"Excrement" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in some sort mysterious and divine; the left foot of a tortoise, the urine of a lizard, the dung of an elephant, the liver of a mole, blood drawn from under the right wing of a white pigeon; and for us who have the stone (so scornfully they use us in our miseries) the excrement of rats beaten to powder, and such like trash and fooleries which rather carry a face of magical enchantment than of any solid science. I omit the odd number of their pills, the destination of certain days and feasts of the year, the superstition of gathering their simples at certain hours, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... Our old friends of humanistic learning—Cyrus, Alexander, Caesar—meet us in these frothy paragraphs. Cambyses, Xerxes, Artaxerxes, Darius, are thrown in to make the gruel of rhetoric 'thick and slab.' The whole epistle ends in a long-drawn peroration of invective against 'that excrement in human shape,' who had had the ill-luck, by pretence to scholarship, by big gains from the Papal treasury, by something in his manners alien from the easy-going customs of the Roman Court, to rouse the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... throat it is sufficient to expectorate in the fire three times, making a cross. Lockjaw is effectually stopped by tying around the sufferer's jaws the strings from a virgin's skirt; and they say also that powdered excrement of a dog, taken in a glass of water, cures the ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... a big drain-pipe—there were wounded women and children among them, and a young French interpreter, the Baron de Rosen, who tried to help them—and they stayed there three days and nights, in their vomit and excrement and blood, until the bombardment ceased. Ypres was a city of ruin, with a red fire in its heart where the Cloth Hall and cathedral smoldered below their broken arches and high ribs of masonry that had been their buttresses ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... foreknowledge from words spoken by the dead, others predicted by leaves of tobacco or the grains and juice of cocoa, while to still other classes, the shapes of grains of maize taken at random, the appearance of animal excrement, the forms assumed by the smoke rising from burning victims, the entrails and viscera of animals, the course taken by a certain species of spider, the visions seen in drunkeness,[TN-16] the flights of birds, and the directions in which ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... other words, the nitrogen in the manure is in an active and available condition. On the other hand, only about half the nitrogen in the coarse fodders and straw is digestible. The other half passes off in a crude and comparatively unavailable condition, in the solid excrement. In estimating the value of the manure from a ton of food, these facts ...
— Talks on Manures • Joseph Harris
... consequence of partaking such forbidden food they lose their family, strength, and energy, and attain to the status of animals, descending to the position of dogs, fallen in virtue and devoid of all religious observances. He who takes food from a physician takes that which is no better than excrement; the food of a harlot is like urine; that of a skilled mechanic is like blood. If a Brahmana approved by the good, takes the food of one who lives by his learning, he is regarded as taking the food of a Sudra. All good men should forego such food. The food ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... out two figures stretched on the ground, one savage-looking and hideously mutilated, the other graceful and pleasing. The two prisoners offered him a share of their straw, and this, rotten and swarming with vermin as it was, was better than having to lie on the earth, which was befouled with excrement. Brotteaux sank down on a bench in the pestiferous darkness and sat there, his head against the wall, speechless and motionless. So intense was his agony of mind he would have dashed out his brains against the ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... alimentation, and prove that animals weakened by a too long usage of dry fodder, are restored to health by the use of bran, which only seems to act by its presence, since the greater portion of it, as already demonstrated by Mr. Poggiale, is passed through with the excrement. ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... made from human excrement burnt and calcined and made into lees, and dried by a slow fire, and all dung in like manner yields salt, and these salts when ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... Why, is Time such a niggard of haire, being (as it is) so plentifull an excrement? S.Dro. Because it is a blessing that hee bestowes on beasts, and what he hath scanted them in haire, hee hath ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... honey-dew on the upper surface of leaves is evacuated by these insects, as they hang on the underside of the leaves above; when they take too much of this saccharine juice during the vernal or midsummer sap-flow of most vegetables; the black powder on leaves is also their excrement at other times. The vegetable world seems to have escaped total destruction from this insect by the number of flies, which in their larva state prey upon them; and by the ichneumon fly, which deposits its eggs in them. Some vegetables put forth stiff bristles with points ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... says, "I received nothing but opprobrious and disgraceful