making further Inquiry, whether or no there be Really in Rerum natura, any such thing as a true Carbuncle or Stone that without Rubbing will shine in the Dark. For if such a thing can be found, it may afford no small Assistance to the Curious in the Investigation of Light, besides the Nobleness and Rarity of the thing it selfe. And though Vartomannus was not an Eye witness of ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle |
