Quotes About Alchemy

For a moment all my bees have turned to honey. Page 302.

Supermarkets and specialist suppliers will have you believe there are great substitutes for cheese. There are not. No vegan cheese tastes anything like decent cheese, and melting cheese might as well be alchemy as far as the vegan cheese industry is concerned.

Every act of his is marked by an unstable ambivalence. He is the god of calculation, arithmetic and rational science; and he also presides over the occult sciences, astrology and alchemy. He is the god of magic formulae, of secret accounts, of hidden texts. And so he is the god of medicine. The god of writing is the god of the pharmakon…

A farmer is a magician who produces money from the mud.

The light needs only our trustAnd, of course, the darknessTo work its eternal alchemy.

Medieval alchemists, despite their lust for gold, considered mercury the most potent and poetic substance in the universe. As a child, I would have agreed with them.

Human beings suffer agonies, and their sad fates become legends; poets write verses about them and playwrights compose dramas, and the remembrance of past grief becomes a source of present pleasure - such is the strange alchemy of the spirit.

The embrace of present and past time, in which English antiquarianism becomes a form of alchemy, engenders a strange timelessness. It is as if the little bird which flew through the Anglo-Saxon banqueting hall, in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, gained the outer air and became the lark ascending in Vaughan Williams's orchestral setting. The unbroken chain is that of English music itself.

mr. makepeace, do you really turn lead into gold? no, of course not. no one can do that. but if people think you're foolish enough to try, they don't bother to look at what you're really doing. they leave you in peace.

The association of magic and cryptology was reinforced by other factors. Mysterious symbols were used in such esoteric fields as astrology and alchemy—where each planet and chemical had a special sign, like the circle and arrow for Mars—just as they were in cryptology. Like words in cipher, spells and incantations, such as "abracadabra," looked like nonsense but in reality were potent with hidden meanings.

That's the alchemy of adjectives: boiling down an excess of ideas to the essence of a thing. We want the words to be precise and evocative. If we pick our adjectives carefully, any description can surprise.

And there you have it, Your Highness. Turning a jug of water into gold.

gunpowder, made from saltpeter (potassium nitrate), sulfur, and carbon.

The tragic element in poetry is like Saturn in alchemy, -- the Malevolent, the Destroyer of Nature; but without it no true Aurum Potabile, or Elixir of Life, can be made.

Ah me! what wonder-working, occult science Can from the ashes in our hearts once more The rose of youth restore? What craft of alchemy can bid defiance To time and change, and for a single hour Renew this phantom-flower?

Fire isn't always an element of destruction. Classical alchemical doctrine teaches that it also has dominion over another province: change.

You know. I never really thought to ask before—but what is that dust made of?" "Depleted uranium," I told him. "At least, that's the base ingredient. I had to add in a lot of other things. Cold iron, basil, dung from a—" "Never mind," he said. "I don't want to know.

Cineama, heir of alchemy, The last erotic science

The right circumstances sometimes happen of their own accord, slyly, without fanfare, without warning. Layman's alchemy. . . . The magic of everyday things.

A few hundred years ago there were no differences between magic and medicine.

un'alchimista casalinga, che fa magie caserecce

Every bottle a whiff of other times, other places; every one, from the commonest Liebfraumilch to imperious 1945 Veuve Clicquot, a humble miracle. Everyday magic, Joe called it. The transformation of base matter into stuff of dreams. Layman's alchemy.

I carry the sun in a golden cup. The moon in a silver bag.

I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even put a stopper on death.