Elixir of life

“ And at the thought of this discovery of the alchemy of the twentieth century, an immense hope opened up before him; he believed he had discovered the universal panacea, the elixir of life, which was to combat human debility, the one real cause of every ill; a veritable scientific Fountain of Youth, which, in giving vigor, health, and will would create an altogether new and superior humanity. ”

“ I have read of an unlucky sage who discovered the Elixir of Life, and who, after thrice renewing his existence, at last voluntarily resigned himself to death, because he had exhausted all that life had to offer of pleasure or of pain, and knew all its vicissitudes but the very last. ”

“ By means of this discovery, life may be easily prolonged over a hundred years, for this vapour of breath collected from maidens in trumpets, when distilled, becomes an elixir of life, and by the copious use of this concentrated vitality steamed down to an essence, man becomes interpenetrated with living energy capable of resisting disease and repelling the inroads of age. ”

“ Besides, if the elixir of life is presented to your Highness, and because your servant swallows it, your Highness slays him, that elixir is clearly the elixir of death; and for your Highness thus to put to death an innocent official is simply for your Highness to be made the sport of men. ”

“ He must take the Elixir of Life which he has developed and with it fill the lamp of his spiritual consciousness, and holding that above his head, walk into the Great Unknown, where if he has been a good and faithful servant, he will learn of the alchemy of Divinity. Where now test tubes and bottles are his implements, then worlds and globes he will study, and as a silent watcher will learn from that Divine One, who is the Great Alchemist of all the universe, the greatest alchemy of all, the creation of life, the maintenance of form, and the building of worlds. ”

“ Your health is weak, your nerves unstrung. That elixir is a powerful vivifying tonic, acting with great rapidity on the entire system, and rushing through the veins with the swiftness of ELECTRICITY. I am accustomed to it; it is my daily medicine. But I was brought to it by slow, and almost imperceptible degrees. A single teaspoonful of that fluid, mademoiselle, administered to anyone not prepared to receive it, would be instant death, though its actual use is to vivify and strengthen human life. ”

“ I beg of Thee, O my God, by Thy most exalted Word which Thou hast ordained as the Divine Elixir unto all who are in Thy realm, the Elixir through whose potency the crude metal of human life hath been transmuted into purest gold, O Thou in Whose hands are both the visible and invisible kingdoms, to ordain that my choice be conformed to Thy choice and my wish to Thy wish, that I may be entirely content with that which Thou didst desire, and be wholly satisfied with what Thou didst destine for me by Thy bounteousness and favor. Potent art Thou to do as Thou willest. ”

“ The elixir made you happy, my father, because you are good and pure, and because the beautiful, to the pursuit of which you have dedicated your life, ennobles everyone and makes every thing harmonious that comes from you. ”

“ Before his time men had been trying to get extraordinary good things out of nature in accordance with the whims and fancies of astrologers and alchemists: they had dreamt of making gold, or finding the elixir of life. ”

“ The theme of the elixir of life is one of the old motifs of supernaturalism retained in modern fiction. The conventional alchemist has given place to a more up-to-date investigator in the chemical laboratory, yet the same thrill of interest is imparted by the thought of a magic potion prepared by man that shall endow him with earthly immortality. The theme has changed less in its treatment and symbolism than most of the supernatural elements in fiction, for though we see the added elements of modern satire and symbolism, its essential aspects remain the same. ”

“ The impelling cause that first drove them to the hills was no doubt to find the magical herbs and roots that were necessary ingredients of the elixir of life, and to practise the self-control and purity of thought that were as essential to success as the mysterious draught itself. ”

“ I said, feeling that now was the moment, if ever, "forgive me if I do a bold thing, and attempt to offer you consolation upon your private sorrows."
He shook his head with a bitter and melancholy smile, replying, "Consolation, my dear boy, is in vain. I have sought it in every source--religion--philosophy--time--activity--danger; and I have never found it. It is the alchemist's elixir of life, a specious name, which can only be believed by those who have never tried it." ”

“ Chemistry or alchemy—how were the whimsical old student’s laboratory pursuits to be described? Chemist he was undoubtedly, by exactness of knowledge; but alchemist, too, by the visionary character of his scientific enthusiasm, though he himself derided the suggestion.
“Powder of projection? Nonsense, nonsense!” he would have cried. “Not in the scheme of our world. Much use to mankind if gold became cheaper than lead!... Elixir of Life? Again preposterous! Given birth, death is Nature’s law.... ”

“ He is never at a loss. All creatures on earth and powers in heaven are submissive to him; he can cure all diseases, and can himself live as long as he chooses, for he holds the elixir of life, which Adam and the early fathers employed before the Flood, and by which they attained to great longevity.
The philosopher's 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 vitæ. ”

“ I have solved at last the secret of life itself. It is contained in that golden vial, an elixir to renew the tissues, to repair the cells, of the wasting body. Taken as I direct, you will no longer grow old, but young. The gray in your hair will vanish, the lines will smooth out of your face, your step will become buoyant, your pulses quick, your heart will sing with youth." The speaker paused a moment, and his gray eyes rested on Carringford and seemed probing his very soul. ”

“ The ancient spoke: "You overcame joy and rage, grief and fear, hate and desire, it is true; but love you had not driven from your soul. Had you not cried out when tho child was flung against the wall, then my elixir would have taken shape and you would have attained immortality. But in the last moment you failed me. Now it is too late. Now I can begin brewing my elixir of life once more from the beginning, and you will remain a mere mortal man!"
Du Dsi Tschun saw that the oven had burst, and that instead of the philosopher's stone it held only a lump of iron. ”

