"Loadstone" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "cease to blunder: Stupid alike your hints and wonder. This is a loadstone, and its virtue— Though insufficient to convert you— Makes me a magnet; and afar True am I to my polar star. The pilot leaves the doubtful skies, And trusts to me with watchful eyes; By me the distant world is known, And both the Indies made ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... preservative of picture-frames from the defilement of flies. Bacon gravely tells of a man who lived for several days on the smell of onions and garlic alone; and there was an old belief that the garlic could extract all the power from a loadstone. ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... fellow called Swingler, an ironmonger's son, of giving me a twist too much, on more than one occasion. He was introduced, that is, proposed as a member of our club, by Sir Robert Ratsbane, whose grandfather was a druggist, and seconded by Lord Loadstone, the celebrated lady-killer, as a regular pigeon, who dropped, by the death of old 'burn the wind,' into half a million at least. The fellow did appear to be a very capital speculation, but the whole ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... Bordeaux,[27] is literature of no mean kind; but this is because it was executed by Lord Berners, long after our present period. Also, being of that date, it represents the latest French form of the story, which was a very popular one, and incorporated very large borrowings from other sources (the loadstone rock, the punishment of Cain, and so forth) which are foreign to the subject and substance ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... asked. 'What do you want of them?'—'What do I want?' He stretched his eyes at me inquiringly. 'How strange,' said I, 'the inconsistency! Here's a true man would try to overtake An untrue mate! If she's not sterling gold And loyal as the loadstone,—not alone In every act, but every thought and throb,— Why should you care who puts her to the proof, Takes her away, and leaves you free again? Show me 'tis an illusion I adore, And I will thank you, though it be in anguish. ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... find close resemblances between Dante and the founder of German mysticism. Not only in similes and illustrations, such as the tailor and his cloth, the needle and the loadstone, the flow of water to the sea, the gravitation of weights to the centre; or in such phrases as Eckhart's "nature possesses nothing swifter than the heaven," or his use of edilkeit "nobility," in reference ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... the present race of philosophers, having been long exercised upon electricity, has been lately transferred to magnetism; the qualities of the loadstone have been investigated, if not with much advantage, yet with great applause; and as the highest praise of art is to imitate nature, I hope no man will think the makers of artificial magnets celebrated ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... good and evil. A motley crowd swarms their streets, presenting to the eye of an onlooker the picturesque spectacle that the contrast of costumes always produces. They are people of different colours, dress and education, attracted thither by the loadstone of wealth. The fortunate, the clever, the unscrupulous have already gained the victory in Life's struggles and now ride about in motor-cars of the newest types; the others look at them, most likely envy them, and work all the harder to get rich themselves. Will they succeed? The way, here ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... of a pomegranate which grew in the Elysian Fields, and so was compelled to remain in the Shades, the wife of "the grisly king." Thus, too, when Morgan the Fay takes measures to get Ogier the Dane into her power she causes him to be shipwrecked on a loadstone rock near to Avalon. Escaping from the sea, he comes to an orchard, and there eats an apple which, it is not too much to say, seals his fate. Again, when Thomas of Erceldoune is being led down by the Fairy Queen into her realm, he desires ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... unmanifest.[719] As a vast tree is ensconced within a small unblown Aswattha flower and becomes observable only when it comes out, even so birth takes place from what is unmanifest. A piece of iron, which is inanimate, runs towards a piece of loadstone. Similarly, inclinations and propensities due to natural instincts, and all else, run towards the Soul in a new life.[720] Indeed, even as those propensities and possessions born of Ignorance and Delusion, and inanimate in respect of their nature, are united ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... be the first who attempted to give reasons for what was believed. His reasons were, nevertheless, sufficiently crude and puerile; and having declared it the property of the soul to move itself, and other things, he was forced to give a soul to the loadstone, because ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... think you walk in clouds, but are transparent. I have heard all, and the choice that you have made; And with my finger, can point out the north star, By which the loadstone of your folly's guided. And, to confirm this true, what think you of Fair Margaret, the only child, and heir Of cormorant Overreach? Dost blush and start, To hear her only nam'd? Blush at your want ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... looked up: backs were bent, eyes fixed, in a hard scrutiny of cradle or tin-dish: it was the earth that held them, the familiar, homely earth, whose common fate it is to be trodden