Quotes About Alchemy

Poetry is the alchemy which teaches us to convert ordinary materials into gold.

The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.

Chinese alchemy parallels European alchemy in postulating the change from watery lead (nigredo) to fiery heart (rubedo) and then to pure white (albedo) or gold (also known as the Philosopher's Stone).22 Understandably, in ancient Greece, a "similar archetypal concept of a perfect being is that of Platonic man, round on all sides and uniting within himself the two sexes."23

Alchemists sometimes say that Buddhism starts with fire while Taoism starts with water."134

but both are necessary for a creative, whole life. "Fire is spirit, water is vitality. Alchemists sometimes say that Buddhism starts with fire while Taoism starts with water."134

God made the water but men made the wine.

You don't have to be a chef or even a particularly good cook to experience proper kitchen alchemy: the moment when ingredients combine to form something more delectable than the sum of their parts.

To make an artwork good enough to enter people's hearts is like what ancient Chinese called 'making stone into gold.' It is alchemy.

Constant happiness is the philosopher's stone of the soul.

We have achieved two of the three alchemists' dreams: We have transmuted the elements and learned to fly. Immortality is next.

Magic. I draw with silver and it turns red.

Gold is the root-essence of lead. It is considered an implicit component of all metals in greater or lesser degree, based on their density, much as the illuminated spiritual reality is considered implicit in the soul of each incarnate human, no matter how overlaid with vice and ignorance.

Labor is the fabled magician's wand, the philosophers stone, and the cap of good fortune.

What a shame the lilac flower jealously guards its aroma, refusing to share its magic. Relying on alchemy, a perfumer recalls its impression with a blend. Together, the essences of jasmine, ylang-ylang, neroli, and vanilla plot to mimic the fair lilac flower. —

A single second is enough like steam in a retort to hiss, obedient to the alchemist and drops dead as a hunted dove.

Become an alchemist. Transmute base metal into gold, suffering into consciousness, disaster into enlightenment.

None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.

Tragedy belongs to the poets. Only they have "trod the sunlit heights and from life's dissonance struck one clear chord." None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry, and if poetry is true knowledge and the great poets guides safe to follow, this transmutation has arresting implications. Pain changed into

The real alchemy consists in being able to turn gold back again into something else; and that's the secret that most of your friends have lost.

O Who can tell The hidden power of herbes, and might of Magick spell?

Like the alchemists, they were content to advocate highly imaginative solutions whose relation to existing facts was one of flat negation.

Perhaps there had been joy for them in finding that sugar could be made from blood.

This agent, partially revealed by the blind guesses of the disciples of Mesmer, is precisely what the Adepts of the middle ages called the elementary matter of the great work. The Gnostics held that it composed the igneous body of the Holy Spirit; and it was adored in the secret rites of the Sabbat or the Temple, under the hieroglyphic figure of Baphomet or the hermaphroditic goat of Mendes.

You are excrement. You can change yourself into gold.