“ The irreplaceable liquid wastes its force on the desert sands, where a magic richness of herbage instantly springs up in contrast to the barrenness around it. Flowers bloom, myriads of insects hover round them, and all is life, but the man who sought the elixir with such pains lies dead. The author suggests a symbolic meaning for his story, hinting that the scientist’s laboratory holds many elixirs of life, that all growth and life are magical, that all being is miraculous. ”

“ Alchemy and the "Elixir of Life."—The desire for long life and the acquisition of wealth have indirectly been the stimulus to medical and physical investigation, eventually evolving science as we have it now. ”

“ The poet is making a reference to the rose of the alchemist's dream—the strange old fairy-tale of the Rosicrucians. It was believed in the Middle Ages and even later, that an Elixir of Life might be formed by chemistry—that is to say, a magical drink that would make old men young again, or prolong life through hundreds of years. ”

“ But if thou art so enamoured of life as to care only to live on, no matter for what ends, recruiting the nerves and veins with the alchemist’s vivifying elixir, why seek these dangers from the intermediate tribes? Because the very elixir that pours a more glorious life into the frame, so sharpens the senses that those larvae of the air become to thee audible and apparent; so that, unless trained by degrees to endure the phantoms and subdue their malice, a life thus gifted would be the most awful doom man could bring upon himself. ”

“ There are great creatures like gigantic men, called genii, who live in the moon, and make "the elixir of life," a draught of which confers very long life. The hare is their steward, and spends his time in pounding the precious roots and bark of the "tree of the king of drugs," from which the elixir is made. ”

“ Elixir of Life. Immortality that proves such a curse in the case of the Wandering Jew forms the basis for various other stories. The elixir of life was a favorite theme with the Gothicists, being used by Maturin, Godwin, and Shelley, and has continued to furnish complication for fiction since that time. The theme has been popular on the continent as well as in England, Balzac and Hoffman being the most impressive users of it. ”

“ The Elixir of Life is once again the Spirit Fire, or rather the fuel which nourishes that fire, and the turning of the base metal into gold is accomplished when he transmutes the lower man into spiritual gold. ”

“ From these he had extracted scarcely enough of the elixir to fill a third of that little glass which I have just drained. He guarded every drop for himself. Who that holds healthful life as the one boon above all price to the living, would waste upon others what prolongs and recruits his own being? Therefore, though he sold me his secret, he would not sell me his treasure."
"Any quack may sell you the information how to make not only an elixir, but a sun and a moon, and then scare you from the experiment by tales of the danger of trying it! ”

“ The same term, more fully elixir vitae, elixir of life, was given to the substance which would indefinitely prolong life; it was considered to be closely related to, or even identical with, the substance for transmuting metals. ”

“ The idea mentioned above, that the grosser elements of man's nature might be refined away and immortality attained, seems to have suggested an immortality, not merely in an unseen [164] world, but even in this one, to be secured by an imaginary elixir of life. Certain at any rate it is, that so far back as a century or so before the Christian era, the desire to discover this elixir had become a national craze. ”

“ There stands the elixir and is hardly more valuable than the small beer with which the servant down-stairs quenches his thirst, indeed it is less useful for who derives any benefit from it? I shall quit this world an unhappy man who has wasted his life and talents in untold efforts from his school-days until now—and yet, if the spirit would only reveal to me the missing substance which should give to this liquid in my hand the power that it once possessed, gladly would I sacrifice twenty lives! ”

“ In more modern times the search for the Philosopher’s Stone and the Elixir of Life, which respectively turned everything to gold, and bestowed long life upon the fortunate finder, occupied many people, who in their researches no doubt discovered the germs of the popular science of Chemistry in Alchemy, while the pursuit took a firm hold of the popular imagination for centuries ”

“ Three apparently hopeless quests have engaged the abilities of inventors and scientists from a very early period—the Philosopher's Stone, that should convert everything it touched into pure gold; the Elixir of Life, that once partaken of should invest the recipient with immortality on earth ”

“ Little by little the endowment of vitality bestowed upon our world at the beginning has, like radiant energy, been returned to God who gave it; but, unlike the case of radiant energy, the Creator has not established any regular source of vital supply from without, no elixir of life for organic nature in general. ”

“ These late rationalizations are merely glosses of the deep motives which more than fifty centuries ago seem to have prompted early pharmacologists to obtain a more potent elixir than human blood by stealing from the heights of Olympus the divine blood of the life-giving deities themselves. ”

“ Have you really measured the world by scrutinies, or through alembics and crucibles? For you must indeed be a great chemist, and the elixir you administered to my son, which recalled him to life almost instantaneously" --
"Oh, do not place any reliance on that, madame; one drop of that elixir sufficed to recall life to a dying child, but three drops would have impelled the blood into his lungs in such a way as to have produced most violent palpitations ”

“ If he have secured the elixir, he can spare the wide gardens from which it was distilled. A cultivated man, wise to know and bold to perform, is the end to which nature works, and the education of the will is the flowering and result of all this geology and astronomy. ”

“ Generation is the production of a substance that before was not, and corruption is the destruction of a substance, by its ceasing to be what it was before. Thus, fire is generated, and wood is corrupted, when the latter is burnt. But the implicit metaphor in the use of the terms likens substances to the human body, their production and destruction implies liability to disease, and thus prepares the way for the notion of the elixir, which is first a potion giving long life, and curing bodily ailments, and only after some time a remedy for diseased metals—the philosopher's stone. ”

“ But the shrill sound of children's singing among the choristers, the reverberation of deep bass notes, awakened gracious associations, visions of childhood, and of man in his strength, and rose above that entrancing harmony of human voices blended in one sentiment of love. ”