#alchemy

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. ↗

— Naomi Janowitz

#magic #magical-thinking #prayer #religion #ritual

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

#cinema #combination #during #editing #emotional

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

#alchemy #consider #gold #lie #making

Medicine rests upon four pillars - philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and ethics. ↗

— Paracelsus

#astronomy #ethics #four #medicine #philosophy

This is alchemy, and this is the office of Vulcan; he is the apothecary and chemist of the medicine. ↗

— Paracelsus

#chemist #medicine #office #vulcan

This process is alchemy: its founder is the smith Vulcan. ↗

— Paracelsus

#founder #process #smith #vulcan

He wishes he were a skilled poet, it would fit his chosen image perfectly; the poor, tragic, tortured artiste. But he has no talent for words, neither for paints nor music; his uselessness is tremendously total. ↗

— Curtis Ackie

#alchemy #magic-realism #magical-realism #surrealism #music

As though eavesdropping, the whistling wind refuses to speak above a whisper. The winding road is cut into the side of the mountain in such a way that it seems they are not making any progress; the walk down will require endurance. She looks up at the cluster of clouds which have been pencilled in neatly against the sky, and hopes it doesn’t rain. It occurs rapidly, a geisha brusquely folding shut her fan; the sun sets, and brilliant darkness replaces light. ↗

— Curtis Ackie

#dreams #magic-realism #surrealism #dreams

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

#exaltation #into #less #none #nothing

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. Fancy ingredients or recipes not required; simple, made-up things are usually even better. ↗

— Erin Morgenstern

#better #chef #combine #cook #delectable