Alchemy Quotes - Page 4

• Writing is alchemy. Dross becomes gold. Experience is transformed. Pain is changed. Suffering may become song. The ordinary or horrible is pushed by the will of the writer into grace or redemption, a prophetic wail, a screed for justice, an elegy of sadness or sorrow. ... There is always a tension between experience and the thing that finally carries it forward, bears its weight, holds it in. Without that tension, one might as well write a shopping list.

  Andrea Dworkin

  Song, Pain, Writing

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• The real alchemy is transforming the base self into gold or into spiritual awareness. That's really what new alchemy's all about.

  Fred Alan Wolf

  Spiritual, Real, Self

  Source: www.edgemagazine.net

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• We live through myriads of seconds, yet it is always one, just one, that casts our entire inner world into turmoil, the second when (as Stendhal has described it) the internal inflorescence, already steeped in every kind of fluid, condenses and crystallizes—a magical second, like the moment of generation, and like that moment concealed in the warm interior of the individual life, invisible, untouchable, beyond the reach of feeling, a secret experienced alone. No algebra of the mind can calculate it, no alchemy of premonition divine it, and it can seldom perceive itself.

  Stefan Zweig

  Feelings, Secret, Mind

  Stefan Zweig (2015). “The Collected Novellas of Stefan Zweig: Burning Secret, A Chess Story, Fear, Confusion, Journey into the Past”, p.144, Pushkin Press

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• Mercy, she had discovered, made mad alchemy: a drop of it could dilute a lake of hate.

  Laini Taylor

  Hate, Lakes, Mad

  Laini Taylor (2012). “Days of Blood and Starlight: Daughter of Smoke and Bone Trilogy”, p.163, Hachette UK

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• Southerners have a genius for psychological alchemy...If something intolerable simply cannot be changed, driven away or shot they will not only tolerate it but take pride in it as well.

  Florence King

  Pride, Genius, Psychological

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• Much early alchemy seems to have been adventure. You heated and mixed and burnt and pounded and to see what would happen. An adventure might suggest an hypothesis that can subsequently be tested, but adventure is prior to theory.

  Ian Hacking

  Adventure, Might, Theory

  Ian Hacking (2006). “The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference”, p.63, Cambridge University Press

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• As hard as you try to write a good script and you have great intentions, this alchemy has to occur.

  Carlton Cuse

  Writing, Trying, Scripts

  Source: collider.com

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• Water and stones. Those are the unpromising ingredients of two very different endeavors... painting, because artists' pigments are made from fluids... mixed together with powdered stones to give color... and the other is alchemy, the stone the ultimate goal.

  James Elkins

  Artist, Color, Two

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• So if we could not have love, my husband and I, then at least I could have alchemy.

  Sarah Dunant

  Husband, Ifs, Love My Husband

  Sarah Dunant (2012). “The Birth of Venus (Random House Reader's Circle Deluxe Reading Group Edition): A Novel”, p.252, Random House

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• What a gulf between impression and expression! That’s our ironic fate—to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teen-agers or college professors. We practice alchemy in reverse—touch gold and it turns into lead; touch the pure lyrics of experience, and they turn into the verbal equivalents of tripe and hogwash.

  Aldous Huxley

  Fate, College, Expression

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• Photography is essentially an act of recognition by street photographers, not an act of invention. Photographers might respond to an old man’s face, or an Arbus freak, or the way light hits a building—and then they move on. Whereas in all the other art forms, take William Blake, everything that came to that paper never existed before. It’s the idea of alchemy, of making something from nothing.

  Duane Michals

  Photography, Art, Moving

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• I submit that the traditional definition of psychiatry, which is still vogue, places it alongside such things as alchemy and astrology, and commits it to the category of pseudo-science.

  Thomas Szasz

  Astrology, Pseudo, Definitions

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• There was no "me" in Alchemy. Well, phonetically there was, but that wasn't the point.

  Richelle Mead

  Wells

  Richelle Mead (2012). “The Golden Lily: A Bloodlines Novel”, p.105, Penguin

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• Cinema, heir of alchemy, last of an erotic science.

  Jim Morrison

  Erotic, Heirs, Lasts

  "The lords, and The new creatures: poems".

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• Without respect, the subtle alchemy that binds an organization or that serves as the impetus for a business transaction would dissolve into mutual suspicion and hostility.

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

  Respect, Business, Organization

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2004). “Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning”, p.126, Penguin

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• Meditation is the alchemy of transforming. The unconscious into the conscious. It gives you a tremendous power, Far greater than anger, greed and lust.

  Rajneesh

  Anger, Giving, Meditation

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• One of the oldest secrets of alchemy is that every living thing, from the most complex creatures right down to the simplest leaf, carries the seeds of its creation within itself.

  Michael Scott

  Dna, Secret, Creation

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• So the crew fly on with no thought that they are in motion. Like night over the sea, they are very far from the earth, from towns, from trees. The clock ticks on. The dials, the radio lamps, the various hands and needles go though their invisible alchemy. . . . and when the hour is at hand the pilot may glue his forehead to the window with perfect assurance. Out of oblivion the gold has been smelted: there it gleams in the lights of the airport.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Night, Airports, Light

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• See ye not, Courtesy is the true Alchemy, turning to gold all it touches and tries?

  George Meredith

  Curiosity, Trying, Gold

  George Meredith (1922). “The Complete Works of George Meredith”, p.7939, Library of Alexandria

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• What is cheaper than lust or of less value than alchemy or aphrodisiacs?

  Avram Davidson

  Lust, Aphrodisiac, Cheaper

  Avram Davidson (2011). “The Avram Davidson Treasury: A Tribute Collection”, p.560, Macmillan

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• Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry begins, and astrology ends and astronomy begins.

  Richard Dawkins

  Philosophy, Science, Astrology

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• The act of quiet nighttime talking, illustrates for me more than anything else the curious alchemy of companionship.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Love, Heartbreak, Talking

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2010). “The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims”, p.456, A&C Black

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• 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.

  Upton Sinclair

  Drama, Grief, Writing

  Upton Sinclair (2016). “Dragon's Teeth”, p.483, Open Road Media

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• If people ever look down upon you for crying for fictional characters, you should give them a gentle, pitying look and feel bad for them. If they've never cried for a fictional character, then they've never loved one (and what a joy that is). If they've never cried at a book, a movie, a piece of music, then they've missed one of the great pleasures life has to offer. Just because fiction does not contain things that are real doesn't mean it doesn't contain truth, and we find it through the alchemy of our tears.

  Cassandra Clare

  Real, Book, Character

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• The secrets of alchemy exist to transform mortals from a state of suffering and ignorance to a state of enlightenment and bliss.

  Deepak Chopra

  Spiritual, Ignorance, Secret

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