Struck Out on the Philosopher s Stone Again

• Home
• My Books

Notice & Share Quotes with Friends

Philosopher Due south Stone Quotes

Quotes tagged as "philosopher-s-rock" Showing 1-30 of 30

"I knew it! I knew information technology! "
"Are nosotros allowed to speak yet?" said Ron grumpily. Hermione ignored him.
"Nicolas Flamel," she whispered dramatically, "is the only known maker of the Philosopher's Stone!"
This didn't take quite the effect she'd expected.
"The what?" said Harry and Ron.
"Oh, honestly, don't you 2 read? Look — read that, at that place."
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

"Strange how short-sighted being invisible can brand y'all."
― J. K. Rowling

"Know this: I, Mercurius, accept here set down a full, true and infallible account of the Great Piece of work. But I give you off-white alarm that unless you seek the true philosophical gold and not the gold of the vulgar, unless you lot heart is fixed with unbending intent on the true Stone of the Philosophers, unless you are steadfast in your quest, abiding by God's laws in all faith and humility and eschewing all vanity, conceit, falsehood, intemperance, pride, lust and faint-heartedness, read no farther lest I evidence fatal to y'all. For I am the watery venomous serpent who lies buried at the world's centre; I am the peppery dragon who flies through the air. I am the one thing necessary for the whole Opus. I am the spirit of metals, the fire which does non fire, the water which does not wet the hands. If yous find the way to slay me you will find the philosophical mercury of the wise, fifty-fifty the White Stone beloved of the Philosophers. If yous observe the way to heighten me upwardly once again, you will notice the philosophical sulphur, that is, the Cherry-red Rock and Elixir of Life. Obey me and I will be your retainer; free me and I will be your friend. Enslave me and I am a dangerous enemy; command me and I will brand yous mad; give me life and y'all will dice."
― Patrick Harpur, Mercurius: The Marriage of Heaven and Globe

"I desire to think about trees. Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive usa, that outlive the sun, even, only I can't think about them. I live with trees. There are creatures nether our feet, creatures that live over our heads, but trees live quite convincingly in the same filament of air we inhabit, and in improver, they extend impressively in both directions, up and downward, shearing rock and fanning air, doing their existent business concern merely out of reach."
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"I take often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering, and similar the ancient mariner, fix him with a wild, glitt'ring eye and say, "Practice y'all know that in the head of the caterpillar of the ordinary goat moth there are two hundred twenty-8 split muscles?" The poor wretch flees. I am not making chatter; I mean to alter his life."
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circumvoluted in a fixed tension between veering and longing, and spins helpless, exalted, in and out of that fleet blazing touch. Last nighttime Orion vaulted and spread all over the heaven, pagan and lunatic, his shoulder and knee on fire, his sword 3 suns at the set up-for what?

I won't see this year over again, not again so innocent; and longing wrapped round my throat like a scarf. "For the Heavenly Father desires that we should meet," says Ruysbroeck, "and that is why He is e'er saying to our inmost spirit ane deep unfathomable word and naught else." But what is the word? Is this mystery or coyness? A cast-iron bell hung from the arch of my rib cage; when I stirred, it rang, or information technology tolled, a long syllable pulsing ripples upwards my lungs and downwards the gritty sap inside my bones, and I couldn't go far out; I felt the voiced vowel similar a sigh or a annotation only I couldn't catch the consonant that shaped it into sense."
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

" Yes, information technology's tough, information technology's tough, that goes without proverb. Only isn't waiting itself and longing a wonder, being played on by current of air, lord's day, and shade? "
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"A kind of northing is what I wish to achieve, a single-minded trek towards that place where any shutter left open to the zenith at night volition record the wheeling of all the sky'south stars as a pattern of perfect, concentric circles. I seek a reduction, a shedding, a sloughing off.

At the seashore you frequently come across a trounce, or fragment of a trounce, that precipitous sands and surf have thinned to a wisp. There is no way you can tell what kind of shell it had been, what creature it had housed; information technology could take been a whelk or a scallop, a cowrie, limpet, or conch. The animal is long since dissolved, and its blood spread and thinned in the general sea. All y'all agree in your hand is a cool shred of shell, an inch long, pared and so thin that it passes a faint pinkish lite. It is an essence, a smooth condensation of the air, a curve. I long for the North where unimpeded winds would strop me to such a pure sideslip of bone. But I'll not get northing this year. I'll stalk that floating pole and frigid air by waiting here. I wait on bridges; I expect, struck, on forest paths and meadow's fringes, hilltops and banksides, day in and day out, and I receive a southing as a gift. The Northward washes downwards the mountains like a waterfall, like a tidal wave, and pours across the valley; it comes to me. It sweetens the persimmons and numbs the terminal of the crickets and hornets; it fans the flames of the forest maples, bows the meadow'southward seeded grasses and pokes it spooky fingers under the leaf litter, thrusting the springtails and the earthworms deeper into the earth. The sun heaves to the south past day, and at dark wild Orion emerges looming like the Specter over Dead Man Mount. Something is already here, and more is coming."
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"This is what I had come for, just this, and nothing more than. A fling of leafy motion on the cliffs, the assault of existent things, living and all the same, with shapes and powers under the sky- this is my city, my civilization, and all the world I need."
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"It is wintertime proper; the cold weather condition, such as it is, has come to stay. I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come up in to come out. At dark I read and write, and things I accept never understood get clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year'due south planting.

The forest are acres of sticks: I could walk to the Gulf of Mexico in a straight line. When the leaves fall, the striptease is over; things stand mute and revealed. Everywhere skies extend, vistas deepen, walls become windows, doors open up."
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"And under the cicadas, deeper down that the longest taproot, between and below the rounded black rocks and slanting slabs of sandstone in the earth, ground water is creeping. Ground water seeps and slides, across and downwards, across and down, leaking from here to there, minutely at a rate of a mile a year. What a tug of waters goes on! There are flings and pulls in every management at every moment. The world is a wild wrestle nether the grass; globe shall exist moved.

What else is going on right this minute while ground water creeps under my feet? The galaxy is careening in a wearisome, muffled widening. If a 1000000 solar systems are born every 60 minutes, then surely hundreds flare-up into being as I shift my weight to the other elbow. The dominicus's surface is now exploding; other stars implode and vanish, heavy and blackness, out of sight. Meteorites are arcing to earth invisibly all 24-hour interval long. On the planet, the winds are blowing: the polar easterlies, the westerlies, the northeast and southeast trades. Somewhere, someone nether total sheet is becalmed, in the horse latitudes, in the doldrums; in the northland, a trapper is maddened, crazed, by the eerie aroma of the chinook, the sweater, a wind that tin can melt two anxiety of snow in a mean solar day. The pampero blows, and the tramontane, and the Boro, sirocco, levanter, mistral. Lick a finger; feel the at present.

Leap is seeping n, towards me and abroad from me, at 16 miles a 24-hour interval. Along estuary banks of tidal rivers all over the world, snails in blackness clusters like currants are gliding up and down the stems of reed and sedge, migrating every moment with the dip and swing of tides. Behind me, Tinker Mountain is eroding one thousandth of an inch a year. The sharks I saw are roving upwards and down the coast. If the sharks finish roving, if they however their twist and residual for a moment, they die. They need new water pushed into their gills; they demand trip the light fantastic. Somewhere e of me, on another continent, information technology is dusk, and starlings in breathtaking bands are winding high in the sky to their evening roost. The mantis egg cases are tied to the mock-orange hedge; inside each example, within each egg, cells elongate, narrow, and split; cells bubble and bend inwards, marshal, harden or hollow or stretch. And where are you now?"
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"Say yous could view a time-lapse motion picture of our planet: what would you lot see? Transparent images moving through lite, "an infinite storm of beauty."

