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Elixir of life   /ɪlˈɪksər əv laɪf/   Listen
Elixir of life

noun
1.
A hypothetical substance believed to maintain life indefinitely; once sought by alchemists.






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"Elixir of life" Quotes from Famous Books



... is the purity of the air that one seems to be taking in at every breath the veritable elixir of life. Your spirits are buoyant, and all nature seems to be smiling and gay. As we journeyed we overtook the scouts, who were returning to apprise us of the exact location of the buffaloes. After making their ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman

... great lover of good water—to my mind the elixir of life, the great secret of health and strength—I was always enraptured by the deliciousness of the water in the streams we met. It was so crystalline and limpid that one could not resist the temptation of drinking it, ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... the Hut were the elixir of life, and a day's cooking was no exception to the rule. It began at 7 A.M., and, with a brief intermission between lunch and afternoon tea, continued strenuously till 8.30 P.M. Cooks were broadly classified as ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... to do with such a serious case as this before, but I have obtained from the Patriarch of the Taoist Church a small vial of the Elixir of Life, which has the marvellous property of prolonging the existence of whoever drinks it. We shall try it on the King and, as there is no sign of vital decay, let us hope that it will be effective in restoring him ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan

... vivisector. This is not true. All that has been accomplished by these torturers of dumb and helpless animals amounts to nothing. We have obtained from these gentlemen Koch's cure for consumption, Pasteur's factory of hydrophobia and Brown-Sequard's elixir of life. These three failures, gigantic, absurd, ludicrous, are the great ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll

... it to-day—and, indeed, of all the religious thought of India. In the Vedic hymns Nature itself is divine, and their pantheon consists of the deified forces of Nature, worshipped now as Agni, the god of Fire; Soma, the god and the elixir of life; Indra, the god of heaven and the national god of the Aryans; and again, under more abstract forms, such as Prajapati, the lord of creation, Asura, the great spirit, Brahmanaspati, the lord of prayer; and sometimes, again, gathered together into the transcendent majesty of ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol

... body is from the earth, extracted from the elements of which all things material are made. This view of man was shared by many other alchemists. The Philosopher's Stone, therefore (or, rather, a solution of it in alcohol) was also regarded as the Elixir of Life; which, thought the alchemists, would not endow man with physical immortality, as is sometimes supposed, but restore him again to the flower of youth, "regenerating" him physiologically. Failing this, of course, they regarded gold in a potable ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove

... Roger Chillingworth was a brilliant acquisition. He soon manifested his familiarity with the ponderous and imposing machinery of antique physic; in which every remedy contained a multitude of far-fetched and heterogeneous ingredients, as elaborately compounded as if the proposed result had been the Elixir of Life. In his Indian captivity, moreover, he had gained much knowledge of the properties of native herbs and roots; nor did he conceal from his patients, that these simple medicines, Nature's boon to the ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... tongue means Paradise, and a Bihishtee is, therefore, an inhabitant of Paradise, a cherub, a seraph, an angel of mercy. He has no wings; the painters have misconceived him; but his back is bowed down with the burden of a great goat-skin swollen to bursting with the elixir of life. He walks the land when the heaven above him is brass and the earth iron, when the trees and shrubs are languishing and the last blade of grass has given up the struggle for life, when the very roses smell only of dust, and all day ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA

... prove it, he blundered off the saddle, and came down on the ground with a thwack. He picked himself up, however, and recollecting that he had a flask with brandy in it, he felt for it, found it intact, and, with an inarticulate murmur of apology, raised it to his lips. It was like the veritable elixir of life: never in his life before had Freeman quaffed so deep a draught of the fiery spirit. It was just ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne

... 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 of Life. In favour of these "three lovers of the truth, and haters of deception," as they styled themselves, Henry dispensed with the law passed by his grandfather, Henry IV., against the undue multiplication of gold and silver, and empowered them to transmute the precious metals. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... be a balm of Gilead—an elixir of life—a sojourn at the fountain of youth and happiness for me to get away from the chaperoning of Eulalie for a while," ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various

... companions toiled up the steep hill, drinking in with every inhalation of the balmy air copious draughts of the new-found elixir of life. "Soft eyes looked love to eyes that spake again,"[2] and their hearts melted beneath each tender glance. The little chubby hands that grasped the handle of the pail timidly crept closer together, and by the time they had reached the rugged top, ...
— Punchinello Vol. 1, No. 21, August 20, 1870 • Various

... on a moonbeam grey To the dusk of the god's great shop, And he stole the Elixir of Life away, And he drank it, every drop; He poured the draught in a golden cup On a wonderful day that's gone, And he swilled it round and he tossed it up, And that was the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various

... science,—chemistry, botany, and geography. As in the case of gunpowder, the Arabs transmitted these discoveries to the West, and along with them the Chinese doctrine as to the twofold objects of alchemic studies,—the elixir of life ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord

... filled with a beautiful astonishment, a sort of divine amazement, as if it were toward this that always, inevitably, she had been moving,—and now it was here! Her blood leaped to it, and went racing fierily through her veins, as if there had been poured into it the elixir of life. She was gloriously conscious of her youth and her womanhood. A quick and vivid rush of warm blood stained her, brow to bosom. Her every-day mind was saying, "It is the stranger who's staying at Grandma Baker's—the gentleman who's been ill." But ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler

... German Bohemian life. And Loerke is an artist, he is a free individual. One will escape from so much, that is the chief thing, escape so much hideous boring repetition of vulgar actions, vulgar phrases, vulgar postures. I don't delude myself that I shall find an elixir of life in Dresden. I know I shan't. But I shall get away from people who have their own homes and their own children and their own acquaintances and their own this and their own that. I shall be among people who DON'T own things and who HAVEN'T got a home and a domestic ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... tale is this of a Spanish friar who wastes the elixir of life upon Lutheran dogs? I' faith, I had bodeful dreams last night, and waked this morning now hot, now cold. I'll end my days with no foul fever—an I can help it! What's the man ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston

... with the works of the great masters when he had not visited Italy, so little could a beer drinker assert that he had seen beer rightly drunk when he had not been in Munich. All over the world beer is regarded as a refreshment, but in Munich it is the elixir of life, the fabled fountain of youth and happiness. It is looked upon as nourishment by the lower classes, who drink for dinner two masses[E] of it, with soup and black bread. For the price of the beer they could procure a good portion of meat, but they universally maintain ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various



Words linked to "Elixir of life" :   elixir



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