heedlessly underfoot. Here, it was the loadstone that drew all men's thoughts. And it took toll of their bodies in odd, exhausting forms of labour, which were swift ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... thick-thronging public disasters and calamities; that name shone amid the storm of war, a beacon light to cheer and guide the country's friends; its flame, too, like a meteor, to repel her foes. That name in the days of peace was a loadstone, attracting to itself a whole people's confidence, a whole people's love, and the whole world's respect; that name, descending with all time, spread over the whole earth, and uttered in all the languages belonging to the tribes and races of men, will forever ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... Chetwood, has attributed a play to our author called Lingua, or the Contention of the Tongue and the Five Senses for Superiority, a Comedy, acted at Cambridge, 1606; but Mr. Langbaine is of opinion, that neither that, Love's Loadstone, Landagartha, or Love's Dominion, as Winstanley and Philips affirm, are his; Landagartha being written by Henry Burnel, esquire, and Love's Dominion by Flecknoe. In the Comedy called Lingua, there is a circumstance which Chetwood mentions, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... denotes you will make favorable opportunities for your own advancement in a material way. For a young woman to think a loadstone is attracting her, is an omen of ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... thought: business, friends, and wife being all alike forgotten, or only remembered with a painful effort, like that of one struggling with a posset. It was most notable in the matter of his wife. Since I had known Durrisdeer, she had been the burthen of his thought and the loadstone of his eyes; and now she was quite cast out. I have seen him come to the door of a room, look round, and pass my lady over as though she were a dog before the fire. It would be Alexander he was seeking, and my lady knew it well. I have heard him speak ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... beckoned to the scarecrow, throwing so much magnetic potency into her gesture, that it seemed as if it must inevitably be obeyed, like the mystic call of the loadstone, when it summons ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... with saying that it simply meant that worn-out magnets were used, which had lost their power to point correctly to the pole. Others had contended that it was through insufficient application of the loadstone to the iron that it was so devious ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various
... absolutely nothing about country life, and it may be dull for him, but he seems desirous of coming, and so I want you to help me to make it cheerful for him. To be candid, sis, I think the chance to see you, whom he has heard me say so much about, is the real loadstone. I enclose a bit of paper, and I want you to use it all in any way ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... the hard metal in armour, while Theophrastus applies it to the hardest crystal. By an etymological confusion with the Lat. adamare, to have an attraction for, it also came to be associated with the loadstone; but since the term was displaced by "diamond'' it has had only a figurative and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... his boundless energy and ingenuity, for in the five years preceding his death (1783-1788), he produced his "Natural History of Minerals" in five volumes, the last of which was mainly occupied with electricity, magnetism, and the loadstone. It is true that the researches of modern chemists have wrought havoc with Buffon's work in this field; but this was his misfortune rather than his fault, and leaves untouched the quantity ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... there were any remains of the second sight[478]. Mr. M'Pherson, Minister of Slate, said, he was resolved not to believe it, because it was founded on no principle[479]. JOHNSON. 'There are many things then, which we are sure are true, that you will not believe. What principle is there, why a loadstone attracts iron? why an egg produces a chicken by heat? why a tree grows upwards, when the natural tendency of all things is downwards? Sir, it depends upon the degree of evidence that you have.' Young Mr. M'Kinnon mentioned one M'Kenzie, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... flash of lightning: it does not exercise, but ravishes and overwhelms our judgment. The fury that possesses him who is able to penetrate into it wounds yet a third man by hearing him repeat it; like a loadstone that not only attracts the needle, but also infuses into it the virtue to attract others. And it is more evidently manifest in our theatres, that the sacred inspiration of the Muses, having first stirred up the poet ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... the Nullification imbroglio of 1833. A philosophic Frenchman or German, who should read this work with a view to enlightening his mind upon the nature of government, would be much puzzled after passing the thirteenth page; for at that point the hidden loadstone begins to operate upon the needle of Mr. Calhoun's compass, and he is as Louis Napoleon writing the Life ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... her and at himself with a miserable grim satisfaction that he was at last over and above it all. She had told him to conquer his boyish love for her and, as her will had always been law to him, he had made it, at last, a law in this. The touch of the loadstone that never in his life had failed, had failed now, and now, for once in his life, desire and ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... memorial, many flatter themselves with high opinion of their own importance and imagine that they are every day adding some improvement to human life."