The showtime is swaddled in mists, blasted past random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and alluvion. Clouds materialize and shift; now yous tin see the globe's confront through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, similar pack water ice rent past a widening atomic number 82. Mountains burst upwardly, jutting and deadening and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests similar felt. The ice rolls up, grinding dark-green land under water forever; the water ice rolls back. Forests erupt and disappear like fairy rings. The ice rolls up-mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale- the water ice rolls dorsum.

A blue-green streaks the highest ridges, a yellow-greenish spreads from the south like a wave up a strand. A red dye seems to leak from the north downward the ridges and into the valleys, seeping south; a white follows the red, then yellow-green washes northward, then red spreads once more, then white, over and over, making patterns of color too swift and intricate to follow. Ho-hum the film. You see dust storms, locusts, floods, in boundless wink frames.

Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting. Stone cities rise, spread, and and then crumble, like patches of alpine blossoms that flourish for a mean solar day an inch to a higher place the permafrost, that iced globe no root tin suck, and wither in a hour. New cities appear, and rivers sift silt onto their rooftops; more cities emerge and spread in lobes like lichen on rock. The corking homo figures of history, those intricate, spirited tissues that roamed the globe'due south surface, are a wavering mistiness whose divide second in the light was too brief an exposure to yield any images. The great herds of caribou pour into the valleys and trickle back, and pour, a brownish fluid.

Boring it downwards more, come closer still. A dot appears, like a flesh-flake. It swells like a airship; information technology moves, circles, slows, and vanishes. This is your life."
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"In the forty minutes I watched the muskrat, he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all. When he was in full view of course I never moved except to breathe. My eyes would move, too, following his, but he never noticed. Only once, when he was feeding from the contrary bank about eight feet away did he suddenly ascension upright, all alert- and then he immediately resumed foraging. But he never knew I was there.

I never knew I was at that place, either.

For that 40 minutes last night I was as purely sensitive and mute equally a photographic plate; I received impressions, but I did not print out captions. My own self-awareness had disappeared; it seems now virtually as though, had I been wired to electrodes, my EEG would have been flat. I have done this sort of thing so often that I take lost self-consciousness nigh moving slowly and halting all of a sudden. And I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this cocky-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do non waste most of our energy simply by spending every waking minute saying how-do-you-do to ourselves. Martin Buber quotes an old Hasid master who said, "When you walk across the field with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their souls come up out and cling to y'all, so they are purified and become a holy burn down in you."
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"It looked as though the leaves of the autumn wood had taken flying, and were pouring downwardly the valley similar a waterfall, like a tidal moving ridge, all the leaves of the hardwoods from here to Hudson's Bay. It was as if the season'south colors were draining abroad similar lifeblood, as if the year were molting and shedding. The yr was rolling down, and a vital curve had been reached, the tilt that gives mode to headlong blitz. And when the monarch butterflies had passed and were gone, the skies were vacant, the air poised. The dark night into which the twelvemonth was plunging was non a sleep but an enkindling, a new and necessary thrift, the sparer climate for which I longed. The shed trees were brittle and still, the creek light and cold, and my spirit holding its breath."
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"Every time you lot use the Dragonflame philosophy, you refine your subtle torso and stengthen your volition past going through the process of separating the dross from the subtle and putting it dorsum together again. Every time you follow this magical philosophy, yous are doing what is know as the Groovy Work. In other words, every fourth dimension yous work magic using Dragonflame, you get closer to finding the Philosopher's Stone."
― Lawren Leo, Dragonflame: Tap Into Your Reservoir of Ability Using Talismans, Manifestation, and Visualization

"The color-patches of vision part, shift, and reform as I move through space in fourth dimension. The present is the object of vision, and what I see before me at any given second is a full field of color patches scattered just so. The configuration will never be repeated. Living is moving; fourth dimension is a live creek begetting irresolute lights. As I movement, or as the world moves around me, the fullness of what I run across shatters. "Final forever!" Who hasn't prayed that prayer? You were lucky to become it in the outset identify. The present is a freely given sail. That information technology is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying; it is a sail, nevertheless.

