These alchemy quotes will inspire you. Alchemy the medieval forerunner of chemistry, concerned with the transmutation of matter, in particular with attempts to convert base metals into gold or find a universal elixir; or a seemingly magical process of transformation, creation, or combination.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging alchemy quotes, alchemy sayings, and alchemy proverbs.
Best Alchemy Quotes
- “Medicine rests upon four pillars – philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and ethics.” ~ Paracelsus
- “You are an alchemist; make gold of that.” ~ William Shakespeare
- “At it’s essence, art is an alchemical process. Alchemy is a process of transformation.” ~ Julia Cameron
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“To obtain something, something of equal value must be given.” ~ Hiromu Arakawa
- “True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.” ~ Arthur Rimbaud
- “Many have said of Alchemy, that it is for the making of gold and silver. For me such is not the aim, but to consider only what virtue and power may lie in medicines.” ~ Paracelsus
- “What the great mentor is always looking for is a person who is willing to tap his genius, to put it through the refiner’s fire, to do the hard work to develop it. Indeed, mentoring is the medieval art of alchemy-turning plain old human steel into hearts and minds of gold.” ~ Oliver DeMille
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“I like to use the term alchemy, which is the soul of the world, or those of Jung’s collective unconscious. You connect with a space where everything is.” ~ Paulo Coelho
- “”This is why alchemy exists,” the boy said. “So that everyone will search for his treasure, find it, and then want to be better than he was in his former life. Lead will play its role until the world has no further need for lead, and then lead will have to turn itself into gold. That’s what alchemists do. They show that, when we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too.”” ~ Paulo Coelho
- “The beautiful souls of the world have an art of saintly alchemy, by which bitterness is converted into kindness, the gall of human experience into gentleness, ingratitude into benefits, insults into pardon.” ~ Henri Frederic Amiel , Soul alchemy quotes
- “Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed. The myths and laws of religion are not true because they they conform to some metaphysical, scientific or historical reality but because they are life enhancing. They tell you how human nature functions, but you will not discover their truth unless you apply these myths and doctrines to your own life and put them into practice.” ~ Karen Armstrong
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“There is an alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmuted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness.” ~ Pearl S. Buck
- “This is alchemy, and this is the office of Vulcan; he is the apothecary and chemist of the medicine.” ~ Paracelsus
- “Awareness is the greatest alchemy there is.
Just go on becoming more and more aware
you will find your life-changing for the better in every possible dimension.
It will bring great fulfillment” ~ Rajneesh - “Humankind cannot gain something without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. This is Alchemy’s First Law of Equivalent Exchange. In those days, we really believed that to be the world’s one, and only, truth.” ~ Hiromu Arakawa
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“Poetry is the alchemy which teaches us to convert ordinary materials into gold.” ~ Anais Nin
- “Every human being has gone through a tragedy of sorts. And the idea is that you have two paths you can take, you can find that alchemy that turns lead into gold, find that magic where you can see the loss as an entry point for learning and grow from it and become wiser and stronger.” ~ Jillian Michaels
- “I think at some level, it’s just alchemy that we, as writers, can’t explain when we write the characters. I don’t set out to create the characters – they’re not, to me, collections of quirks that I can put together. I discover the characters, instead. I usually go through a standard set of interview questions with the character in the beginning and ask the vital stuff: What’s important to you? What do you love? Hate? Fear? .. and then I know where to start. But the characters just grow on their own, at a certain point. And start surprising me.” ~ Rachel Caine , Alchemy quotes love
- “For I am every dead thing In whom love wrought new alchemy For his art did express A quintessence even from nothingness, From dull privations, and lean emptiness He ruined me, and I am re-begot Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.” ~ John Donne
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“What’s the world’s greatest lie?… It’s this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate.” ~ Paulo Coelho
- “Chymia, or Alchemy and Spagyrism, is the art of resolving compound bodies into their principles and of combining these again.” ~ Georg Ernst Stahl
- “This process is alchemy: its founder is the smith Vulcan.” ~ Paracelsus
- “Although Alchemy has now fallen into contempt, and is even considered a thing of the past, the physician should not be influenced by such judgments.” ~ Paracelsus
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“Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.” ~ Henry A. Kissinger
- “Thanks to his complex convictions, made strong with the forces of animus and anima, the alchemist believes he is seizing the soul of the world, participating in the soul of the world. Thus, from the world to the man, alchemy is a problem of souls.” ~ Gaston Bachelard
- “The essence of cinema is editing. It’s the combination of what can be extraordinary images of people during emotional moments, or images in a general sense put together in a kind of alchemy.” ~ Francis Ford Coppola
- “None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.” ~ Edith Hamilton
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“You can make a good show, but you still need some magical alchemy to get people to watch.” ~ Shawn Ryan
- “As the last drops fell from the glass to my tongue, I wondered – only for an instant – what perhaps I’d never know. What would it taste like, what would it feel like, if that liquid sliding down my throat was not champagne. But the elixir of life. Katherine Neville.” ~ Bill Vaughan
- “I’ve never wanted to be a witch, but an alchemist, now that’s a different matter. To invent this wizard world, I’ve learned a ridiculous amount about alchemy. Perhaps much of it I’ll never use in the books, but I have to know in detail what magic can and cannot do in order to set the parameters and establish the stories’ internal logic.” ~ J. K. Rowling
- “Alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing which has many properties, which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, which can do anything.” ~ Terence McKenna
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“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.” ~ Edith Wharton
- “Religion isn’t about believing things. It’s ethical alchemy. It’s about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness.” ~ Karen Armstrong