epithets," and he says "that his predecessors possessed more of their confidence than he had." Yet for years he lay down in that sty of disgrace, fattening in it, feeding upon that offal of disgrace and excrement, upon everything that could be disgustful to the human mind, rather than deny the fact and put himself upon a civil justification. Infamy was never incurred for nothing. We know very ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... their food, are considered, one cannot be surprised at the magnitude of the beds of Guano, which have resulted from uninterrupted accumulations during many thousands of years. I kept for some days a living Sula variegata, which I fed abundantly with fish. The average weight of the excrement daily was from 3-1/2 to five ounces. I have no doubt that when the bird is in a state of freedom the weight must be much greater, for these birds are constantly plunging into the sea, in order to devour the fishes which they find in extraordinary masses around all ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... at rest, and glanced upon the nest of a bird within his room. Ah! cruel was his doom! Into his eye there went the sparrow's excrement. Tobiah's sight was gone! He had an only son, whom thus he now addressed: "When business ventures pressed, I passed from clime to clime. Well I recall the time, when long I dwelt in Ind, of wealth full stores to find. But ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... small boarding-houses like rabbits, and ordinary precautions for the removal of filth neglected, even if that were enough in itself; houses are built on pestilential swamps; the wind blows the dust about spots where the typhoid excrement has been deposited to breed germs by the million; and bread, meat, and other food carts go about uncovered to collect it, as if to make sure that any who escaped all other sources of the danger should not be allowed to escape ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... the lonely hovel, the narrow scandals and petty spites and persecutions of the small village, that hoarding, half inanimate existence away from books, thought, or social participation and in constant contact with cattle, pigs, poultry, and their excrement, is passing away out of human experience. In a little while it will be gone altogether. In the nineteenth century it had already ceased to be a necessary human state, and only the absence of any collective intelligence and an imagined need for ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... take delight. But for this foulness, the legs of the adjutant would be of a dark colour; but in the living bird they are never seen of the natural hue—being always whitened by the dust shaken out of its plumage, and other excrement that attaches itself ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... which had been left in water. The elytron, however, had evidently yielded some nutritious matter, for the leaf remained clasped over it for four days; whereas the leaves with bits of the true wing re-expanded on the second day. Any one who will examine the excrement of insect-eating animals will see how powerless their ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... field the heat caused by the decay and fermentation makes ideal conditions for the development of the larvae. Cow manure may serve as a breeding-place to a limited extent. The flies are immediately attracted to human excrement and breed freely in it when opportunity offers. Decaying vegetables or fruit, fermenting kitchen refuse and other materials sometimes also serve ...
— Insects and Diseases - A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread - or Cause some of our Common Diseases • Rennie W. Doane
... existence. This may be true of the fighting instinct, but it does not follow that the combative instinct is useful to man to-day. Instinct is extremely conservative, and survives the circumstances that produced it. For instance, the wolf, wishing to cover up its tracks, buries its excrement; the dog, a town dweller, stupidly scrapes the pavement. In the latter case instinct has become ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... dropped into the bay, knowing that their instinct would induce them to swim for the nearest land. All this turned out as was expected, and the pigs were soon seen on the island, snuffing around on the rocks, and trying to root. A small quantity of the excrement of these animals still lay on the deck, where it had been placed when the launch was cleaned for service, no one thinking at such a moment of cleaning the decks. It had been washed by the sea that came aboard quite across the deck, but still formed a pile, and most of it ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... stable manure consists of the solid and liquid excrement of any of the farm animals mixed with the straw or other materials used as bedding for the comfort of the animals and to absorb the ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich
... Dampmartin, ibid. i. 25: "I was dining this very day at the Hotel d'Ecquevilly, in the Rue Saint-Louis." He leaves the house on foot and witnesses the disturbance. "Fifteen to Sixteen hundred wretches, the excrement of the nation, degraded by shameful vices, covered with rags, and gorged with brandy, presented the most disgusting and revolting spectacle. More than a hundred thousand persons of both sexes and of all ages ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... is a mere rock, the retreat of boobies (Pelecanus fiber, Linn.) and turtles of the hawks-bill species. Some slight vegetation was perceived upon it but it was so entirely covered with the excrement of birds that it had the appearance of being white-washed. The number of these birds was almost incredible, and they hovered over and about us as we passed, as if to drive us from ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... and peculiar longings of pregnant women furnish curious matter for discussion. From the earliest times there are many such records. Borellus cites an instance, and there are many others, of pregnant women eating excrement with apparent relish. Tulpius, Sennert, Langius, van Swieten, a Castro, and several others report depraved appetites. Several writers have seen avidity for human flesh in such females. Fournier knew a woman with an appetite for the ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... it to guard us against the injuries of external bodies; in the same manner as the secretion of tears is designed to preserve the cornea of the eye moist, and in consequence transparent; yet has this cutaneous mucus been believed by many to be an excrement; and I know not how many fanciful theories have been built on its supposed obstruction. Such as the origin of catarrhs, coughs, inflammations, erysypelas, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... the vulgar error, which is to curse and to dishonour the age in which we live. Erasmus called the sixteenth century "the excrement of the ages," fex temporum. Bossuet thus qualified the seventeenth century: "A wicked and paltry age." Rousseau branded the eighteenth century, in these terms: "This great rottenness amidst which we live." Posterity has proved these illustrious men in the wrong. It has said to Erasmus: ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... to enter them for the purpose of cleansing them. It has been necessary, therefore, to provide inlets with a separating apparatus called "gully" or "catch basin," which retains as completely as possible all solid matter, mud, excrement, and debris of every kind which maybe floated in by street washing or by rain-water, and which may be capable of causing stoppages in the sewers, the choking up being followed by fermentation and the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... perversion the use of the anus as a sexual aim. But it should not be interpreted as espousing a cause when I observe that the basis of this loathing—namely, that this part of the body serves for the excretion and comes in contact with the loathsome excrement—is not more plausible than the basis which hysterical girls have for the disgust which they entertain for the male genital because it serves ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... any man so vile, To act the crimes these Whippers reprehend, Or what their servile apes gesticulate, I should not then much muse their shreds were liked; Since ill men have a lust t' hear others' sins, All good men have a zeal to hear sin shamed. But when it is all excrement they vent, Base filth and offal; or thefts, notable As ocean-piracies, or highway-stands; And not a crime there tax'd, but is their own, Or what their own foul thoughts suggested to them; And that, in all ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... and the receiver: and then he pleads his beggary as an excuse for his crimes. He melts with tenderness for those only who touch him by the remotest relation, and then, without one natural pang, casts away, as a sort of offal and excrement, the spawn of his disgustful amours, and sends his children to the hospital of foundlings. The bear loves, licks, and forms her young; but bears are not philosophers. Vanity, however, finds its account in ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... from "butter" and "fly," an old term of uncertain origin, possibly from the nature of the excrement, or the yellow colour of some particular species; the latter akin to O. Eng. mod, an earth-worm), the common English names applied respectively to the two groups of insects forming the scientific order ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... How many cowards whose hearts are all as false As stairs of sand, wear yet upon their chins The beard of Hercules, and frowning Mars; Who, inward searched, have livers white as milk? And these assume but valor's excrement, To render them redoubted. Look on beauty And you shall see 'tis purchased by the weight; Which therein works a miracle in nature, Making them lightest that wear most of it; So are those curled, snaky golden locks, Which make such wanton gambols with the wind Upon supposed fairness, ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... them that they must all go out into the fields and bring her whatever they found. So the next day they went out in different directions and the old man found some human excrement and he thought "Well, my daughter-in-law told me to bring whatever I found" so he wrapped it up in leaves and took it home; and his daughter-in-law told him that he had done well and bade him hang up the packet at the back of the house. A few days later he found the ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... the orchard and examine for apples with masses of sawdust-like material projecting from the sides or blossom end. By removing this brown deposit which is the excrement of the worm, you will find a hole leading into the apple. Cut open one of these and determine the course of the tunnel. Where do you find the worm? Do all such apples contain worms? Where have they gone? How does the feeding of the worms injure the ...
