TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY ®  •  TODAYINSCI ®
Celebrating 24 Years on the Web
Find science on or your birthday

Today in Science History - Quickie Quiz
Who said: “A people without children would face a hopeless future; a country without trees is almost as helpless.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index T > Category: Tincture

Tincture Quotes (5 quotes)

Astronomy, that micrography of heaven, is the most magnificent of the sciences. … Astronomy has its clear side and its luminous side; on its clear side it is tinctured with algebra, on its luminous side with poetry.
In Victor Hugo and Lorenzo O’Rourke (trans.) Victor Hugo’s Intellectual Autobiography: (Postscriptum de ma vie) (1907), 237-8. From the original French (1901): “L'astronomie, cette micrographie d'en haut, est la plus magnifique des sciences … L'astronomie a son côté clair et son côté lumineux ; par le côté clair elle trempe dans l'algèbre, par le côté lumineux dans la poésie.” [Note: The published translation had the typo “micography”, which is corrected herein. —Webmaster]
Science quotes on:  |  Algebra (117)  |  Astronomy (251)  |  Heaven (266)  |  Luminosity (6)  |  Luminous (19)  |  Magnificence (14)  |  Magnificent (46)  |  Most (1728)  |  Poetry (150)  |  Side (236)

Every creature has its own food, and an appropriate alchemist with the task of dividing it ... The alchemist takes the food and changes it into a tincture which he sends through the body to become blood and flesh. This alchemist dwells in the stomach where he cooks and works. The man eats a piece of meat, in which is both bad and good. When the meat reaches the stomach, there is the alchemist who divides it. What does not belong to health he casts away to a special place, and sends the good wherever it is needed. That is the Creator's decree... That is the virtue and power of the alchemist in man.
Volumen Medicinae Paramirum (c. 1520), in Paracelsus: Essential Readings, edited by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (1990), 50-1.
Science quotes on:  |  Alchemist (23)  |  Appropriate (61)  |  Bad (185)  |  Become (821)  |  Belong (168)  |  Blood (144)  |  Body (557)  |  Both (496)  |  Cast (69)  |  Change (639)  |  Cook (20)  |  Creator (97)  |  Creature (242)  |  Decree (9)  |  Digestion (29)  |  Divide (77)  |  Division (67)  |  Eat (108)  |  Excretion (7)  |  Flesh (28)  |  Food (213)  |  Good (906)  |  Health (210)  |  Man (2252)  |  Meat (19)  |  Power (771)  |  Special (188)  |  Stomach (40)  |  Task (152)  |  Through (846)  |  Virtue (117)  |  Wherever (51)  |  Work (1402)

If the Tincture of the Philosophers is to be used for transmutation, a pound of it must be projected on a thousand pounds of melted Sol [gold]. Then, at length, will a medicine have been prepared for transmuting the leprous moisture of the metals. This work is a wonderful one in the light of nature, namely, that by the Magistery, or the operation of the Spagyrist, a metal, which formerly existed, should perish, and another be produced. This fact has rendered that same Aristotle, with his ill-founded philosophy, fatuous.
In Paracelsus and Arthur Edward Waite (ed.), The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Paracelsus (1894), Vol. 1, 28.
Science quotes on:  |  Aristotle (179)  |  Exist (458)  |  Fact (1257)  |  Fatuous (2)  |  Gold (101)  |  Light (635)  |  Medicine (392)  |  Metal (88)  |  Moisture (21)  |  Must (1525)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Operation (221)  |  Perish (56)  |  Philosopher (269)  |  Philosophy (409)  |  Prepare (44)  |  Produced (187)  |  Project (77)  |  Render (96)  |  Thousand (340)  |  Transmutation (24)  |  Will (2350)  |  Wonderful (155)  |  Work (1402)

Scholars should always receive with thanks new suppositions about things, provided they possess some tincture of sense; another head may often make an important discovery prompted by nothing more than such a stimulus: the generally accepted way of explaining a thing no longer had any effect on his brain and could communicate to it no new notion.
Aphorism 81 in Notebook D (1773-1775), as translated by R.J. Hollingdale in Aphorisms (1990). Reprinted as The Waste Books (2000), 56.
Science quotes on:  |  Accept (198)  |  Brain (281)  |  Common Sense (136)  |  Communicate (39)  |  Communication (101)  |  Discovery (837)  |  Effect (414)  |  Explanation (246)  |  Importance (299)  |  More (2558)  |  New (1273)  |  Nothing (1000)  |  Notion (120)  |  Possess (157)  |  Prompt (14)  |  Receive (117)  |  Scholar (52)  |  Sense (785)  |  Stimulus (30)  |  Supposition (50)  |  Thank (48)  |  Thanks (26)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Way (1214)

So, then, the Tincture of the Philosophers is a universal medicine, and consumes all diseases, by whatsoever name they are called, just like an invisible fire. The dose is very small, but its effect is most powerful. By means thereof I have cured the leprosy, venereal disease, dropsy, the falling sickness, colic, scab, and similar afflictions; also lupus, cancer, noli-metangere, fistulas, and the whole race of internal diseases, more surely than one could believe.
Quoted in Paracelsus and Arthur Edward Waite (ed.), The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Paracelsus (1894), Vol. 1, 29.
Science quotes on:  |  Affliction (6)  |  Call (781)  |  Cancer (61)  |  Colic (3)  |  Cure (124)  |  Disease (340)  |  Dose (17)  |  Dropsy (2)  |  Effect (414)  |  Fall (243)  |  Fire (203)  |  Internal (69)  |  Invisible (66)  |  Leprosy (2)  |  Mean (810)  |  Means (587)  |  Medicine (392)  |  More (2558)  |  Most (1728)  |  Name (359)  |  Philosopher (269)  |  Powerful (145)  |  Race (278)  |  Sickness (26)  |  Small (489)  |  Surely (101)  |  Universal (198)  |  Venereal Disease (2)  |  Whatsoever (41)  |  Whole (756)


Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
Sitewide search within all Today In Science History pages:
Visit our Science and Scientist Quotations index for more Science Quotes from archaeologists, biologists, chemists, geologists, inventors and inventions, mathematicians, physicists, pioneers in medicine, science events and technology.

Names index: | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

Categories index: | 1 | 2 | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
Thank you for sharing.
- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


by Ian Ellis
who invites your feedback
Thank you for sharing.
Today in Science History
Sign up for Newsletter
with quiz, quotes and more.