Paracelsus Quotes on Knowledge
Paracelsus (Theophrastus von Hohenheim, 1493–1541), the itinerant Swiss-German physician and natural philosopher whose polemical rejection of the Galenic medical tradition set the early-modern stage for chemical medicine, defended an explicitly experiential epistemology against the textual authority of the medieval medical curriculum. The doctrine of signatures — that the healing virtues of natural substances are legible from their visible features once the practitioner has been trained to read the book of nature — and the tripartite analysis of natural substances into salt, sulphur, and mercury frame a programme in which knowledge is acquired through travel, observation, and direct engagement with the phenomena rather than through the disputational study of ancient texts.
Quotes
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Attributed to Paracelsus:
“Nature is the great teacher; the physician is her translator.”
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Attributed to Paracelsus:
“He who would heal must first know himself.”
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Attributed to Paracelsus:
“Medicine is not only science but also wisdom and love.”
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“Hermetic and Alchemical Writings (1894), edited by Arthur Edward Waite; Coelum Philosophorum or Book of Vexations , originally 1543”
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 -
“As you talk, so is your heart.”
Wikiquote -
“Belief and work, knowledge and action are one and the same thing.”
Wikiquote -
“Consider that we shouldn’t call our brother a fool, since we don’t know ourselves what we are.”
Wikiquote -
“He who conquers his enemy with meekness, wins fame.”
Wikiquote -
“We have Divine Wisdom in the mortal body.Whatever does harm to the body, ruins the House of the Eternal.”
Paracelsus - Doctor of our Time(1992) -
“What maintains the marriage and what is it? Only the knowledge of the hearts, that is its beginning and end.”
Paracelsus - Doctor of our Time(1992)