—"Some turn the wheel of electricity, some suspend rings to a loadstone, and find that what they did yesterday they can do again to-day. Some register the changes of the wind, and die fully convinced that the wind ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... wide, 15 yards long, very low on one side, and moderately high on the other. It is plain, ricketty, and whitewashed. The side wall of the railway bridge forms one end of it. On the northern side, there is a door fastened up with a piece of wood in the form of a large loadstone. This door leads to the top of a pig-stye. The "chapel" will hold about 70. When we visited it, the congregation consisted of 35 children of a very uneasy sort, 11 men, and five women. Every now and then railway goods trains kept passing, and what with the whistling of the engines, ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... by a fair wind, cut the sea with the swiftness of a bird; but on a sudden it deviated from its course, no longer obeyed the helm, and sped fast towards a black promontory which stretched into the sea. This was a mountain of loadstone, and, its attractive power increasing as the distance diminished, the vessel at last flew with the swiftness of an arrow towards it, and was dashed to pieces on its rocky base. Ogier alone saved himself, and reached the shore on ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... into his library the Magnetiser's Guide, by Montacabere, read it over attentively, and initiated Bouvard in the theory: All animated bodies receive and communicate the influence of the stars—a property analogous to the virtue of the loadstone. By directing this force we may cure the sick; there is the principle. Science has developed since Mesmer; but it is always an important thing to pour out the fluid and to make passes, which, in the first place, must have the effect of ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... single subject of grammar, a topic rendered only more tenebrific by the labours of his successors, and which seems still to possess an attraction for authors in proportion as they can make nothing of it. A singular loadstone for theologians, also, is the Beast in the Apocalypse, whereof, in the course of my studies, I have noted two hundred and three several interpretations, each lethiferal to all the rest. Non nostrum est tantas componere lites, ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... dear Annie, has never been touched by the wonderful stone! You must know that some few hundred years ago, people discovered that a mineral called the loadstone, found in iron mines, had the quality of always pointing to the North, and they found, too, that any iron rubbed with it would possess the same quality. The needle Tom tells us of has undergone this operation. Before the invention of the compass, it was only by watching the stars that ...
— The Young Emigrants; Madelaine Tube; The Boy and the Book; and - Crystal Palace • Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick
... said to have listened to the whimsical proposal of Dinochares, the architect, to build a room of loadstone in Arsinoe's tomb, so that an iron statue of the queen should hang in the air between the floor and the roof. But the death of the king and of the architect took place before this was tried. He set up there, ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... and, closely watched, be suffered to undo those bundles and breathlessly devour those pages of gesticulating villains, epileptic combats, bosky forests, palaces and war-ships, frowning fortresses and prison vaults—it was a giddy joy. That shop, which was dark and smelt of Bibles, was a loadstone rock for all that bore the name of boy. They could not pass it by, nor, having entered, leave it. It was a place besieged; the shopmen, like the Jews rebuilding Salem, had a double task. They kept us at the stick's end, frowned ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... part of this story is borrowed from the First Voyage of Aboulfawaris in the Thousand and One Days; it has some resemblance to the story of the Mountain of Loadstone in ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... not venture beyond compliments and modest protestations of devotion. But as time went on, he advanced to kisses and caresses, and once he made Virginia take a little jewel into her mouth. This was a white loadstone, blessed by Arrigone, and intended to operate like a love-charm. The girl, in fact, began to feel the influence of her seducer. In the final confession which she made, she relates how she fought against temptation. 'Some diabolical force compelled me to go to the window ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... not poisons—phosphor and ammonia entered into some of them. There were also some very curious glass tubes, and a small pointed rod of iron, with a large lump of rock-crystal, and another of amber—also a loadstone of great power. ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... them, relating to the Service of our Country. I would have done my utmost to have gotten the best and noblest Members of the Society (as great and good Men communicate Virtue to their Friends as the Loadstone invigorates the Needle it touches) to have petitioned the Parliament for sumptuary Laws, for Hospitals in every County Town, for establishing a national Bank, for illuminating our Coasts, with Light-houses as carefully as our Streets with Lamps; for applying ...
