"Queen Whims, or Queen Quintessence (which you please), perceiving that we stood as mute as fishes, said: Your taciturnity speaks you not only disciples of Pythagoras, from whom the venerable antiquity of my progenitors in successive propagation was emaned and derives its original, but also discovers, that through the revolution of many retrograde moons, you have in Egypt pressed the extremities of your fingers with the hard tenants of your mouths, and scalptized your heads with frequent applications of your unguicules. In the school of Pythagoras, taciturnity was the symbol of abstracted and superlative knowledge, and the silence of the Egyptians was agnited as an expressive manner of divine adoration; this caused the pontiffs of Hierapolis to sacrifice to the great deity in silence, impercussively, without any vociferous or obstreperous sound. My design is not to enter into a privation of gratitude towards you, but by a vivacious formality, though matter were to abstract itself from me, excentricate to you my cogitations. Having spoken this, she only said to her officers, Tabachins, a panacea; and straight they desired us not to take it amiss if the queen did not invite us to dine with her; for she never ate anything at dinner but some categories, jecabots, emnins, dimions, abstractions, harborins, chelemins, second intentions, carradoths, antitheses, metempsychoses, transcendent prolepsies, and such other light food."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Chapter 20 : How the Quintessence cured the sick with a song
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Rabelais
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
François Rabelais
103 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by François Rabelais →
Related Quotes
"Reverence thy preceptors: shun the conversation of those whom thou desirest not to resemble, and receive not in vain …"
"Oignez vilain, il vous poindra. Poignez vilain, il vous oindra."
"Tout vient à point à qui sait attendre."
"Make three bites of a cherry."
"Strike the iron whilst it is hot."
"A baker's dozen."
"Performed to a T."
"Readers, friends, if you turn these pages Put your prejudice aside, For, really, there's nothing here that's outrageo…"
"Je m'en vais chercher un grand peut-être; tirez le rideau, la farce est jouée."
"Appetite comes with eating, says Angeston. But the thirst goes away with drinking."