- “I often felt better as soon as I swallowed my vitamin C, long before it had time to take effect. Medical researchers call it ‘placebo effect’; I prefer to call it magic, for it occurs when something – a pill or a word – is imbued with power and meaning, and so it becomes effective. That is alchemy.” ~ Kat Duff
- “In the new alchemy, we have a similar kind of way of thinking. Our internal space includes our intuitions, our thoughts, our senses and our feelings, and from these we construct or build a picture of the outside world. From intuition and thought, we construct time. We also construct space from thought and our sensations. From our senses and our feelings, we experience energy, and from our intuitions and our feelings, we experience motion.” ~ Fred Alan Wolf
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“The light needs only our trust And, of course, the darkness To work its eternal alchemy.” ~ Scott Hastie
- “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.” ~ Erin Morgenstern
- “Gratitude helps us stop trying to control outcomes. It is the key that unlocks positive energy in our life. It is the alchemy that turns problems into blessings, and the unexpected into gifts.” ~ Melody Beattie
- “If you become more sensitive to beauty, to poetry, that means your love has blossomed. And all the energy that has been left by fear, anger, and hate, will be taken over by your love, your sensitivity, your compassion, your creativity. This is the whole alchemy of changing base metals into gold.” ~ Rajneesh
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“Alchemy is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter.” ~ Terence McKenna
- “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 know that the heart is the philosopher’s stone. Our music is our alchemy.” ~ Saul Williams
- “The alchemist of the West has turned stone into glass But my alchemy has transmuted glass into flint Pharaohs of today have stalked me in vain” ~ Muhammad Iqbal
- “Or perhaps it is some combination of spirit and desire, love and hope, some alchemy that we each possess and can put to use, if we first know where to look without flinching.” ~ Libba Bray
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“Only by discovering alchemy have I clearly understood that the Unconscious is a process and that ego’s rapport with the Unconscious and its contents initiate an evolution, more precisely, a real metamorphosis of the psyche.” ~ Carl Jung
- “I can’t explain the alchemy that transmuted one evening into the equivalent of years held lightly in common. The only way I can put it is that we recognized, too surely even for surprise, that we shared the same currency.” ~ Tana French
- “Mid-summer … when the alchemy of Nature transmutes the sylvan landscape to one vivid and almost homogeneous mass of green; when the senses are well-nigh intoxicated with the surging seas of moist verdure and the subtly indefinable odors of the soil and the vegetation. In such surroundings the mind loses its perspective; time and space become trivial and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric past beat insistently upon the enthralled consciousness.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “endurance of inescapable sorrow is something which has to be learned alone. And only to endure is not enough. Endurance can be a harsh and bitter root in one’s life, bearing poisonous and gloomy fruit, destroying other lives. Endurance is only the beginning. There must be acceptance and the knowledge that sorrowfully accepted brings its own gifts. For there is an alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmuted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness.” ~ Pearl S. Buck
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“Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
- “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
- “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 alchemy quotes
- “In the alchemy of man’s soul almost all noble attributes- courage, honor, love, hope, faith, duty, loyalty, and so on – can be transmuted into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us. Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion, even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.” ~ Eric Hoffer
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“The sense of gratitude produces true spiritual alchemy, makes us magnanimous – large souled.” ~ Sam Keen
- “I think there is an element of magic in photography – light, chemistry, precious metals – certain alchemy. You can wield a camera like a magic wand almost. Murmur the right words and you can conjure up proof of a dream. I believe in wonder. I look for it in my life every day; I find it in the most ordinary things.” ~ Keith Carter , Alchemy quotes dreams
- “” … What if?” Through the alchemy of those two words, something new comes into the world.” ~ David Morrell
- “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.” ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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“The voice that U hear is the alchemy of Ur mind.” ~ Prince
- “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?” ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- “The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been. The public does not fully understand the world into which it is going. Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision. Those leaders who do not are ultimately judged failures, even though they may be popular at the moment.” ~ Henry A. Kissinger
- “Voting is like alchemy – taking an abstract value and breathing life into it.” ~ Sharon Salzberg
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“We stole their babes and mothers, chiefs and braves Although we held the whip, you knew we were The real slaves To alchemy, human alchemy.” ~ Andy Partridge
- “Time is our most precious currency. So it’s significant that we are being encouraged, wherever possible, to think of our attention not as expenditure but as consumption. This blurring of labor and entertainment forms the basis, for example, of the financial alchemy that conjures deca-billion-dollar valuations for social-networking companies.” ~ Mohsin Hamid
- “Not to say people shouldn’t get rich from art. I adore the alchemy wherein artists who cast a complex spell make rich people give them their money. (Just writing it makes me cackle.) But too many artists have been making money without magic.” ~ Jerry Saltz
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“We are, all of us, crippled and twisted. Most of us strive desperately to keep our grotesqueries out of sight and mind. Our suffering is transformed by an alchemy of the soul into addiction, ulcers, strokes, hatred, even war.” ~ Keith Ablow
- “Choicelessness is the alchemy of transformation, of inner mutation. A new being is born who has nothing to do with the past, who is absolutely discontinuous with the past. He has no desire. And when there is no desire, for the first time you live” ~ Rajneesh
- “In the Greek way of dealing with alchemy, which was earth, air, fire, and water, these were the objective qualities. Within the objective qualities – things of earth, air, fire, and water – are our subjective experiences of hot, cold, dry, and moist.” ~ Fred Alan Wolf
Alchemy is a power or process that changes or transforms something in a mysterious or impressive way.
