Paracelsus Quotes

The art of medicine cannot be inherited, nor can it be copied from books ~ Paracelsus

Generally certain symptoms appear, among them a peculiar use of language: one wants to speak forcefully in order to impress one's opponent, so one employs a special, "bombastic" style full of neologisms which might be described as "power-words." This symptom is observable not only in the psychiatric clinic but also among certain modern philosophers, and, above all, whenever anything unworthy of belief has to be insisted on in the teeth of inner resistance: the language swells up, overreaches itself, sprouts grotesque words distinguished only by their needless complexity. The word is charged with the task of achieving what cannot be done by honest means. ~ C. G. Jung

Forty of Paracelsus's theological manuscripts still survive, as well as sixteen Bible commentaries, twenty sermons, twenty works on the Eucharist, and seven on the Virgin Mary. Half of these have never been properly edited, let alone printed in modern form. There is no question that Paracelsus thought long and hard about Christianity, and by styling himself a professor of theology (without, it seems, any official academic sanction) he implies that he regarded this component of his output to be the equal of his medical and chemical theories. That his role in the history of science and medicine has received far more attention than his theological oeuvre is, however, understandable and probably apt, for it cannot be said that he had much influence even on the religious debates of his day. In theology he never aspired to be a Luther, and that would in any case have been a futile aspiration for one so lacking in political acumen or the ability to foster disciples. ~ Philip Ball

It is significant comment on the victory of science over magic that were someone to say 'if I put this pill in your beer it will explode,' we might believe them; but were they to cry 'if I pronounce this spell over your beer it will go flat,' we should remain incredulous and Paracelsus, the Alchemists, Aleister Crowley and all the Magi have lived in vain. Yet when I read science I turn magical; when I study magic, scientific. ~ Cyril Connolly

The art of medicine has its roots in the heart. ~ Paracelsus

The dreams which reveal the supernatural are promises and messages that God sends us directly: they are nothing but His angels, His ministering spirits, who usually appear to us when we are in a great predicament. ~ Paracelsus

Destruction perfects that which is good; for the good cannot appear on account of that which conceals it. The good is least good whilst it is thus concealed. The concealment must be removed so that the good may be able freely to appear in its own brightness. For example, the mountain, the sand, the earth, or the stone in which a metal has grown is such a concealment. Each one of the visible metals is a concealment of the other six metals. ~ Paracelsus Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus Von Hohenheim

Man is a microcosm, or a little world, because he is an extract from all the stars and planets of the whole firmament, from the earth and the elements; and so he is their quintessence. ~ Paracelsus

All our nourishment becomes ourselves; we eat ourselves into being ... For every bite we take contains in itself all our organs, all that is included in the whole man, all of which he is constituted ... We do not eat bone, blood vessels, ligaments, and seldom brain, heart, and entrails, nor fat, therefore bone does not make bone, nor brain make brain, but every bite contains all these. Bread is blood, but who sees it? It is fat, who sees it? ... for the master craftsman in the stomach is good. He can make iron out of brimstone: he is there daily and shapes the man according to his form. ~ Paracelsus

The most secure method, to ruin your health, is a SICK BED! ~ Paracelsus

The universities do not teach all things ... so a doctor must seek out old wives, gypsies, sorcerers, wandering tribes, old robbers, and such outlaws and take lessons from them. A doctor must be a traveller ... Knowledge is experience. ~ Paracelsus

Time is a brisk wind, for each hour it brings something new ... but who can understand and measure its sharp breath, its mystery and its design? ~ Paracelsus

Often the remedy is deemed the highest good because it helps so many. ~ Paracelsus

After the birth of printing books became widespread. Hence everyone throughout Europe devoted himself to the study of literature ... Every year, especially since 1563, the number of writings published in every field is greater than all those produced in the past thousand years. The Paracelsians have created medicine anew and the Copernicans have created astronomy anew. I really believe that at last the world is alive, indeed seething, and that the stimuli of these remarkable conjunctions did not act in vain. ~ Johannes Kepler

All numbers are multiples of one, all sciences converge to a common point, all wisdom comes out of one center, and the number of wisdom is one. ~ Paracelsus

The main reason for healing is love. ~ Paracelsus

A mortal lives not through that breath that flows in and that flows out. The source of his life is another and this causes the breath to flow. ~ Paracelsus

Fasting is the greatest remedy
the physician within. ~ Paracelsus

It should be forbidden and severely punished to remove cancer by cutting, burning, cautery, and other fiendish tortures. It is from nature that the disease comes, and from nature comes the cure, not from physicians. ~ Paracelsus

It would be an error to try to build the Kingdom of Heaven upon envy. For nothing that is founded on envy can thrive; it must have another root. ~ Paracelsus

It is said that a wise man rules over the stars, but this does not mean that he rules over the influences which come from the stars in the sky. It means that he rules over the powers which exist in his own constitution. ~ Paracelsus

Let no one who can be his own belong to another. ~ Paracelsus

And it is true, best is nothing concealed which shall not be discovered; for which cause a marvellous being shall come after me, who as yet lives not, and who shall reveal many things. ~ Paracelsus

So that human beings were miraculous indeed - conscious creators, walking this new world like fresh young gods, wielding immense alchemical powers. So that anyone Michel met on Mars he regarded curiously, wondering as he looked at their often innocuous exteriors what kind of new Paracelsus or Isaac of Holland stood before him, and whether they would turn lead to gold, or cause rocks to blossom. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

The spirit is the master; imagination the tool, and the body the plastic material ... The power of the imagination is a great factor in medicine. It may produce diseases in man and in animals, and it may cure them ..Ills of the body may be cured by physical remedies or by the power of the spirit acting through the soul. ~ Paracelsus

Probit analysis provides a mathematical foundation for the doctrine first established by the sixteenth-century physician Paracelsus: "Only the dose makes a thing not a poison." Under the Paracelsus doctrine, all things are potential poisons if given in a high enough dose, and all things are nonpoisonous if given in a low enough dose. To this doctrine, Bliss added the uncertainty associated with individual results. One reason why many foolish users of street drugs die or become very sick on cocaine or heroin or speed is that they see others using the drugs without being killed. They are like Bliss's insects. They look around and see some of their fellow insects still alive. However, knowing that some individuals are still living provides no assurance that a given individual will survive. There is no way of predicting the response of a single individual. ~ David Salsburg

We should not imagine that this means our fate is fixed by our planets, however. Even though each vital organ corresponds to a planet - the liver to Jupiter, the brain to the moon, the heart to the sun, the spleen to Saturn, the lungs to Mercury, the gallbladder to Mars, and the kidneys to Venus - yet the one is not governed by the other: "Saturn has nothing to do with the spleen, nor the spleen anything to do with Saturn." Rather, these correspondences are simply a manifestation of the cosmic mirror that makes man a microcosm of the universal macrocosm. The two are analogs but are not causally related. From a scale model of a building you can read the proportions and relationships of the building itself, but crushing the former does not raze the latter. ~ Philip Ball

But is not He who created it for the sake of the sick body more than the remedy? And is not He who cures the soul, which is more than the body, greater? ~ Paracelsus

Be not another, if you can be yourself. ~ Paracelsus

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

All things are poisons. It is simply the dose that distinguishes between a poison and a remedy. ~ Paracelsus

The interpretation of dreams is a great art. ~ Paracelsus

All things are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous. ~ Paracelsus 1493-1541

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

We do not know it because we are fooling away our time with outward and perishing things, and are asleep in regard to that which is real within ourself. ~ Paracelsus

All that man needs for health and healing has been provided by God in nature, the Challenge of science is to find it. ~ Paracelsus

All things are poisons, for there is nothing without poisonous qualities. It is only the dose which makes a thing poison. ~ Paracelsus

For one country is different from another; its earth is different, as are its stones, wines, bread, meat, and everything that grows and thrives in a specific region. ~ Paracelsus

Pathology, probably more than any other branch of science, suffers from heroes and hero-worship. Rudolf Virchow has been its archangel and William Welch its John the Baptist, while Paracelsus and Cohnheim have been relegated to the roles of Lucifer and Beelzebub ... Actually, there are no heroes in Pathology-all of the great thoughts permitting advance have been borrowed from other fields, and the renaissance of pathology stems not from pathology itself but from the philosophers Kant and Goethe. ~ Harry S.N. Greene

Medicine is not only a science; it is also an art. It does not consist of compounding pills and plasters; it deals with the very processes of life, which must be understood before they may be guided. ~ Paracelsus

If we want to make a statement about a man's nature on the basis of his physiognomy, we must take everything into account; it is in his distress that a man is tested, for then his nature is revealed. ~ Paracelsus

The human body is vapor materialized by sunshine mixed with the life of the stars. ~ Paracelsus

One who lives within reason lives without the spirit ~ Paracelsus

There is an earthly sun, which is the cause of all heat, and all who are able to see may see the sun; and those who are blind and cannot see him may feel his heat. There is an Eternal Sun, which is the source of all wisdom, and those whose spiritual senses have awakened to life will see that sun and be conscious of His existence; but those who have not attained spiritual consciousness may yet feel His power by an inner faculty which is called Intuition. ~ Paracelsus

This process is alchemy: its founder is the smith Vulcan. ~ Paracelsus

Mickey had turned into Daisy, and Goofy had turned into Einstein - we were talking about a transmutation that would even have had Paracelsus foaming at the mouth. ~ Novala Takemoto

Magic has power to experience and fathom things which are inaccessible to human reason. For magic is a great secret wisdom, just as reason is a great public folly. ~ Paracelsus

In the words of the Renaissance physicist and occultist Paracelsus, 'Sola dosis facit venenum', which means the dose makes the poison. Even oxygen and water, which are essential to all living creatures, are toxic if the dose is too high. And so it is with religion, too. ~ Luke Gracias

Medicine is not merely a science but an art. The character of the physician may act more powerfully upon the patient than the drugs employed. ~ Paracelsus

That which lives on reason lives against the spirit. ~ Paracelsus

Women's regular bleeding engenders phantoms. ~ Paracelsus

Dreams are not without meaning wherever thay may come from-from fantasy, from the elements, or from other inspiration. ~ Paracelsus

As you talk, so is your heart. ~ Paracelsus

What we should be after death, we have to attain in life, i.e. holiness and bliss. Here on earth the Kingdom of God begins. ~ Paracelsus

Consider that we shouldn't call our brother a fool, since we don't know ourselves what we are. ~ Paracelsus

The highest degree of a medicine is Love. ~ Paracelsus

Know that the philosopher has power over the stars, and not the stars over him. ~ Paracelsus

What the eyes perceive in herbs or stones or trees is not yet a remedy; the eyes see only the dross. ~ Paracelsus

The dose makes the poison... ~ Paracelsus

They made figures of brass, and tried to induce souls to indwell them. In some accounts we read that they succeeded; Friar Bacon was credited with one such Homunculus; so was Albertus Magnus, and, I think, Paracelsus. He had, at least, a devil in his long sword 'which taught him all the cunning pranks of past and future mountebanks, ~ Aleister Crowley

All drugs are poisons the benefit depends on the dosage. ~ Paracelsus

Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest. (Let no man belong to another that can belong to himself.) ~ Paracelsus

The book of Nature is that which the physician must read; and to do so he must walk over the leaves. ~ Paracelsus

Some children are born from heaven and others are born from hell, because each human being has his inherent tendencies, and these tendencies belong to his spirit, and indicate the state in which he existed before he was born. ~ Paracelsus

Could we but rightly comprehend the mind of man, nothing would be impossible to us upon the earth. ~ Paracelsus

Bombast, an old Swabian name, has inevitably given rise to the idea that Paracelsus's bluster and arrogance lie at the root of the word "bombastic." One feels that it ought to be so, but it is not. Baum means "tree" in German (in the Swabian dialect it is rendered Bom), and Baumbast is the fibrous layer of a tree's bark. But in the sixteenth century "bombast" had also come to mean cotton padding, inappropriately derived from bombax, the medieval Latin name for the silkworm, and it is from this origin that the connotation of puffed up derives. ~ Philip Ball

Every drug, the sixteenth-century physician Paracelsus once opined, is a poison in disguise. Cancer chemotherapy, consumed by its fiery obsession to obliterate the cancer cell, found its roots in the obverse logic: every poison might be a drug in disguise. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

There is in each person, in every animal, bird and plant a star which mirrors, matches or is in some sense the same as a star in the heavens. ~ Paracelsus

The ultimate cause of human disease is the consequence of our transgression of the universal laws of life. ~ Paracelsus

The right dose differentiates a poison from a remedy ~ Paracelsus

Medicine rests upon four pillars - philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and ethics. The first pillar is the philosophical knowledge of earth and water; the second, astronomy, supplies its full understanding of that which is of fiery and airy nature; the third is an adequate explanation of the properties of all the four elements - that is to say, of the whole cosmos - and an introduction into the art of their transformations; and finally, the fourth shows the physician those virtues which must stay with him up until his death, and it should support and complete the three other pillars. ~ Paracelsus

Once a disease has entered the body, all parts which are healthy must fight it: not one alone, but all. Because a disease might mean their common death. Nature knows this; and Nature attacks the disease with whatever help she can muster. ~ Paracelsus

For it is we who must pray for our daily bread, and if He grants it to us, it is only through our labour, our skill and preparation. ~ Paracelsus

From time immemorial artistic insights have been revealed to artists in their sleep and in dreams, so that at all times they ardently desired them. ~ Paracelsus

Everything is a poison, nothing is a poison.
It is the dose that makes the poison ~ Paracelsus

Thoughts are free and subject to no rule. On them rests the freedom of man, and they tower above the light of nature ... create a new heaven, a new firmament, a new source of energy from which new arts flow. ~ Paracelsus

Death is the midwife of very great things ... It brings about the birth and rebirth of forms a thousand times improved. This is the highest mystery of God. ~ Paracelsus

Europe shall be the head, Asia the crown, but Africa shall be the jewel.

"Another Prognostication by Theophrastus Paracelsus ~ Paracelsus

All arts lie in man, though not all are apparent. Awakening brings them out. To be taught is nothing; everything is in man waiting to be awakened. ~ Paracelsus

Every physician must be rich in knowledge, and not only of that which is written in books; his patients should be his book, they will never mislead him. ~ Paracelsus