Only there is more to the present than a series of snapshots. Nosotros are not merely sensitized film; we have feelings, a retentiveness for information and an eidetic memory for the imagery of our pasts.

Our layered consciousness is a tiered track for an unmatched assortment of concentrically wound reels. Each one plays out for all of life its dazzle and mistiness of translucent shadow-pictures; each one hums at every moment its ain secret melody in its own unique key. We tune in and out. But moments are not lost. Time out of listen is time nevertheless, cumulative, informing the present. From fifty-fifty the deepest slumber you wake with a jolt- older, closer to death, and wiser, grateful for breath.

Merely time is the one thing we take been given, and we have been given to time. Time gives usa a whirl. Nosotros keep waking from a dream we tin can't recall, looking around in surprise, and lapsing back, for years on end. All I want to practise is stay awake, continue my head up, prop my eyes open up, with toothpicks, with trees."
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"All at once, something wonderful happened, although at commencement, it seemed perfectly ordinary. A female goldfinch suddenly hove into view. She lighted weightlessly on the head of a bankside purple thistle and began emptying the seedcase, sowing the air with down.

The lighted frame of my window filled. The downward rose and spread in all directions, wafting over the dam's waterfall and wavering between the tulip trunks and into the meadow. It vaulted towards the orchard in a puff; it hovered over the ripening pawpaw fruit and staggered upward the steep faced terrace. Information technology jerked, floated, rolled, veered, swayed. The thistle downward faltered down toward the cottage and gusted clear to the wood; it rose and entered the shaggy arms of pecans. At last it strayed similar snow, blind and sweet, into the pool of the creek upstream, and into the race of the creek over rocks downwards. It shuddered onto the tips of growing grasses, where it poised, lite, withal wracked by errant quivers. I was holding my breath. Is this where nosotros live, I thought, in this identify in this moment, with the air then light and wild?

The aforementioned fixity that collapses stars and drives the mantis to devour her mate eased these creatures together before my eyes: the thick practiced bill of the goldfinch, and the feathery coded down. How could anything be awry? If I myself were lighter and frayed, I could ride these small winds, too, taking my chances, for the pleasure of beingness so purely played.

The thistle is part of Adam's expletive. "Cursed is the ground for thy sake, in sorrow shalt k eat of information technology; thorns besides and thistles shall it bring forth to thee." A terrible curse: But does the goldfinch swallow thorny sorrow with the thistle or do I? If this furling air is fallen, then the fall was happy indeed. If this creekside garden is sorrow, then I seek martyrdom.

I was weightless; my bones were taut skins blown with buoyant gas; it seemed that if I inhaled likewise securely, my shoulders and head would waft off. Alleluia."
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"Shadow is the blue patch where the calorie-free doesn't hit. It is mystery itself, and mystery is the ancients' ultima Thule, the modernistic explorer's Point of Relative Inaccessibility, that boreal indicate most afar from all known lands. There the twin oceans of beauty and horror run across. The great glaciers are calving. Ice that sifted to earth as snow in the fourth dimension of Christ shears from the pack with a roar and crumbles to h2o. Information technology could be that our instruments accept not looked securely enough. The RNA deep in the mantis's jaw is a beautiful ribbon. Did the crawling Polyphemus moth take in its watery heart ane cell, and in that cell ane special molecule, and that molecule i hydrogen atom, and round that atom'due south nucleus ane wild, distant electron that divide showed a forest, swaying?"
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"Xerxes, I read, 'halted his unwieldy regular army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction' the beauty of a single sycamore.

