get blood from a stone

get blood from a stone

To do something that is very hard to accomplish, especially when dealing with other people in some way. Good luck getting a group of toddlers to sit still—it's like getting blood from a stone.
See also: blood, get, stone
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms. © 2015 Farlex, Inc, all rights reserved.
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References in periodicals archive ?
Never mind conventional wisdom; you can get blood from a stone. Anthropologists have extracted the blood of humans, sheep and an extinct form of cattle from the surface of a stone slab at an approximately 10,000-year-old agricultural village in Turkey.
Ritual clues flow from prehistoric blood
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