— A Dialogue Between Dean Swift and Tho. Prior, Esq. • Anonymous
... Green vivaciously, "insult our town by staying only one day? It won't be long enough to get acquainted with our young ladies. Patesville girls are famous for their beauty. But perhaps there's a loadstone in South Carolina to draw you back? Ah, you change color! To my mind there's nothing finer than the ingenuous blush of youth. But we'll spare you if you'll answer one question—is ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... the limestone heap raised by Ross; he ran to it; an opening allowed him to see, in the interior, the tin case in which James Ross had placed the official report of his discoveries. No living being seemed to have visited this desolate coast for the last thirty years. In this spot a loadstone needle, suspended as delicately as possible, immediately moved into an almost vertical position under the magnetic influence; if the centre of attraction was not immediately under the needle, it ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... of solitude, and the tumult of crowds, time itself, while it casts the shade of oblivion over so many other remembrances, in vain would tear that tender and sacred recollection from the heart, which, like the needle, when touched by the loadstone, however it may have been forced into agitation, it is no sooner left to repose, than it turns to the pole by which it is attracted. When I inquired of Paul, while we wandered amidst the plains of Williams, 'Where are we now going?' he pointed to the north and said, 'Yonder ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... called the loadstone the bone of Haroeri, and iron the bone of Typhon. Haroeri was the son of Osiris and grandson of Rhea, a goddess of the earth, a queen of Atlantis, and mother of Poseidon; Typhon was a wind-god and an evil genius, but also a son of Rhea, the earth goddess. Do we find in this curious designation ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... might. Still, the impulse is not to be analysed; these are mere notes acknowledging its power. The hills and vales, and meads and woods are like the ocean upon which Sindbad sailed; but coming too near the loadstone of London, the ship wends ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... and vases of gold and silver were carefully melted, and those of a less valuable metal were contemptuously broken, and cast into the streets, Theophilus labored to expose the frauds and vices of the ministers of the idols; their dexterity in the management of the loadstone; their secret methods of introducing a human actor into a hollow statue; [4711] and their scandalous abuse of the confidence of devout husbands and unsuspecting females. [48] Charges like these may seem to deserve some degree of credit, as they are not repugnant ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... events, as bear little analogy to the common course of nature, are also readily confessed to be known only by experience; nor does any man imagine that the explosion of gunpowder, or the attraction of a loadstone, could ever be discovered by arguments a priori. In like manner, when an effect is supposed to depend upon an intricate machinery or secret structure of parts, we make no difficulty in attributing all our knowledge of it to experience. Who will assert that he can ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... illuminated it will be filled with an infinite number of images which are produced by the various bodies and colours assembled in it. And the eye is the target, a loadstone, of ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... that doubt—in not a few instances the parent of knowledge—had, by throwing cold water on it, extinguished the last funeral pyre of the ultimate Phoenix, and laughed to scorn the gigantic, gold-grubbing pismires of Pliny; the Roc, the Valley of Diamonds, the mountain island of Loadstone, the potentiality of the Talisman, the miraculous virtues of certain drugs, and countless other fables, were accepted and believed by all the nations of the West. One of those drugs, seldom brought to Europe on account of its great demand among the rulers of the East, and its extreme ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... investigation of hidden causes, stronger reasons are obtained from sure experiments and demonstrated arguments than from probable conjectures and the opinions of philosophical speculators of the common sort, therefore, to the end of that noble substance of that great loadstone, our common mother (the earth), still quite unknown, and also that the forces extraordinary and exalted of this globe may the better be understood, we have decided, first, to begin with the common stony and ferruginous matter, and magnetic bodies, and the part of the earth that ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... yet I make no question but some considerable discovery has been made in these latter ages, and inventions of human origin produced, which the world was ever without before, either in whole or in part; and I refer only to two cardinal points, the use of the loadstone at sea, and the use of gunpowder and guns: both which, as to the inventing part, I believe the world owes as absolutely to those particular ages as it does the working in brass and iron to Tubal Cain, or the inventing of music to Jubal, his brother. ...
— An Essay Upon Projects • Daniel Defoe |
