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1 " Advice," Doña Vorchenza chuckled. " Advice. The years play a sort of alchemical trick, transmuting one's mutterings to a state of respectability. Give advice at forty and you're a nag. Give it at seventy and you're a sage. "
2 " 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. "
― Alan Moore
3 " Despite the experiences that put me in the spotlight as the co-creator of my wisdom, the human part of me keeps burning, like an alchemical process that I both accept and want to refuse. You see, it's hard when I notice women falling in love with me, and then destroying everything at the same time. And so, I'm changing the world as much as this world is changing me. The two things are inseparable. "
― Robin Sacredfire
4 " The wicked ones make us better persons for those that deserve our attention. Nothing is really lost and wasted in this alchemical dance of life. "
5 " To discover the source of this alchemical love within is to uncover the deepest secrets of the soul. It is to unearth and align with the ultimate truth of who we are. "
― Atalina Wright , Alchemical Love: Poems, Thoughts and Stories for the Heart and Soul
6 " Love's alchemical power is nevermore clear than in the moments when we least expect it to grace our lives; for love transforms, love transcends, love awakens. "
7 " Writing is hard. Writing that is good, writing that is powerful enough to evoke a change or an authentic emotion or even just an idea in another human being is about as mysterious as an alchemical recipe, but there are a few known ingredients. Craft? Yes, absolutely. Devotion? A load - yes! Humility? Not vital, I suppose, but all my favorites include at least a dash. Before those can be added to the cauldron though, you must have a base of Honesty. Honesty is difficult to find in public spaces these days (and getting harder every goddamn day) but if you're quiet, and patient, you can usually find some hidden in your room somewhere. (It helps to turn off the lights, for some reason.) Problem is, Honesty is invariably bound to Vulnerability and the only thing that cuts the bitterness of Vulnerability is Courage. And Courage? Well. Courage is the hardest thing of all. "
― , The Secret Loves of Geek Girls
8 " Low states are a like a poison to the psyche. Millions of people throughout the world take tranquillizers each day to combat depression, but this does not tackle its root cause, which is found in the basic state of the internal energies of the psyche.Basically the energy of the psyche needs to change, from low states to spiritual ones. It requires inner observation, the destruction of the egos, and alchemical transformation. "
― Belsebuub
9 " People's imaginations have continued to work, right up to our own day; hence the incredible crop of fanciful allegations attributing to the Templars every kind of esoteric rite and belief, from the most ancient to the most vulgar, every variety of alchemical or magical knowledge, all kinds of initiation and affiliation rituals, those already in existence at the time and those yet to be conceived—in a word, all the " secrets" devised the slake the thirst for mystery inherent in human nature. This thirst, by a kind of instinctual reaction, seems never to be stronger than in those eras when people appear to reject all mysteries: let us recall that it was in Descartes' own day that trials for witchcraft were most numerous; that it was at the beginning of the rationalistic eighteenth century that Freemasonry was born; that our own scientific twentieth century is equally the century in which sects have proliferated, occultism has undergone a renaissance, and so on. "
10 " Through photography and image I have been afforded the privilege of sharing the stories and myths of people's lives with others. The process for me became self-revelatory. It was a process of soul-making, something all humans are engaged in, no matter their endeavor. I saw a part of myself in each person I photographed. I came to realize, through the alchemical process of living, that each life is important, no matter how little that life seems to offer. "
11 " The Alchemical world view, in stark contrast to the scientific world view, where rational deterministic man is completely separated from both Nature and the Self, in fact the Self does not even exist. In the alchemical world view, all three are inextricably woven together and in " synchronistic" or " archetypal" events & occurrences in one's life, all distinctions between them blur and almost disappear. "
12 " Getting hold of the difficulty deep down is what is hard. Because if it is grasped near the surface it simply remains the difficulty it was. It has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beginning to think about these things in a new way. The change is as decisive as, for example, that from the alchemical to the chemical way of thinking. The new way of thinking is what is so hard to establish. Once the new way of thinking has been established, the old problems vanish; indeed they become hard to recapture. For they go with our way of expressing ourselves and, if we clothe ourselves in a new form of expression, the old problems are discarded along with the old garment. "
― Ludwig Wittgenstein , Culture and Value
13 " It is possible to induce incorrect notions of cause and effect in most people in just a few minutes. All that is necessary is to expose them to rewards which they believe they are generating based on their actions when in fact the rewards are randomly awarded. People will latch onto any seeming success and repeat it, even when they have to explain repeated failures as well. It appears practically impossible, or at least very rare, for humans not to be influenced by immediate experiences of concrete results. This is true even if the experiences turn out to have limited theoretical validity. The moment of surprise is not when people repeat alchemical failures but when they begin to do something else. "
― , Magic in the Roman World: Pagans, Jews and Christians
14 " Like an alchemical wave sending ripples of love to every part of our being, once we become conscious of an intelligent life force existing within us, everything changes. "
15 " The power of the work comes through this alchemical process in which the darkness is transmuted into light, and the energy that was trapped in maintaining rigid social structures and unhealthy cultural conditioning becomes freed up and released. "
― , Divine Duality: The Power of Reconciliation Between Women and Men
16 " He thought that it was all over, finished, done with. Andrew had never yet had reason to observe the first tiny bubble of fermenting yeast, in which was contained an inevitable, alchemical transformation. "
― J.K. Rowling , The Casual Vacancy
17 " Women: One of the most mysterious forces on the planet have had a very profound impact on men since millennia, for they are gifted with an alchemical agent - Discontinuity ~ Any one who encounters their presence gets disconnected with their past, a very life changing experience. "
18 " Fire isn't always an element of destruction. Classical alchemical doctrine teaches that it also has dominion over another province: change. "
― Jim Butcher , Cold Days (The Dresden Files, #14)
19 " The water beneath the Temple was both actual and metaphorical, existing as springs and streams, as spiritual energy, and as a symbol of the receptive or lunar aspect of nature. The meaning of that principle is too wide and elusive for it to be given any one name, so in the terminology of ancient science it was given a number, 1,080. Its polar opposite, the positive, solar force in the universe, was also referred to as a number 666. These two numbers, which have an approximate golden-section relationship of 1:1.62, were at the root of the alchemical formula that expressed the supreme purpose of the Temple. Its polar opposite, the positive, solar force in the universe, was also referred to as a number 666. Not merely was it used to generate energy from fusion of atmospheric and terrestrial currents, but it also served to combine in harmony all the correspondences of those forces on every level of creation. "
― John Michell , The Dimensions of Paradise: Sacred Geometry, Ancient Science, and the Heavenly Order on Earth
20 " Poe had this curious kind of alchemical courage, where he took all the terrible things and terrors that happened in his life, all this shame and fear and pain, and turned them into great works of art. He was a complex, brilliant person who was just wired too tight. "
