Quotes About Alchemy

The words we did not shout, the tears unshed, the curse we swallowed, the phrase we shortened, the love we killed, turned into magnetic iron ore, into tourmaline, into pyrite agate, blood congealed into cinnabar, blood calcinated, leadened into galena, oxidized, aluminized, sulphated, calcinated, the mineral glow of dead meteors and exhausted suns in the forest of dead trees and dead desires.

Introspection does not need to be a still life. It can be an active alchemy.

The unconscious cannot express itself directly because it is a composite of past, present, future, a timeless alchemy of many dimensions. A direct statement, as for an act, would deprive it of its effectiveness. It is an image which bypasses the censor of the mind, affects our emotions and our senses. An act has to be interpreted on two levels—one as action, the other as meaning.

Consider the case of alchemy: it fascinated human beings for over a thousand years, and yet anyone who seriously claims to be a practicing alchemist today will have disqualified himself for most positions of responsibility in our society. Faith-based religion must suffer the same slide into obsolescence.

ALKAHEST  (A'LKAHEST)   n.s.A word used first by Paracelsus, and adopted by his followers, to signify an universal dissolvent, or liquour, which has the power of resolving all things into their first principles.

She blamed the lack of real flowers on both weather and the war, and instead put four or five pieces of coal in glass bowls, added water, salt, and ammonia, before finally pouring a mixture of violet and blue ink over them. It was a complete mystery to me how this alchemy would result in anything resembling flowers, but they were "blooming" within the hour.

William Morris championed the movement for Arts and Crafts. He believed that when we build a house with our hands, make furniture in our workshops, make pots and paintings in our studios, plant fruits and flowers in our gardens, we transform ourselves into alchemists, turning ordinary into extraordinary.

We claim the present as the pre-sent, as the hereafter. We are unraveling our navels so that we may ingest the sun. We are not afraid of the darkness, we trust that the moon shall guide us. We are determining the future at this very moment. We now know that the heart is the philosophers' stone. Our music is our alchemy...

Abandoning the flatland ages past, And finding mountains much more to their taste, They toil in labyrinthine caverns, dense With gases that are metal's noble source; 10770 They separate, combine, test, trying to Discover things undreamt of hitherto. By spirit power, subtly, they construct Forms clear and crystalline, without defect; Then in the crystal's eternal silence peering, Perceive what in the upper world is occurring.

scores of scientists working in widely separated unrelated disciplines are crossing the threshold into the world of ancient science. We call it progress, but Merlin will have the last laugh. Science is inching into magic, and the science of the twenty-first century will probably be nothing more than a revival of alchemy. In

We have seen that the process of stellar alchemy takes time – billions of years of it. And because our Universe is expanding it needs to be billions of light years in size if it is to have enough time to produce the building blocks for living complexity. A universe that was only as big as our Milky Way galaxy, with its 100 billion stars, would be little more than a month old.

For I am every dead thing,In whom love wrought new alchemy.For his art did expressA quintessence even from nothingness,From dull privations, and lean emptinessHe ruin'd me, and I am re-begotOf absence, darkness, death; things which are not.

I so connected to symbolically being able to turn lead into gold. My grandmother used to say, "Life give you a lemon, you go ahead and make lemonade." To me, that's alchemy.

Everyone thinks alchemy is dead, but alchemists live among us—they are called editors: adept in the art of transformation, they practice arcane methods of selection, deletion and synthesis to take what is base and produce gold.

By projecting his psyche into the stone he gave the stone life, identity, consciousness, doing what the alchemists did as they gazed into the prima materia in their retorts. He came to see the imagination as the psychic quicksilver out of which everything of value is created; for the material world of objects is devoid of all meaning save that which we grant it in the psyche.

Watching a woman make Russian pancakes, you might think that she was calling on the spirits or extracting from the batter the philosophers stone.

If love is a precious resource, it is not one simply extracted from the Third World and implanted in the First; rather, it owes its very existence to a particular cultural alchemy that occurs in the land to which it is imported.

601If love is a precious resource, it is not one simply extracted from the Third World and implanted in the First; rather, it owes its very existence to a particular cultural alchemy that occurs in the land to which it is imported.

From apparently the basest metals we have the finest toned bells.

Do you believe then that the sciences would ever have arisen and become great if there had not beforehand been magicians, alchemists, astrologers and wizards, who thirsted and hungered after abscondite and forbidden powers?

In a way, we are magicians. We are alchemists, sorcerers and wizards. We are a very strange bunch. But there is great fun in being a wizard.

This is our mercury, our lunary, but whosoever thinks of any other water besides this, is ignorant and foolish, never attaining to the desired effects.

You sit here for days saying, This is strange business. You're the strange business. You have the energy of the sun in you, but you keep knotting it up at the base of your spine. You're some weird kind of gold that wants to stay melted in the furnace, so you won't have to become coins.

Watercolor is an alchemical medium - colors mixing with water, joining with it, being extended by it - creating new life where none had been before.