You are Xerxes in Persia. Your army spreads on a vast and barren peneplain…you lot call to you all your pitiful captains, and give the order to halt. You have seen the tree with the lights in it, haven't you? You must have. Xerxes buffeted on a plain, ambition drained in a puff. Your men are bewildered…there is zero to catch the eye in this flatness, nil but a hollow, hammering sky, a waste of sedge in the lee of windblown rocks, a meager ribbon of scrub willow tracing a slumbering watercourse…and that sycamore. You saw it; you volition stand rapt and mute, exalted, remembering or not remembering over a menstruation of days to shade your head with your robe.

"He had its form wrought upon a medal of gold to assist him remember it the rest of his life." We all ought to have a goldsmith following us around. Just it goes without saying, doesn't it, Xerxes, that no gold medal worn around your cervix will bring back the glad hour, keep those lights kindled then long as you alive, forever present? Pascal saw it; he grabbed pen and paper and scrawled the ane word, and wore it sewn in his shirt the rest of his life. I don't know what Pascal saw. I saw a cedar. Xerxes saw a sycamore."
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"You lot are God. Yous want to make a wood, something to concord the soil, lock upward free energy, and give off oxygen. Wouldn't it be simpler just to rough in a slab of chemicals, a green acre of goo?

Yous are a human, a retired railroad worker who makes replicas equally a hobby. You make up one's mind to make a replica of one tree, the longleaf pine your great-grandfather planted- just a replica- it doesn't have to work. How are you lot going to do it? How long practise you think you might live, how good is your glue? For 1 thing, you lot are going to take to dig a pigsty and stick your replica trunk halfway to China if you want the thing to stand up upwardly. Because you will accept to work fairly big; if your replica is as well minor, you'll exist unable to handle the slender, 3-sided needles, affix them in clusters of three in fascicles, and attach those laden fascicles to flexible twigs. The twigs themselves must exist covered by "many silvery-white, fringed, long-spreading scales." Are your pine cones' scales "thin, flat, rounded at the apex?" When y'all loose the lashed copper wire trussing the limbs to the trunk, the whole tree collapses similar an umbrella.

You are a sculptor. You lot climb a great ladder; you pour grease all over a growing longleaf pine. Next, you build a hollow cylinder around the entire pine…and pour wet plaster over and inside the pine. Now open the walls, dissever the plaster, saw downward the tree, remove it, discard, and your intricate sculpture is gear up: this is the shape of role of the air.

Yous are a chloroplast moving in water heaved one hundred feet above ground. Hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen in a ring around magnesium…you are development; you lot take only begun to make copse. You are god- are you tired? Finished?"
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"Terminal twelvemonth I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream well-nigh fourth dimension. I was dead, I guess, in deep blank infinite high up above many white stars. My own consciousness had been disclosed to me, and I was happy. So I saw far below me a long, curved band of color. Every bit I came closer, I saw that it stretched endlessly in either direction, and I understood that I was seeing all the fourth dimension of the planet where I had lived. It looked similar a woman'south tweed scarf; the longer I studied any one spot, the more dots of color I saw. There was no end to the deepness and diverseness of dots. At length I started to look for my time, but, although more and more than specks of color and deeper and more intricate textures appeared in the fabric, I couldn't find my time, or any time at all that I recognized as being near my time. I couldn't make out and so much equally a pyramid. Nonetheless as I looked at the band of time, all the individual people, I understood with special clarity, were living at that very moment with great emotion, in intricate, item, in their individual times and places, and they were dying and being replaced by ever more people, one by 1, like stitches in which wholly worlds of feeling and free energy were wrapped in a never-catastrophe cloth. I remembered suddenly the color and texture of our life equally nosotros knew it- these things had been utterly forgotten- and I thought every bit I searched for it on the limitless band, "that was a good time and so, a practiced time to be living." And I began to recollect our fourth dimension.

I recalled dark-green fields with carrots growing, one by ane, in slender rows. Men and women in bright vests and scarves came and pulled the carrots out of the soil and carried them in baskets to shaded kitchens, where they scrubbed them with yellow brushes under running water. I saw white-faced cattle lowing and wading in creeks. I saw May apples in forests, erupting through leaf-strewn paths. Cells on the root hairs of sycamores dissever and divided, and apples grew spotted and striped in the fall. Mountains kept their cool caves and squirrels raced home to their nests through sunlight and shade.

I remembered the ocean, and I seemed to exist in the ocean myself, swimming over orange crabs that looked like coral, or off the deep Atlantic banks where whitefish school. Or over again I saw the tops of poplars, and the whole sky brushed with clouds in pallid streaks, under which wild ducks flew with outstretched necks, and chosen, one by i, and flew on.

All these things I saw. Scenes grew in depth and sunlit detail earlier my eyes, and were replaced past ever more scenes, as I remember the life of my time with increasing feeling.

At last I saw the earth equally a globe in infinite, and I recalled the sea'south shape and the grade of continents, saying to myself with surprise as I looked at the planet, "yes, that's how information technology was and then, that part there was chosen France." I was filled with the deep amore of nostalgia- and then I opened my eyes.

Nosotros all ought to be able to conjure up sights like these at will, and so that we can keep in mind the scope of texture's motion in time."
― Annie Dillard

"Were the world as smooth as a ball bearing, it might exist beautiful seen from another planet, as the rings of Saturn are. Just here we live and move; we wander up and downwards the banks of the creek, nosotros ride a railway through the Alps, and the landscape shifts and changes. Were the world smooth, our brains would be smoothen as well; nosotros would wake, blink, walk two steps to get the whole picture and lapse into dreamless slumber. Considering we are living people, and considering we are on the receiving end of dazzler, another element necessarily enters the question. The texture of infinite is a condition of fourth dimension. Time is the warp and affair the weft of woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurtling shuttle…
What I desire to do, then, is add time to the texture, paint the landscape on an unrolling scroll, and prepare the giant relief globe spinning on it stand up."
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"Those people who shoot countless time-lapse films of unfurling roses and tulips have the incorrect idea. They should train their cameras instead on the melting of pack ice, the green filling of ponds, the tidal swings…They should film the glaciers of Greenland, some of which creak forth at such a fast clip that fifty-fifty the dogs bark at them. They should film the invasion of the southernmost Canadian tundra by the northernmost spruce-fir woods, which is happening correct now at the rate of a mile every x years. When the concluding ice sheet receded from the North American continent, the earth rebounded 10 feet. Wouldn't that have been a sight to see?"
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"I was in no tent nether leaves, sleepless and glad. There was no moon at all; forth the earth's coasts the bounding main tides would be springing strong. The air itself likewise has lunar tides; I lay still. Could I feel in the air an invisible sweep and surge, and an answering knock in the lungs? Or could I feel the starlight? Every minute on a square mile of this land one 10 thousandth of an ounce of starlight spatters to earth. What percentage of an ounce did that make on my eyes and cheeks and arms, tapping and nudging as particles, pulsing and stroking equally waves?"
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"I am sitting here, y'all are sitting there. Say fifty-fifty that you lot are sitting across the kitchen table from me right now. Our eyes run across; a consciousness snaps back and forth. What we know, at to the lowest degree for starters, is: here we- and so incontrovertibly- are. This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and so we dice. In the concurrently, in between time, we can see. The scales are fallen from our eyes, the cataracts are cut away, and we can piece of work at making sense of the color-patches nosotros see in an effort to discover where we so incontrovertibly are.

I am as passionately interested in where I am equally is a solitary sailor sans sextant in a ketch on an open ocean. I have at the moment a situation which allows me to devote considerable hunks of time to seeing what I can run across, and trying to piece it together. I've learned the name of some color-patches, but non the meanings. I've read books; I've gathered statistics feverishly: the boilerplate temperature of our planet is 57 degrees F…The boilerplate size of all living animals, including man, is almost that of a housefly. The earth is generally granite, which is mostly oxygen…In these Appalachians we have found a coal bed with 120 seams, significant 120 forests that only happened to autumn into water…I would like to see it all, to sympathise it, simply I must start somewhere, and so I try to deal with the giant water bug in Tinker Creek and the flight of iii hundred redwings from an Osage orange and allow those who cartel worry about the birthrate and population explosion among solar systems.

So I call up about the valley. And it occurs to me more and more than that everything I have seen is wholly costless. The behemothic water bug's predations, the frog'southward croak, the tree with the lights in it are not in whatsoever real sense necessary per se to the world or its creator. Nor am I. The cosmos in the first place, beingness itself, is the merely necessity for which I would die, and I shall. The point near that being, as I know it here and meet it, is that as I think about it, it accumulates in my mind as an extravagance of minutiae. The sheer fringe and network of detail assumes primary importance. That there are so many details seems to exist the most important and visible fact nearly creation. If you tin't see the forest for the copse, and so look at the trees; when you've looked at enough trees, you've seen a forest, y'all've got information technology. If the world is free, then the fringe of a goldfish'southward fin is a meg times more so. The first question- the one crucial one- of the cosmos of the universe and the existence of something as a sign and an barb to nothing is a blank one…

The old Kabbalistic phrase is "the Mystery of the Splintering of the Vessels." The words refer to the shrinking or imprisonment of essences inside the various husk-covered forms of emanation or fourth dimension. The Vessels splintered and solar systems spun; ciliated rotifers whirled in still water, and newts laid tracks in the silt-bottomed creek. Not only did the Vessels splinter; they splintered exceeding fine. Intricacy then is the subject field, the intricacy of the created world."
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery. The surface of mystery is not smoothen, any more than the planet is shine; not even a unmarried hydrogen atom is shine, allow solitary a pine. Nor does it fit together; non even the chlorophyll and hemoglobin molecules are a perfect match, for, even after the atom of iron replaces the magnesium, long streamers of disparate atoms trail disjointedly from the rims of the molecule'due south loops. Freedom cuts both ways. Mystery itself is as fringed and intricate at the shape of the air at times. Forays into mystery cutting trophy and fine fjords, only the forested mainland itself is implacable both in its majority and in its most filigreed fringe of detail."
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"This must be "the philosopher'due south stone" that thousands of philosophers and experts couldn't find throughout history: Living for someone else, living in someone else…
-Red White Love: The Love of Liverpool FC"
― Mustafa Dönmez

"The aboriginal study of abracadabra is concerned with making the Philosopher's Stone, a legendary substance with astonishing powers. The Stone will transform any metal into pure gold. It also produces the Elixir of Life, which will make the drinker immortal."
― J.Thousand. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Magician's Stone

"Read Nietzsche. Reject all mainstream religions. Your objective is not to worship God, but to become God. Only God has all the answers to the mysteries of life. Therefore if you truly seek those answers so you are seeking the ultimate cloak-and-dagger: how to transform yourself into God. Information technology is precisely with this quest that the Philosopher's Stone and the Holy Grail are intimately involved. That is why they have supreme spiritual power, why they control such indelible fascination."
― Michael Faust, Eastern Faith For Western Gnostics

"I saw an exhibition of paintings of alchemists in one case,' said Ruth. 'It used to be a pop setpiece. There was 1 I liked past Joseph Wright of Derby―of an alchemist who'd accidentally discovered phosphorus. He's just crouching at that place, staring in amazement at his examination tube or alembic, or whatever you call it. A bloody skillful painting, actually."
― Adrian Mathews, The Apothecary's House

Welcome dorsum. Just a moment while nosotros sign yous in to your Goodreads account.

larosehationlove.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/philosopher-s-stone

Share this post