— An Elementary Study of Insects • Leonard Haseman
... into their heads to consider this order as a great affront, and a direct violation of the rights of man; but the doctors were the most strenuous opposers of the measure, having no doubt very cogent reasons for wishing the continuance of the practice. They assured the inhabitants, that if human excrement was no longer to be accumulated in the streets, to attract the putrescent particles floating in the air, they would find their way into the human body, and a pestilential sickness would ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... window. If I would drink water, I must quaff the maukish contents of an open aqueduct, exposed to all manner of defilement; or swallow that which comes from the river Thames, impregnated with all the filth of London and Westminster — Human excrement is the least offensive part of the concrete, which is composed of all the drugs, minerals, and poisons, used in mechanics and manufacture, enriched with the putrefying carcasses of beasts and men; and mixed with the ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... is consumptive; one who is sickly; one whose mouth contains worms; one whose breath smells like human excrement; one whose wife is dear to him; one who speaks harshly; one who is always suspicious; one who is avaricious; one who is pitiless; one who is a thief; one who is self-conceited; one who has a liking for sorcery; one who does not care for ...
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - Translated From The Sanscrit In Seven Parts With Preface, - Introduction and Concluding Remarks • Vatsyayana
... nigh a large, shelving aperture in the earth, on one side of the vault, and looking in saw a man, nearly naked; seated upon a heap of excrement and filthy straw. A fragment of a penny candle was burning dimly near him, which showed him to be literally daubed from head to foot with the vilest filth. Before him lay the carcase of some animal which had died from disease—it ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... The excrement of dogs and some other animals which from exposure to air and weather becomes whitened like chalk. It was ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... through an infinite maze by winding paths, much as the chyle is carried through the mesentery and the lacteal vessels there to its cistern, and from this into the blood by the thoracic duct, and so to its place. 7. Those who are not receptive are parted from those within the divine man, as excrement and ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... vermicularis, thread, pin, or seat-worm, is round, very slender, and about half an inch in length. The habitation of this species is the rectum, and they are often found matted together in the excrement. They are very active, even after ejection, and have been known to cause great local irritation by entering the vagina and urethra. Their presence is an occasional cause of masturbation. It is impossible to estimate the number of these parasites that may exist in the human rectum. ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... too, the Chinese doctors would not venture to assert, as the medical faculty of Madrid in the middle of last century assured the inhabitants, that "if human excrement was no longer to be suffered to accumulate as usual in the streets, where it might attract the putrescent particles floating in the air, these noxious vapours would find their way into the human body and a pestilential sickness would be ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... menstruation, it is defined as a monthly flow of bad and useless blood, and of the super-abundance of it, for it is an excrement in quality, though it is pure and incorrupt, like the blood in the veins. And that the menstruous blood is pure in itself, and of the same quality as that in the veins, is proved in two ways.—First, from the ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... Caesar—meet us in these frothy paragraphs. Cambyses, Xerxes, Artaxerxes, Darius, are thrown in to make the gruel of rhetoric "thick and slab." The whole epistle ends in a long-drawn peroration of invective against "that excrement in human shape," who had had the ill-luck, by pretence to scholarship, by big gains from the Papal treasury, by something in his manners alien from the easy-going customs of the Roman Court, to rouse the rancour of ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... scattered to the four winds of heaven. Here is a portrait that has been wrenched from its frame and trampled on. A baby's bathtub has been carried into the garden, and the soldiers have deposited their excrement in it. There are chairs that have been smashed by the kicks of heavy boots and wardrobes that have been disemboweled. Here is a fine old mahogany table that has been carried into the fields for five hundred meters and then broken in two. An old red damask armchair, with wings at the sides, one ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... importunate and most serious designs, and of great import indeed, too, but let that pass: for I must tell thee it will please his Grace, by the world, sometime to lean upon my poor shoulder, and with his royal finger thus dally with my excrement, with my mustachio: but, sweet heart, let that pass. By the world, I recount no fable: some certain special honours it pleaseth his greatness to impart to Armado, a soldier, a man of travel, that hath ...
— Love's Labour's Lost • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... of the Bowery, which cuts through like a drain to catch its sewage, Every Man's Land, a reeking march of humanity and humidity, steams with the excrement of seventeen languages, flung in patois from tenement windows, fire escapes, curbs, stoops, and cellars whose walls are terrible ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst |
