Alchemical Transformation Quotes

To me, all creativity is magic. Ideas start out in the empty void of your head - and they end up as a material thing, like a book you can hold in your hand. That is the magical process. It's an alchemical thing. Yes, we do get the gold out of it but that's not the most important thing. It's the work itself.

You think it more difficult to turn air into wine than to turn wine into blood?.

When alchemists were talking about turning lead to gold, they were talking about turning a leaden consciousness, which most of us exist in during our lives, into a golden consciousness, which is a much better place to be.

Canada may be fast-forwarding, jump starting, into a new pattern, a model of communication linkages, a civilization that is more than a grab for power and dominance, a place that could channel the fires of the global wirings, where political alliances are subject to electrical ebb and flow, and the alchemical cultivations of imagination and perception, of the self, could precail of the ideology of capital.

No lower can a man descend than to interpret his dreams into gold and silver.

I suppose for me, with 'Djesse,' I realized fairly early in the process that I also needed a character to walk this path, which in some ways is me, and in some ways is not me. I think of Djesse a bit like the infinite child who can see everything and walk into everything as light as a feather and just alchemize.

Within the context of the alchemical vocabulary, the psychedelic experience, as brought to us through plants long in the possession of Aboriginal people, appears to be the identical phenomena.

People adored Element 13's color and luster, which reminded them of the sparkle of gold and silver - a brand-new precious metal. In fact, aluminum became more precious than gold and silver in the 19th century because it was harder to obtain.

The alchemists spent years in their laboratories, observing the fire that purified the metals. They spent so much time close to the fire that gradually they gave up the vanities of the world. They discovered that the purification of the metals had led to a purification of themselves.

You want to be an alchemist so badly? Don't wait to react to the immediate problem. Plan ahead. Look at the big picture and you won't ever have to deal with that problem. Better to save yourself from a major catastrophe than drag your feet over a bunch of little inconveniences.

I believe the personal is the collective. One of the ironies of writing memoir is in using the "I" it becomes an alchemical "we." This is the sorcery of literature.

Have you watched it? A man who is too greedy about money, by and by starts having the qualities of money. He becomes just money. He loses spirituality, he is no more a spirit. He is reduced to a thing. If you love money, you will become like money. If you love your house, by and by you will become material. Whatsoever you love, you become. Love is alchemical. Never love the wrong thing, because it will transform you. Nothing is so transforming as love. Love something which can raise you higher, to higher altitudes. Love something beyond you.

Like Hipster Racism, Hipster Sexism is a distancing gesture, a belief that, simply by applying quotations, uncool, questionable, and even offensive material about women can be alchemically transformed.

I consider myself an alchemist. An alchemist is basically a mystical chemist, right? And one of the great feats that alchemists used to do is they would take lead - just take a chunk of lead - and they could turn lead into gold.

Then hast our the Red Stone perfect with less labour, expense of time and costs, for the which ever thank God.

A poem makes clear without making simple. Poetry's language carries what lives outside language. It's as if you were given a 5-gallon bucket with 10 gallons of water in it. Mysterious thirsts are answered. That alchemical bucket carries secrets also, even the ones we keep from ourselves.

It's a funny thing: my name in Arabic means hope, so I suppose I have to live by that principle. Hope is desire, feeling, and investing in a projection of something that doesn't yet exist. At its best, you witness its alchemy in your life, turning something that was once in the mind into reality. At its worst, it's delusion.

In 'A Poetics of Optics,' Equi writes that 'all images bank on alchemy.' This idea captures her fundamental sense of poetry as turning common material into something rare and valuable.